Advancing Tenant Voice: Examining Tenant Participation

Advancing Tenant Voice: Examining the Efficacy of Tenant Participation looks at the 40 years of tenant participation initiatives in NSW public housing and explores them further through a case study of the Hamilton South estate in Newcastle. 

The document charts how changes to government-funded programs translated into empowerment and support for public housing renters over time, and how shifting trends in community development theories and the consequences of changing political leadership shaped the material conditions of people’s lives and advanced or limited their influence over their surroundings. 

To date, the Tenant Participation program has reached its peak in providing pathways for public tenant associations to undertake small, independent initiatives, make requests of their housing provider, and provide feedback on proposed policy changes or site development plans. At its lowest point, Tenant Participation was reduced to public housing renters attending a monthly afternoon tea get-together and discussing their concerns with third-party facilitators. 

Since the aspirational goal of ‘maximum opportunity to participate in the management of their dwellings and estates’ was articulated in the 1980s, the shift in policies of successive NSW governments saw support for and investment in public housing communities decline, the waitlist for public homes stretch out and the impacts of economic pressures and ill physical and mental health compound for people on government benefits. These combined factors created an environment of growing disenfranchisement for tenants and neglect of their neighbourhoods, rather than a space for “maximum opportunity for participation.” 

As the state government housing provider, Homes NSW, embarks on the path to department-operated Tenant Participation, the Tenants’ Union of NSW proposes six key actions to ensure the newly-developed program addresses the shortcomings of the initiatives past, learns from gains made by community members who have come before and, most importantly, builds on and with the knowledge and expertise of the public housing tenants it is intending to assist.

Recommendations

• Homes NSW rebuilds their knowledge and deepens its understanding of the communities they are to support for Tenant Participation in public housing.
• Overall significant improvement to the standard and quality of public housing dwellings.
• Return to more bespoke, responsive and appropriately resourced initiatives in Tenant Participation and Engagement in public housing.
• Commitment to delivering long-term planned, consistently run and critically reviewed programs as part of Tenant Participation and Engagement.
• Tenant Participation program utilises existing networks and builds operationally sustainable partnerships.
• Creation of government-funded, independent statewide Tenant Participation Panels for the benefit of all social housing tenants and their housing providers across the sector.