The location and details of new Bendigo Big Build social housing projects announced by the state government this month remain under wraps, despite the fact they have apparently already been chosen.
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On October 4 housing minister Danny Pearson announced the Greater Bendigo region would see the construction of $40 million worth of new social housing projects comprising 130 dwellings as part of a $219 million round of regional funding for Big Build projects.
The government said project sites had been chosen where demand was most critical and residents would be close to services. The projects will accommodate "priority access" waiting list applicants.
The projects bring to 325 the number of social and affordable dwellings completed, underway or on the cards for the Greater Bendigo region under the $5.3 billion Victorian scheme.
However, the achievement pales in view of waiting list numbers.
Housing Victoria figures for the region show that as of March 31, there were 3,069 applications on the Victorian Housing Register listing Bendigo as one of their five location preferences, 2,746 of them belonging to "priority access" applicants, meaning the new dwellings meet the need of just 11 per cent of the most urgent applicants.
The scale of the problem was reflected by the cautious reaction of the City of Greater Bendigo mayor Cr Andrea Metcalfe, who welcomed the recent funding announcement, saying the Big Build program would "start to address significant and growing affordable housing needs in Bendigo".
"The City looks forward to understanding more about the planned projects and [to] them contributing to the housing supply pipeline," she said.
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According to the CEO of one social housing provider, a number of regional councils have been working together to develop "some sort of action plan or approach to try and work through how they create more housing, whether that be by doing developments or trying to attract government funding."
At a housing summit run by government agency Homes Victoria in Creswick earlier this month "all the councils were saying, basically, they've got a shortage of housing, full stop," Fiona Williams, CEO of CatholicCare Victoria Housing Limited, said. "That with rental increases, and the changes in the economy and people moving out [from the city] to regional areas, rents are going up, and people were being priced out of the rental market."
As well as people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, who were struggling to find or keep a rental, the problem was affecting new people coming into town for work or other reasons.
"It's actually a bottleneck that's really impacting the economy in regional areas," Ms Williams said. "There was a lot of repetition of that theme on the day."
The recently announced $40 million will go to four social housing providers - Common Equity Housing Limited, Uniting Housing Victoria, VincentCare Victoria and YWCA National Housing - which will work in partnership with Homes Victoria to build the accommodation.
YWCA National Housing was the only one of the four to share any information about its project, telling the Advertiser it involved "up to 35 homes" for women and their families on low incomes.
Homes Victoria said this week the projects, due to commence throughout 2023, are in the planning phase and the agency and the community housing partners would engage with the local community about them when they were "further progressed".
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