So I saw this video of a dumpy house in Footscray (link), and on my first watch I barely even noticed anything wrong. My current place is similar. I’m hesitant to draw an exact comparison, because our place isn’t quite that bad (there’s nowhere that’s rotted through to the outside). Being a government property, they’re also very strict on fire safety (probably good, being a wooden house), and put at least 50% effort into making sure the electricity situation is safe.

But they’ve neglected minor maintenance works for so long, that there’s probably some quite large work that needs to be done. On one side of the house particularly, there’s a lot of rot. Every year or so, they send someone out to replace them, but they only ever replace the worst panel. They just leave the rest of the rotted out panels there, and never really bother to look at why it’s rotting.

Before I moved in, there was some sort of gutter collapse along the outside gutter, and it started funnelling water inside the roof. The old LT reported it and followed up once a week, and they never fixed it. Eventually something in the roof either shifted or collapsed and the water was no longer coming inside. But eventually whatever stopped it shifted and started funnelling water into the eaves along the outside below where the gutter collapsed. Then that section of roof collapsed. Then there was a big hoo hah where they wouldn’t fix it because they thought it may have contained asbestos.

The spare YPs toilet floor seems like it’s been completely rotted out and is on the verge of collapse. There’s major flexing when you step on it, and there used to be signs of rot damage on the outside, but they seem to have replaced the boards that were rotten. I’ve shown a few people in person, and the general consensus seems to be that the floor has probably rotted or at the very least been severely damaged. But they won’t send anyone under the house to fix it until they have photos of the damage, and they won’t send someone under the house to check on it or take photos because idk, spiders ig.

I think the very worst of everything though, is that the stairs at the front of the house are at uneven heights. In October, we reported the very bottom stair not being attached to the staircase risking thing (it was resting on the brick pavement slightly wedged into the stairs), and they sent someone out to “fix it”. What this dude did was move the bottom stair up a bit, nail some wood into the staircase railing thing, and then screw the stair into those. This sounds fine, but now there’s a little gap between the stair and the ground, then a half gap between the bottom stair and the next stair, then a double gap between the 2nd and 3rd stairs. I was in Sydney at time, but was privy to a very angry message in the house group chat from the old LT, because he got home when it was dark, nobody told him anybody was coming to work on the stairs, and having lived here for 4 years, it’s pretty obvious what happened next.

I’ve heard so many people trip on it. The postie tripped on it, food delivery people have tripped on it, almost everybody trips on it. Now, 9 months or whatever later, they’re finally planning on fixing it. They’re going to have a cknreter come out and install concrete stairs. I think that’s going to look ridiculous, with brick pavement leading up to solid concrete stairs, which lead up to a wooden patio, but that’s better than the current state. I did ask the obvious - why can’t they just put the stair back the way it was, maybe screw it into the stairs, and at least keep things even and safe until they properly fix it, but apparently because how the stairs were was considered unsafe, and they’ve now “fixed” it, they can’t unfix it because that’ll make it unsafe again.

I could rant for a long time about the lack of adequate maintenance here (in fact I already did!) but it seems to be pretty standard in Melbourne for older homes. It’s probably a little bit more shocking that we have such poor maintenance since the government owns the property, but I don’t understand why we don’t have better laws. Why are houses like the one in the video even allowed to exist? Why isn’t that considered uninhabitable?

Do we have the worst housing condition standard of “rich/developed” countries?