Public housing in Sydney. Source: Eastberliner
An abandoned Clayfield retirement village will be turned into social housing in a bid to address the current housing crisis.
The state government purchased the complex for $9.4 million, and construction has already begun to get the 30 homes within the complex ready.
Housing Minister Leeanne Enoch said, “There is a bit of work to be done, of course, it is an older building… Some of the self-contained rooms were built back in the ’80s… We’ve got our team on that already.”
Ms Enoch said the teams are working “as quickly as possible” to prepare the homes, but that the entire process of finalising planning regulations, upgrading works, and procuring public housing providers and support services will likely take weeks to months.
“This is a critical part of our solution to ensuring that we have more social homes in our stock going forward,” Ms Enoch said.
“It was called upon us to be more innovative in the way that we purchase properties and the way that we build properties, and this is a great example of that.”
This announcement comes 100 days after the state government’s housing summit, where a range of stakeholders collaborated to address Queensland’s housing affordability crisis.
Another similar project was announced back in September 2022, with plans to turn unused student accommodation at Griffith University’s Mount Gravatt campus into emergency housing. However, this project remains incomplete, and Ms Enoch told reporters on Sunday that a time frame could not be given on when these emergency homes would be ready.
Opposition Leader David Crisafulli said that with tens of thousands of people still on public housing waitlists, this conversion of the abandoned retirement village will not do enough to ease the pressure.
“To have another announcement of something that could happen in the future, after half a dozen announcements 100 days ago that still haven’t delivered a roof, imagine how you feel being a Queenslander living out of a car knowing that,” Crisafulli said.
“All we’re seeing is a generation of working Queenslanders unable to live in a home and the most vulnerable falling further through the cracks. Neither of those are acceptable in a modern Queensland.”
