ABC Radio (720, WA) interviewed Michelle about the “My Home” project.
Transcript
ABC:
We know that homelessness is an issue confronting the community takes on many forms. I growing a fact is that it is actually single women over the age of 55, who are increasingly find themselves without a roof over their heads. Now in North Fremantle, an innovative proposal might soon be constructed to address this part of the problem. On the line is the director of an organisation called My Home, Michelle Blakely. Good morning. Thank you for your time this morning. Can you explain the My Home concept?
Michelle Blakeley:
Well, basically it’s a public private partnership, which is fairly common in property development where you get the private sector, the public sector, and in this case, the community sector coming together to enable a development to happen. So what we’ve done is gone to the state government and said can you supply us or provide us with land at a peppercorn lease?Then we’ve gone to the private sector and said, can you fund the construction of the houses? And then the community housing providers will be managing the property and the tenants. So you bring the three groups together and it makes a viable opportunity to create homeless housing.
ABC:
There’s some innovative bits in each part of the partnership. We’ll go through them one by one. Tell us about the land first.
Michelle Blakeley:
Well, for the land we went to WAPC, the West Australian planning commission. They said that there’s a lot of land available that the government owns which is unused. And sometimes there’s no plans for that in the forward works. It might be 20, 30, 40 years or more before they actually intend to develop that land. So it’s just sitting there empty. So we said, if you can give us peppercorn rent leases, which is sort of a nominal dollar lease, on that land for a decent period of time, we can use it to actually build these houses for homeless people. And they said, yes. So they came back to us with four sites that they’ve offered for us to build houses. The one in North Fremantle, which is likely to go ahead first, one in East Victoria Park, one in Woodbridge, near Midland and one in Maddington. So those pieces of land are empty. And we’re now working on submitting development applications to the various councils, the Fremantle one’s already gone through. So the council has approved planning application for that. Then that just needs to take one more step to go to WAPC for its final approval. And then that one will be pretty much ready to go. And the others will follow suit.
ABC:
The North Fremantle one is interesting because the land is actually railway reserve. And as I understand it, part of the deal is that it sits there as railway reserve for future transport use.Basically says that if they need to use it for that purpose, then, then that’s fine. Then the building can be dismantled
Michelle Blakeley:
That’s right, because I mean, understandably the public transport authority might be a bit reluctant to hand over the lease for the land for such a long period of time, because something may come up where they do want to actually use the land. So there’s a clause in the lease agreements that if they do want the land back, then they can have it back by giving us 12 months notice, and then they will give us another site where we can relocate the houses. So the houses have actually been designed so that they’re demountable. They’re prefabricated, flat-pack delivered to site and erected, but then that can be reversed so that we can deem out the homes and take them to another site if need be.
ABC:
Right. So that’s one of the other innovative aspects of this is that the housing itself, which I’m sure is, you know, perfectly good high quality, but it is, it’s sort of demountable, it’s removable.
Michelle Blakeley:
Yes. And it’s important to know it’s not transportable because I think they will have a bit of a preconceived idea of what transportables are, like tiny house or Dongers or whatever. But these are designed with the structural engineer, they are prefabricated. The builder and myself are involved so that we can create a comfortable, well controlled house that anyone would, I think, be quite happy to live it in. But they do have this ability to move if necessary.
ABC:
I touched on this in my introductory remarks, but the issue of homelessness is a rising phenomenon for women over 55. Can you tell us about that?
Michelle Blakeley:
Yeah, well, it is. It’s horrible. And what they call it is the hidden homelessness because these women are often not the homeless people that we see on the streets. So frequently these days. Um, it’s such a common situation now where women of that age, um, they perhaps hadn’t been working because they’ve been raising their children. Maybe their husbands died that if divorced, um, they haven’t got any assets in their house, um, or they’re still paying off a mortgage. So they have to sell the house because they can’t afford to pay the mortgage. If they haven’t worked throughout their adult life, they locked, it have very little superannuation. If they haven’t worked for some time, they’ve often lost confidence in their ability to pick up where they left off. Often their skills are now superseded and that they feel that they are too old to start retraining.
Michelle Blakeley:
And when you put all these things together, they just bumped suddenly find themselves in this situation where they can’t afford the rent. And, um, they’re out on the street and these are the, these are the people that we hear about like living in their cars, couch, surfing, moving from one family member or friend to another. Um, and just not really well, they don’t have a permanent address. They might be living in a shelter or a boarding house, but a very non-permanent situation. And these people are, they basically want a roof over their heads. And, um, that’s what, hopefully we’ll be able to provide them
ABC::
So 18 self-contained units, uh, assuming all the approvals through the WIPC per se. When do you hope to have them constructed and open for business?
Michelle Blakeley:
We’re hoping that they’ll get up and running, um, this year, certainly, hopefully by about August, September.
ABC:
Well, it’s I terrific innovation. I hope that it succeeds and I hope that, uh, the North Fremantle side is not the first and not the last, I guess, hope it’s not the last opportunities to roll this out. It’s uh, it’s good. Good work, Michelle. Thank you for your time this morning. Thank you.