Housing, Crime and Stronger Communities Conference

State government agencies, local governments and non-government agencies have already put considerable program effort into improving life for tenants in a number of high rise flat tower blocks in the inner city of Melbourne. This includes improving the physical fabric of the buildings, supporting tenant groups, providing additional services and increasing security. However, the continuing reluctance of low income public housing applicants to move onto these estates and the applications for transfer received from current residents indicate that making these estates popular places to live, or at least acceptable places to live, is going to be difficult. In housing policy terms this is a tragedy for a number of reasons. In the inner city this public housing, which is good quality housing located within easy reach of a wide range of services and facilities, provides almost all the affordable housing in the very expensive gentrified inner city housing market1. More broadly it makes the task of meeting a very high level of demand for affordable housing more difficult in a system that is already under considerable pressure (Hudson 2002; The Review of Public Rental Eligibility Criteria Community Reference Group 2001). A key factor in the reluctance of people to live on a number of these estates is that they have become sites for extensive trading and use of illicit drugs. This has led to the common areas, suc