Michael Green

Writer and producer

Cracks in the walls

In Social justice, The Big Issue on

Published in The Big Issue, with illustrations by Michel Streich

In 2008 the federal government set a target: halve homelessness by 2020 and offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it. More than three years on, what has changed? Who has benefited? Who is still slipping through the cracks? Michael Green finds some very human perspectives amid the complex housing landscape.

THE first time I meet Albert, all I notice is his hair. I see him from behind, when his social worker points him out on a computer, playing poker on Facebook in the common room of his new supportive housing. He has the kind of hair you notice: long and black, shimmering and incongruous.

I’d been apprehensive about meeting him: unsure about how openly he’d talk with me, and wary about commandeering his story for mine. But Albert puts me at ease in a moment.

“A lot of people say I’m American Indian,” he tells me, and breaks into a modest, raspy laugh. “I’ve even had other Aboriginal people ask me if I am.” (Later, under my questioning, he reveals his only hair-care secret is Head and Shoulders shampoo.)

While we talk, a young man sitting two computers away starts coughing uncontrollably. Unnerved, I glance towards him; Albert sees this, reassures me, and then gently checks on the kid.

Albert has warm eyes and manners, but his nose is off-kilter and his chin angles the other way. The middle and index fingers on his left hand are stained where he holds his cigarettes.

At the end of 2009, Albert completed an Associate Diploma in Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide, and hoped to move back to Melbourne. “It’s got more life, you know. More going on,” he explains. “But last year was pretty bad.”

Until a few weeks ago, he was in alcohol rehab; three months ago, a rooming house; and six months ago, a friend’s couch. One year ago, he was sleeping rough. Tomorrow, however, is payday. First thing in the morning, he says, he’ll get one of his guitars back from the pawnshop.

Soon after meeting Albert, I’m in Melbourne, but not in the lively parts where he wants to be; I’m on the train towards Frankston, about to visit Dee. On my way I flick through the newspaper and see the rich list – since last year, mining heiress Gina Rinehart’s wealth has doubled, to $10.3 billion. Today’s an okay day for Dee, too. She and her daughter are booked in to give blood. The Red Cross bus is parked at the local RSL, only a few minutes’ walk from their unit, which means they can do a good deed without having to buy petrol or a train ticket. Since Dee got injured at work four years ago, she’s been sick or unemployed. Since February, her rent has trumped her income.

Dee introduces me to Brandy, her big handsome dog – a Japanese Akita, a breed known for loyalty. “Related to the Huskies and the white Samoyeds,” Dee explains. “She’s depressed – it’s too small here. Her face wasn’t grey, but she’s gone grey like me.” Dee bends down and rubs the dog between the ears. “We’ve turned old, haven’t we?”

That’s the other activity on Dee’s list: her hair. The Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service has given her a packet of dye, L’Oréal Ultra Violet Red. The box is sitting on top of the fridge, but she thinks she’ll leave it for another day.

***

 

***

In early autumn, the editors of The Big Issue asked me to write about housing and homelessness. “See what you come up with,” they said, handing over two manila folders of clippings and reports.

I began reading them one afternoon, sitting in the park on the pretty street where I’ve lived for the past five years. It was pleasant outside and I chatted with a neighbour, one of several who’ve become my friends. Then I succumbed to the sun and napped there on the grass, awake to my good fortune.

In the next fortnight, I called charities and peak bodies, more and more of them, because each one recommended another. I boiled down their words into three facts:

More than 100,000 Australians are homeless on any given night. That includes some rough sleepers, but mostly it’s people forced to crash on couches and in spare rooms, or live in caravan parks and boarding houses; in beds without a secure lease or space of their own.

Most of these people experience homelessness only briefly. A crisis hits, in fast or slow motion – a car crash, redundancy, a broken relationship, domestic violence – and they’re out on their arse. But then, with help from agencies, welfare, friends or family, they find a stable home, even if the bills remain a stretch and life a stress.

About one in eight, however, reel from place to place, service to service; repelled and repelling, like magnets the wrong way round. If you think about homelessness, some of these people come to mind: rough sleepers huddling at train stations, old men trembling with booze, beggars withered by childhood traumas. They’re usually men with many problems, long-term problems, all at once.

After I found out these things, I found Albert and Dee. And then these facts evaporated altogether. Albert has been homeless most his life; Dee probably will be soon.

In 2008, at the height of global financial panic, just months after Wall Street collapsed, the federal government released a policy white paper called The Road Home. It announced two ambitious targets for 2020: to halve all homelessness, and to offer supported accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it. Two months later, the government scrounged billions more for social housing, as part of the recession-busting stimulus package.

Soon after I began my research, one charity worker described the new policy to me as “the best chance we’ve had”.

***

I stay in Adelaide for a rainy week, visiting Albert every day, spending the long walk to and from his place thinking about what he’s said about his life and what it would mean to re-tell it fairly. I shelter beneath an umbrella, considering how disadvantage has passed from one generation to the next in Albert’s family, the way prominent noses have in mine. I draw my coat tight and shudder, too, about the holding pattern I have entered.

For this week at least, Albert orbits in a universe comprised of three core elements: instant coffee, Winfield Red rollies and Facebook poker. He is 38 years old, and unfailingly polite. He offers me coffee when I arrive and fetches me a newspaper while he paces upstairs to make it.

Today is the second day I’ve visited. We’re sitting in the common room again, on new IKEA chairs. He’s wearing jeans and a black-and-orange jacket bearing the insignia of Adelaide’s biggest homeless drop-in service, the Hutt Street Centre.

When I arrived, Albert was out the front having a smoke with his friend, Alan, who has a small moustache and a furrowed brow. They had been on the computers playing Facebook poker. Alan’s been on a lucky streak this morning, his virtual fortune rising from $10,000 to $36,000.

Albert talks about his own, more tangible finances: “I’ve got some fines hanging over my head in Melbourne. It’s nothing serious, but they go back a fair while. And because it’s a few thousand dollars and the combination of this and that: whoosht – jail. I’m not really interested in going to jail.”

So, in 2006, Albert decided to try his luck in Adelaide. “I wasn’t getting anywhere looking for work in Melbourne,” he explains. When I ask what kind of work he’s done before, he replies: “Ah, how do I put it? I’ve been in the wilderness for most of my life.”

The year Albert moved to Adelaide, Rosanne Haggerty, an American housing expert, completed her stint as the city’s ‘thinker-in-residence’. Under the state government scheme, international experts live in Adelaide briefly, meet influential people and make policy recommendations. “The Thinker,” says the program’s website, “focuses on the problems of modern life”.

Haggerty’s experience with community housing goes back decades. In 1991, after several years securing donations, investments and grants, she bought the Times Square Hotel in Manhattan, a derelict 15-storey art deco building. She had it refurbished, and when it reopened, the old hotel provided housing for 652 people: the otherwise homeless, together with low-income earners and people living with HIV/AIDS. There were onsite counsellors and common areas – a library, a roof-deck garden, a computer lab, an art studio, a medical clinic, an exercise room and laundry facilities. The lobby had a marble staircase.

The organisation Haggerty founded, Common Ground Community, now manages 12 buildings with nearly 2500 units. Its philosophy is that chronic homelessness is solvable. Housing that comes with linked support services is more effective – and cheaper – than leaving people on the street and relying on police and emergency services to deal with them. Almost nine out of 10 residents stay put.

In South Australia, senior public servants recall Haggerty’s charisma. “She probably ruffled feathers,” one told me, “but she does it in a nice way, in a way that’s always about how to make people’s lives better. And no one can object to that.”

For many charity workers, however, Haggerty had a confronting message: handing out food and blankets is misguided. Emergency shelters sustain homelessness, rather than end it.

She proposed dramatic change. Until recently, most Australian housing services operated on a ‘treatment first’ or ‘housing readiness’ basis: get into treatment for your troubles, then we’ll offer you a place to live. Instead, Haggerty and others pushed for the reverse: ‘housing first’ tied with support services for as long as necessary.

Common Ground Adelaide was launched in 2006, mirroring the New York model. In April, the organisation opened its second premises – a red-brick, heritage building overlooking a park in the Adelaide CBD, retrofitted with 52 apartments. It once housed a printing press and, briefly, a nightclub. For the last month, it has housed Albert.

The building is bright and airy, equipped with its own part-time medical and dental clinic and a worker who coordinates regular activities for the residents, things like gardening and ten-pin bowling. The large common room, complete with kitchen, computers and couches, has a bright orange wall that perfectly matches Albert’s jacket. His onsite social worker explained to me about the pair’s regular meetings and the support plan they’re drawing up together.

But as I walked home that day, my footsteps wavered. I had Albert’s words in my head, with a scene from 10 years ago: the time when he accessed his human services file. Among other things that continue to upset him, he read that not long after he was born, his mother, a diabetic and bad alcoholic, left town without him. Her partner told people the baby had died. Someone made an anonymous call and Albert was taken away.

“I grew up on the welfare system, ward of the state and whatnot. Never had a proper family.” The longest time Albert had a stable home was between the ages of five and 10, in foster care.

“There was a time when I was a teenager and I thought ‘I’m on my own now’. But when I pulled that file out and read a lot of stuff, I thought, ‘Ah no, no, I’ve always been on my own, even before I was born.’”

Around the time he read his file, Albert told me, he had a tendency to get a bit wild.

***

I get unsteady again when I type the transcript from my visit to Dee’s house. She speaks fast, in staccato sentences without pronouns. I’ve slowed the tape way down, but still she outpaces me. The birds chirp slowly and every 10 minutes a train toots, stretched out along the line. All the while there’s a warped hum in the background, like a tape on rewind.

“Boss dropped a pallet on my shoulder,” Dee says. “Rotator cuff stuffed. Went through rehab and ops and for a good 18 months I wasn’t able to work. Incapacitated.”

As I listen, I picture her two-bedroom unit, neatly kept, but flimsy like a cardboard box. Dee is Maori; in good humour, she described herself as “not your petite young girl who wants to sit and type”. Yet somehow, the dwelling seemed to have diminished her big laugh and limbs.

The tape continues and I recall the scene: the two of us sitting on an L-shaped couch, arranged with fluffy cushions; Dee talking about the big things in her life. “Went back to work maybe a year ago, and got cervical cancer. So had that removed and I got all-cleared end of January. And I’ve been trying to get a job since. I was a warehouse manager, travelled interstate. But with the injury, not allowed to do that anymore. Turned 40 last month. Find a new calling at 40? With no experience, no nothing? It’s not happening.”

My concentration slips again from the recording and I wonder how I’ll be able to express the heat of Dee’s despair. Then I hear myself ask: “Uh, so do you have enough to eat?”

“No. No. We go without,” Dee replies. “You have to. We’ve got no family. I’m not lining up in a soup kitchen, I’d rather go without. It’s just the way I feel. Sorry. Nothing you can do about it – I’m not going to rob somewhere. Some people do. Geez, I hope I don’t ever feel that way.

“You hear about it on the news, people robbing 7-Elevens and taking 50 bucks and this and that, and some people are so desperate you wonder – are they just scum? Are they just bums? Or they just someone like me who’s lost it and who’s sick of not feeding their kids?”

Above Dee’s TV cabinet I’d noticed three small lava lamps; green, orange and purple, with gold flakes flowing and shimmering inside. These are her luxuries. She keeps them going because an energy auditor from Kildonan UnitingCare explained they only cost one cent per day.

It was through Kildonan that I met her. The charity mainly works in Melbourne’s north. One of its services is to help people overburdened with energy bills understand how to reduce their usage. After the advisor visited Dee, he negotiated a payment plan for the money she owed the power company.

On another day, I visited Kildonan’s headquarters in Epping, in Melbourne’s northern growth corridor, for a launch promoting a low-interest, micro-finance loan.

In his speech at the event, Harry Jenkins, the local federal member and speaker of the lower house, joked that Kildonan’s CEO, Stella Avramopoulos, was known around the office as “she-who-must-be-obeyed”. Avramopoulos, who has dark, sparky eyes and leaves a residue of energy even after she exits a conversation, grew up in the region serviced by her organisation.

After the launch, she chatted in the foyer while assorted charity workers milled around sandwich platters. Recently, Avramopoulos told a Victorian inquiry into child protection that the number of people requesting financial assistance from Kildonan had doubled in the past five years. “They were really gobsmacked because it was a reality they didn’t know,” Avramopoulos told me. “And I said, ‘Well, that’s what happening!’”

In the first week of January this year, while the nation worried about the English cricket team winning the Ashes, six people arrived at Kildonan’s office asking for help, forced to choose between paying their rent or buying food for their families. The next week, three more presented with eviction notices.

Households who spend more than 30% of their income on their mortgage or rent are considered to be in ‘housing stress’. All the charities I contacted for this article told me housing stress has become an increasingly mainstream concern.

“These are not families who saw themselves as struggling or at risk of homelessness and yet here they are, now in severe financial distress,” Avramopoulos says.

In her lounge room, Dee tells me she thinks about her rent before she goes to sleep, and before she wakes up. Before she wakes up. “Not a nice thought, but an everyday one. Rent. Rent. Rent.” She says words in threes.

“Uh,” I say, and pause. “So, uh, how do you spend your days now?”

“Sit around and look at the walls. Talk to my dog. Teach her tricks. I go for a walk sometimes, but I don’t even feel like doing that.”

Dee is crying, wiping tears away from her cheeks with the sleeve of her purple windcheater. “Do all these appointments, apply for jobs. I go to counselling for depression and anxiety. Drink coffee. I don’t drink alcohol. I started smoking cigarettes.”

I walked back to the train knowing this: Dee and her daughter’s rent is well over two-thirds of their combined income, forgetting groceries, bills or food for the dog. And I know this, too: the rent is due next week and Dee won’t be able to pay it.

***

When Albert was sleeping rough, each day went like this:

“You’d wake up five-thirty or so, quite often by the magpies – that was my alarm clock. You’d have a cigarette, go behind the pavilion and have a piss, then have a few cigarettes and wait till Hutt Street opens. I’d get there just as it opened up. It’s on the good side of town and I didn’t want people staring at me when they’re driving to work.

“First thing I would do is have a few coffees, shit, shave, shower – depending on if it was needed, or if I was up to it. I wouldn’t hang around. I’d come back and have lunch, then I’d grab my sleeping bag. Usually if you had money you’d get a cask of wine because there’s not much to do. We’d just sit and drink and smoke and talk.”

During Albert’s time on the street, Kylie Burns (who leads the Hutt Street Centre’s primary homelessness team) safeguarded his music diploma in her office. Burns has a presence at once cherubic and stoic. “He’s a good guy, Albert,” she tells me. “You really wish him well and hope he can achieve what he wants.”

The day I visit, she’s wearing a white, knitted top. There’s a pink toy pony sitting on her desk and bubblegum pop playing on her radio. Earlier in the morning, I’d seen bearded, scraggly men waiting for the centre to open, with plastic bags tied over their feet to keep out the wet.

Hutt Street serves breakfast to about 100 people and lunches to about 200 people every weekday. Burns walks me through their facilities, past the dining room, showers, laundry and storage room, to an art and education centre, an op shop, a lounge and a bank of computers.

The centre signed a new funding agreement with the South Australian government at the end of 2010, as part of reforms that backed more outreach and long-term housing programs – in line with Haggerty’s recommendations.

Burns has reservations about the change. “I can see [Haggerty’s] point of view, but in a practical sense, if we weren’t here, where are people meant to go?” she asks.

“We don’t just do crisis stuff; we do long-term response, too. But I think that sometimes, the ‘housing first’ model sets people up to fail. Living close together wouldn’t work for a lot of our clients – some of them have been sleeping rough for 15 years.”

A senior employee at a national charity tells me that while the ‘housing first’ philosophy has broad support, its implementation is still in question. “The bottleneck is bricks and mortar – if you don’t have access to suitable housing, the whole tenet of ‘housing first’ breaks down,” he said.

Even so, the approach has spread throughout the country, both in pre-existing scattered housing and in new dwellings. More Common Ground-style apartments are under construction in Sydney, Brisbane and Hobart, and a large building opened last year in Melbourne.

This year in Brisbane, a ‘housing first’ outreach campaign run by Micah Projects, called ‘50 Lives 50 Homes’, out-performed its target. It housed 73 of the city’s most at-risk rough sleepers in less than 12 months.

But it is the South Australian government that has made the biggest changes, across all its housing services. In the words of one insider, they’ve “thrown everything up in the air on the evidence that it’ll land in a better place”. In a few more years, she said, they’ll know if it has.

The same goes for Albert. I walk to visit him on a Saturday. The common room is closed at weekends. He shows me to his bedsit on the second floor, apologising several times for the mess.

I think his room is tidy. It’s small, about five bed-lengths by two, with a high ceiling and perky furnishing, like the rest of the building. There’s little marking the space as his own besides the laminated music diploma stuck to the wall and a small figurine of an American Indian on his coffee table.

Albert pulls his hair into a ponytail and starts doing the dishes, standing neatly with his legs together, half-turned towards me while we talk about his plans, long-term and short.

He wants to enrol in a bachelor degree in Aboriginal Studies in Music next year at the university. “My intention is to stay here for a few years, but because I’m so used to not being in the same spot too long, who knows? I could be here for one year and decide I’m going to move on – even though it is ideal.”

Earlier in the week, Albert’s social worker from Common Ground called the job network on his behalf, chasing up training. The following day, they booked him on a course to get his forklift ticket.

This afternoon, he tells me, he’s planning to watch a DVD – maybe Avatar – then at about three o’clock he’ll begin reading through the information booklet for the course. Alan had planned to go out for a drink this Sunday night, but Albert said he couldn’t come; he wanted to be okay for the training, which starts on Monday.

“A woman once said I was a quiet achiever. That’s what I am, you know, a quiet achiever.”

***

I visit Dee again. I’d been hoping to be there when her daughter helped dye her hair, because I thought it would make a hopeful scene. But when I arrive, her hair is already dark red. It looks good, and she appears several years younger. She returns to her couch in the darkened living room to continue watching the mid-morning TV news with the sound down, arms crossed in her loose fleece-lined jacket, the three lava-lamps flowing.

Before long, the questions taste sour in my mouth. It is her face that turns grey now, as I ask her again about all those worries. She’s $600 behind on the latest rent. The payment plans brokered by Kildonan for the utility bills have expired and disconnection notices came for the gas and electricity.

Upset, Dee directs conversation through her dog, who is lying at her feet. “Yeah, it’s not fair is it? It’s not a nice conversation, no it’s not – tickle, tickle,” she pats the animal, speaks in cuddles. “She’s eight today. Old lady now, aren’t you? No birthday cake, no dog food!” she laughs, and then briefly falls silent. “She knows when I’m not happy. She’ll stare at me.”

When her old home that she’d lived in for nearly a decade was put up for sale, she moved half-an-hour down the train line to a much smaller place. The rent was higher, but it was the only one she could find that allowed pets.

She has long been on waiting lists for public housing, and for a housing co-op in which she would pay below-market rent. But around the country, waiting lists for public housing run to the tens of thousands. As decades have passed and the population and economy have grown, governments have not provided the public housing to match. The tenants have shifted from low-paid workers to the most marginalised in society – carers, single mothers, the elderly, disabled or chronically unemployed.

The federal government’s stimulus package included funding for nearly 20,000 new social housing dwellings. Many not-for-profit housing associations received balance sheet boosts they should be able to leverage for ongoing investment. But Australia’s cities are growing fast, and much more is needed. The National Housing Supply Council, a government body, estimates that there was a national shortage of about 180,000 homes in mid-2009, the number having doubled in the preceding year, while prices for existing houses rose sharply.

Near Kildonan’s office in Epping, the landscape has transformed. “When we moved here in 2003 there were still kangaroos hopping around everywhere,” Avramopoulos says. “People thought we were mad to set up a building in the middle of nowhere. There’s been an extraordinary amount of change and some of the service systems have not moved in.”

When population growth outstrips investment in housing, infrastructure and services, the economy still grows and most people become richer, but we are subsidised by the suffering of the poor. “Those at the upper echelons are getting so much stronger financially, but there are fewer and fewer options for the bottom percentile,” Avramopoulos says.

When I left Dee’s place, she walked with me to the letterbox. It was the first time I’d seen her outside her unit, unencumbered by the closeness of the walls and the darkness of her lounge. As I walked away she bent down to pick up her mail and called out, “Want to take my bills?” She gave me a big throaty laugh. I laughed with her and for an instant everything seemed like it would turn out okay, until I remembered it probably wouldn’t.

***

For months I pore over books and documents about homelessness. About housing affordability, poverty, education and income inequality. Structural causes that fuse with the vagaries of personal and social circumstances, chance and mischance. I learn of the thousands of agencies, services and workers implementing a web of policies and tailored responses.

But I can’t keep all the bits and pieces arranged in my mind. Instead, I keep remembering a paragraph in Haggerty’s report:

“In advanced democracies, where homelessness during peacetime was rare until the last 25 years, [it] has been particularly disturbing and uncomfortable to deal with: too complicated, too vast, too much of an affront to our societies’ faith in social and economic progress.”

I thought about this paragraph the morning I read the rich list. That was the morning I’d met Dee, and found out she couldn’t pay the rent on her small, cold unit. I wondered if the lack of affordable housing was inevitable, so long as we seek to better society’s material wealth, rather than the quality of life of our people.

And, again, I thought about Haggerty’s words when I visited Common Ground Adelaide and witnessed the green shoots of well-targeted public and private funding. Albert has a home, a support plan, and his own plans.

But, so far, the big funding push in The Road Home hasn’t made it to all quarters. For example, Avramopoulos is yet to see it reach Melbourne’s outer north. Still, she remains hopeful. “We actually save a lot of money if we invest in early prevention. Housing is one of the critical areas that can act as an intervening force. I know it’s possible to make change,” she says. “I’ve seen it.”

Eventually, stuck for how to write about what I’ve observed, I begin listening to Dee’s interviews while I walk through the city. I notice that she was quieter the second time I visited: less feisty, more resigned. Her voice is soft on the recording, and even though I turn it up as loud as I can, she vanishes often in the noise of the traffic, disappearing among the trucks, the trams and the pulsing crossings.

As I walk, her voice comes and goes: “…yeah, I speak to my mum every week in New Zealand. She’s got nothing and I don’t want her to worry. I can come across quite good…make a joke and laugh. But she always asks, have you got a job, have you got a job?”

There are long pauses, too, where no one speaks because I don’t know what to say. “Another half-year gone,” she says.

When I can’t hear the recording for what seems like a minute, I give up listening, unsure if Dee’s predicament was overwhelmed by the city, or by a silence I was unable to fill.

Read this follow up story about what happened after I wrote the article.

Q&A with Carolyn Steel

In Architecture and building, Environment on

A few weeks ago I interviewed writer and architect Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City: How food shapes our lives, who visited Melbourne last week for the State of Design Festival.

Soon, I’ll publish a Greener Homes column in The Sunday Age based in part on our conversation, but here’s a longer, edited version of the interview. We chatted for so long, we even spoke about Masterchef. Carolyn loves it and loathes it. Read on to find out why…

Why do we need to think about cities and food?

In trying to describe a city through food, I’ve come to the conclusion that food – which is the most important thing in all our lives – has been sidelined, culturally, politically, economically and mentally. We’ve constructed this bizarre idea that food should be cheap and convenient, which it clearly isn’t and shouldn’t be. We’ve lost our sense of the true value of food basically. We externalise all its true costs.

It’s also the case that about a billion people globally don’t have access to food. They’re hungry. But actually a large proportion of that is directly attributable to the globalised industrial food system. Demonstrably there’s more food available globally at the moment than we need, but it’s not reaching everybody.

Because I’m an architect, I’m interested in how those iniquities of the food system relate to cities. I talk about what I call the urban paradox, which is essentially that as humans we have two key needs: sociability (each other) and sustenance (all the natural resources necessary to sustain us, of which food is a key element). The urban paradox comes from the fact that if we live together in large blobs in order to be sociable, if we gather in cities, then we get further and further away from the sources of our sustenance and there’s no solution to this.

What’s the role of architecture and design in responding to this problem?

Is it right that we design houses that don’t have a kitchen, as we now do in the UK? Because, basically, people aren’t cooking, so don’t bother to get them a kitchen. That’s a design issue. If you start saying food is important, you start asking: How do we design the food system so that it is equitable? How do we design the whole journey of food, from the producer to the consumer?

In the case of the pre-industrial world, the countryside was basically a short little chain where you had multipurpose farms and people living nearby and you walked and got it. Now we have these global systems. That’s a design problem because frankly the way we’ve got it set up at the moment has been designed by people who are not designers of society, they’re designers of food systems. I’m saying we have to bring the question of how food travels, how food is produced, how it is bought and sold, directly into the architectural and urban design frame.

People talk about eco-cities and they go on about the u-values and saving water, but the food comes from the supermarket. That’s not an eco-city. If you want to design an eco-city, food is central to it. We have to eat every day – where’s it coming from? Food and agriculture, together, account for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions currently, so if you’re talking about the environment, you have to be talking about food.

I’m not saying that cities should grow all of their own food inside the city, because that is the definition of the countryside. But what is that balance? There are so many models that begin to address how you get a balance between urbanity and rurality.

What model are we using now, and what alternatives are there?

At one end of the possibilities is that we all move to Shanghai and we make Brazil the farm. Behind the global industrial food system model is the logic that you live in urban blobs of up to 30 million people and the farm is thousands of miles away and it uses mono-cultural production.

At the other end, we all go back to being farmers, which is what Frank Lloyd Wright was suggesting with his Broadacre City concept. He said we’ve got to stop building cities altogether, we’ve got to cover the whole of America in little farmsteads and everybody has got to go back to growing their own food.

I’m very interested in solutions that somehow look at the middle ground. In Ebenezer Howard’s garden city model, people would live in urban blobs of up to 30,000 people, with productive farmland around and then a network created with railways, and that gives you the urbanity.

So what kinds of things can people do to make change?

There’s a series of things that can be done at all levels. If you live in suburbia, grow your own. When you think about it, low-density suburbia is fertile land that has just had houses built on it. So there’s capacity for people to do fairly serious home food production in their gardens, which they probably don’t use anyway.

If you have a compact urban core, with farmland nearby then you can create networks that allow producers and consumers to come together. This is the Slow Food ‘co-producer’ idea. Carlo Petrini talks about consumers becoming co-producers. You become aware of food and where it’s been produced, and through your choices you actively promote ethical, local, seasonal good food.

If you go to one supermarket and get all your food from there, it’s got an unacceptable level of control over your life. In the middle aisles of the supermarket, where all the packaged and processed food is, it’s very likely that unless it says explicitly on the label that it is sustainably and ethically sourced, that it isn’t. Once you start to understand that the food you’re buying is not good, you actually start looking for other sources.

There are many models for how can we get together and use our buying power to create alternative, better food networks. In the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn every member works a four-hour shift every month. And so the people own the supermarket. Now it’s got 14,000 members and it’s been going for 38 years.

It’s a model that’s now being copied in London by The People’s Supermarket. These are the models that hopefully will start to scale up. But it is about people getting interested in food – not just what is in the food, but the social and political implications of the way we eat food, and becoming proactive about changing it.

If you’re operating at the global scale, which all cities do, then you begin to use your city-wide power to question the international food system and the political and economic frameworks that allow it to have such free reign.

Toronto has a food policy council, which means that any law that is passed in Toronto it has to go through the food policy council first and the implications for the food system are addressed before that legislation is passed.

Masterchef has been hugely popular in Australia, but a supermarket sponsors it. Can these kinds of shows help change the food culture?

I’m a Masterchef addict – I’ve watched every episode that’s ever been broadcast. I always call programs like Masterchef ‘food porn’, because people go to the supermarket, buy the cheapest possible, hideous ready-meal and then they sit in front of these programs eating crap and watching somebody cooking incredible food.

I’m afraid the more cookery programs are on television, the more it’s a sign there’s something wrong in the food culture. There’s a complete disjunction. If you go to countries like France or Italy, where there’s still a reasonable cooking culture, people don’t sit and watch chefs on television because why on earth would you do that? They just do it themselves. It’s a symptom of the problem, really. I do still love the program, but I also cook.

Choir hits a high note in Europe

In Culture, The Age on

CALEB Foster-McLachlan could barely contain his excitement yesterday, the eve of his departure for the ancient cathedrals of Europe where he will perform with the Australian Children’s Choir.

”I’m so excited I can’t get to sleep at night any more. I just want to go,” the 17-year-old said.

Foster-McLachlan, who has high-functioning autism, said he tends to worry too much: ”I get stressed about expectations and results a lot of the time. Sometimes I think I’m going from one stressful thing to another.”

That made his first night in the choir after his successful audition particularly nerve-racking. ”It was very scary at first,” he says. ”I was so nervous my voice wobbled and the conductor commented that I sounded like a pregnant turkey being strangled.

”But I learnt quickly and the last comment I had from him was a few months ago – he said I had too much of a cheeky grin, which was off-putting from a distance!”

The choir’s tour of Europe has been two years in the planning. For just over three weeks, 50 children – aged from 10 to 18 – will sing in several cities across Germany, Austria and England.

The schedule culminates with a performance at Canterbury Cathedral, where the group will take part in the International Children’s Choir Festival, singing with young choristers from six countries.

Choir director and conductor Andrew Wailes says he has been able to organise for the ensemble to perform in some remarkable venues – places far removed, and not just geographically, from the children’s normal base in Mitcham.

”It’s mind-blowing just to walk into some of the glorious Gothic cathedrals in Europe and know they are between 500 and 1000 years old,” he says. ”And when you go in there to sing, it’s the most inspirational setting. These spaces were designed all those years ago to make the human voice sound its best.”

Wailes says the tour party is excited and nervous – and that goes for the accompanying adults, too. Last week, he held the final briefing for parents.

”Suddenly one of the kids looked up to me with these forlorn eyes and said, ‘We’ve only got one rehearsal left!’ And I said, ‘Yes, you betcha. I’m acutely aware of that, young man’.”

The choir’s repertoire for the trip comprises 43 songs, including a Latin Mass and a few pieces in German, all learnt since the beginning of the year at twice-weekly rehearsals.

”It’s a huge amount of music for the kids to have prepared in six months, but they’ve got there. We’re ready and raring to go,” Wailes says.

”They’re going to come back different people, with a whole lot of experiences and wonderful memories to inspire them.”

Foster-McLachlan has felt restless for the past two weeks, but this time it’s out of anticipation, not anxiety. He has been daydreaming about walking in German forests, descending upon mediaeval castles and singing in thousand-year-old chapels with gilded walls.

”I could have spent my sleeplessness productively, packing my bag,” he admits, ”but instead I sit there imagining being inside the Canterbury Cathedral or how I’m going to talk with the American choirs we’ll meet.”

The year 11 student’s mother, Brenda McLachlan, says being in the choir has helped him understand the subtleties of communication and socialising in a group – scenarios that can be challenging for autistic people.

”Singing in the choir is calming and therapeutic because at times he can get quite wound up,” she says.

Wailes said the benefits of singing are clear for the young and the old.

”It’s the basic human form of relaxing that doesn’t require gym fees or expensive equipment,” he said. ”When you’re singing, that’s all you think about, you don’t worry about anything else. It’s good for the soul.”

Read this article at The Age online

Greener apartment blocks

In Architecture and building, Environment on

YOU’D think apartments would have smaller eco-footprints than houses – after all, they’re usually smaller and stacked up, not sprawling. But are high-rise inhabitants really justified in looking down upon energy-guzzling suburbanites?

In 2005 Paul Myors, from EnergyAustralia, investigated the carbon emissions of different kinds of housing for the NSW Department of Planning (PDF). Surprisingly, he found that apartment-dwellers account for more greenhouse gas emissions than residents in detached housing (not including transportation).

Myors laid the blame at the energy consumption of common areas, together with lower occupancy rates in apartments.

Michael Buxton, professor of environment and planning at RMIT, confirms that high-rise residential buildings – above about nine storeys – tend to be very poor performers. “That’s partly because they often use a lot of glass in construction,” he says. “But they also have lifts, big foyers and lots of large spaces that have to be heated, as well as other facilities like gyms and pools.”

“The best energy performance comes from attached buildings such as townhouses and villas – your classic medium density,” Buxton says. According to Myors’ research, a typical townhouse produces about half the carbon emissions of a high-rise apartment.

So what can eco-minded apartment dwellers do to lift their game?

This article explores the ways you can go green in common. I’ll bypass the standard steps individuals can take within their own walls, and focus on the measures that transform the building as a whole.

Owners corporations

If retrofitting your own home looks confusing, the added challenge of common property can be mind-boggling. “With collective decision-making and volunteer committees, there’s a whole layer of complexity that gets in the way of change,” says Christine Byrne, founder of eco-website Green Strata.

As a first step, she suggests green-minded strata-title owners join the management committee of their building. “If you’re on the committee, it’s easier to get access to information and put items on agendas,” she says. (The task is harder for renters; unfortunately, you’ll have to convince owners to take up the case for you.)

Once you’re there, Byrne suggests getting a picture of exactly what you’re all consuming. The best way to do that is by commissioning an environmental audit of the building. At the least, make sure you’re actually seeing your bills, not just paying them automatically.

“Start to make a list of what’s happening in your building and work through the options,” she says. “The bigger your building, the more you can do, because the greater your water and energy consumption. With smaller buildings the options might be things like double-glazing, waste and composting.”

Lighting

As in any existing home or office, improving lighting efficiency is the easiest step – and some changes will cost nothing at all.

In a case study detailed on Green Strata, Nexus apartments in St Leonards, Sydney, found the fluorescent globes in its car park were illuminating the space well beyond what was necessary. So the building manager simply removed almost half the tubes.

“Walk around your building and look at every light,” suggests Byrne. “Can outdoor lights be solar lights? Consider timers, motion sensors and LEDs – for every space there’s a different solution. De-lamping is an easy step, but you have to make sure the level of lighting still complies with Australian Standards.”

Nexus also installed day/night detectors for the compact fluorescent globes under its awnings, as well as motion sensors in the plant and utility rooms. Both measures meant that the lights no longer ran 24-hours a day. The cost is expected to be recouped in savings within 12 months.

Water

In buildings taller than three storeys, water consumption packs a double-whammy. Each drop has an associated energy cost for pumping (as well as the energy cost for heating it). And if that’s not concern enough, in most apartments, residents don’t have separate water meters.

“People aren’t paying for water based on their own consumption,” says Byrne. “The water use of some of these big buildings is quite horrific and it can be very poor in the older ones as well.”

While this is a problem, it’s also an opportunity for serious savings. Miramar Apartments, a 38-storey building in the Sydney CBD, undertook an audit by Sydney Water. The assessment identified major leaks and found that most tap fittings and showerheads were inefficient. Each apartment was retrofitted by the utility under its WaterFix program (which costs as little as $22 per dwelling).

For measures that totalled about $7000, the building cut its water use by one-fifth. It saves about $64,000 each year on water and energy bills combined.

“We’re starting to see owners corporations agreeing to pay for the WaterFix,” Byrne says. “You have to do annual fire inspections, so at the same time, why not do an annual water inspection?”

Hot water

If you have to wait a long time for hot water, it’s likely there’s something amiss in the pipes. Many large buildings have centralised hot water that uses a ring main system – a pipe that loops from the boiler, past all levels and back again.

In this kind of system, broken valves, cross-connections and lack of insulation on pipes can cause a lot waste.

The Sustainable Living in the City trial, run by the Melbourne City Council in 2008, found that some residents in high-rise apartment buildings were waiting up to ten minutes for their hot water to flow.

Dorothy LeClaire oversees the owners corporation department at from Melbourne in the City Management, which manages three of the buildings that took part in the trial. One of the key recommendations was that plumbers assess the ring main system. And for some residents there was an instant benefit: immediate hot water.

“When you do ring main balancing, the hot water comes a lot quicker,” she says. “It saves water, obviously – there’s less cold water going down the drain. But it also saves energy because you have to heat less water.

Waste

When Melbourne City Councillor Cathy Oke moved into her CBD apartment, she found there was no recycling collection at all. “Residential recycling rates in the city are terrible,” she says.

But it’s not just city apartments that don’t get it right. In most multi-dwelling blocks, recycling is less convenient than in stand-alone dwellings. Without dedicated areas and separate chute systems, bins usually become a jumble of rubbish and recyclables.

In Oke’s building, recycling bins have been moved off each floor and she uses a special container, supplied by the council, to sort and transport her recyclables.

“It’s like a funky yellow shopping basket that’s easily tip-able. It fits neatly in my small kitchen,” she says. “If you move the recycle bins to reduce contamination, you have to make it easy to go to those locations.”

The best method will vary from building to building, depending on the space: the key is to make the chore as convenient as possible. Good signage, with colour coding and clear instructions can help focus the most absent-minded residents, so try asking your local council for education material.

Composting is always tricky in apartments, but to encourage residents, owners corporations can organise bulk purchase of worm farms or Bokashi Buckets, together with a workshop to get people started. In some buildings, enthusiastic residents have established communal composting on shared garden space.

Case study: Signature Apartments

At the suggestion of a resident, Signature Apartments turned to technology to create a sense of community. The building, in Redfern, Sydney, has created its own Facebook page.

Robert Goodall, an apartment owner and the chairperson of Signature’s management committee, is one of two people who moderate the page.

“There are 100 units in our building. A lot of us felt that within apartment buildings nobody ever knows their neighbours,” he says.

“We thought Facebook would be a way to get feedback on how the building was going. And for greening the apartments, we could post ideas and get comments. We were looking at installing a communal compost bin to reduce our waste and when posted that we got lots of positive responses.”

For now, about fifty people ‘like’ the page, and Goodall says many more visit it regularly. Among other things, residents have used it to borrow and lend things, and to recycle unwanted furniture.

He has also used Facebook to promote the building’s bike room. Low-impact transportation is one clear advantage apartment-dwellers have over suburban householders – they’re usually much closer to shops, workplaces and public transport. But when it comes to bike-friendly infrastructure, most buildings still don’t provide the goods.

A bike room had been planned for Signature Apartments, but when residents moved in, it hadn’t been fitted out. The committee conducted research on racks, layouts and costs.

“There are a lot of options out there. The internet is a good place to do a general browse and see what you can find,” Goodall says.

“Having the room is good because it takes the bikes out of all the common areas where people were locking them. And for riders, it gives us a safe place to store our bikes.”

This article was published by Sanctuary Magazine

Star ratings lost in space

In Architecture and building, The Age on

Governments have failed to ensure house energy ratings become reality

MOST new homes don’t measure up to their energy rating, building industry experts warn. Since the start of May, all new houses and renovations in Victoria must reach six stars, but because of shoddy insulation and inadequate draught sealing, householders’ bills may continue to rise.

Despite steadily lifting the stringency of energy ratings, the industry’s regulators have not enforced those standards in the way homes are built. There is no inspection or auditing process to ensure houses comply with efficiency specifications.

House energy consultant Blair Freeman, from Energy Leaks, says eight out of every ten residences he audits have poorly installed or missing insulation – especially in walls, around window frames and towards the perimeter of ceilings.

“People are paying for a five or six star home and not getting it,” he says. “The rating software is a great start – it gives you an assessment of the drawings – but no one assesses the home.”

Freeman photographs the insides of houses with a thermal camera. If it’s warm outside, the images show hot spots where insulation is gappy. Too often, he says, the new houses in his photos glow like hot coals. “It’s a big problem and it’s all to do with poor installation of insulation.”

Similarly, draught testing company Air Barrier Technologies has found air leakage in new homes to be five to 10 times worse than expected under the star-rating models.

Wayne Liddy, a building surveyor and former president of the Australian Institute of Building Surveyors Victoria, says he’s concerned new houses don’t meet the efficiency expectations of homeowners.

Building surveyors assess compliance with the star rating paperwork, but do not check those features in fabric of the building itself. They are not required to monitor the quality of the installation of insulation or draught sealing.

“There’s a big gap in compliance,” Mr Liddy says. “We could have a very embarrassing situation when mandatory disclosure [of energy ratings at the point of sale or lease] comes in. Most houses that have a building permit with a report giving them five stars may be lucky to get to two stars.”

But Victorian Building Commissioner Tony Arnel says people must understand that the rating scheme is a design tool, not an on-the-ground assessment. “The quality of building varies, like everything in life,” he says.

“Where houses are built that have more air gaps and leakage issues, then potentially they will be below the five-star standard. But that’s not to say those houses don’t comply with the regulations.”

The Building Commission conducts “desk-top audits” of compliance with the rating standards, Mr Arnel says. “Quality assurance is a contractual responsibility between the owner and the builder. That’s what you pay for.”

Kristin Brookfield, building and environment director of the Housing Industry Association, says she has not seen any evidence of a systemic problem. “We will always support the view that our members understand their obligations and are delivering homes to the expectations of the law and the customer.”

Even so, Ms Brookfield says she would not be surprised if some states introduced an extra building inspection targeting energy efficiency measures. “But it needs to be done in a way doesn’t slow everything down and cost thousands of dollars,” she says.

Misgivings about the scheme’s governance extend to the oversight of ratings assessors. Until March this year, Sustainability Victoria was responsible for supervising the performance of accredited house energy raters. However, according to a spokesperson for the agency, due to “resource constraints”, it did not audit any ratings after June 2004 – a gap of nearly seven years.

The role has now been outsourced to the Building Designers Association of Victoria and the Association of Building Sustainability Assessors.

Architect and environmental design consultant Chris Barnett, from Third Skin Sustainability, says this kind of ineffective regulation is undermining the rating scheme’s credibility.

To improve compliance in the industry, Mr Barnett says regulators should urgently consider a range of changes, including random ‘as-built’ audits and additional checks by surveyors or sustainability assessors, along with training and education campaigns for builders.

Why we can’t see the insulation for the walls

Before the five-star regulations began in 2005, Tony Isaacs recalls, the building industry campaigned vigorously against the rules.

“There was a lot of fear among builders because it was a big change,” he says. “But because of the size of the change there was also a view [in government] that, strictly speaking, there should be an additional inspection – particularly for insulation.”

The extra check was not introduced. At the time, Mr Isaacs was the project manager responsible for the new regulations at the (then) Sustainable Energy Authority Victoria. He also developed FirstRate, the software tool commonly used in Victoria to analyse the efficiency of housing designs.

Now senior research fellow at RMIT’s Centre for Design, Mr Isaacs says both the house energy raters and the actual buildings must be assessed more rigorously.

“There needs to be some checking done of the people who do the ratings in the first place, to make sure they’re accurate,” Mr Isaacs says.

“Someone has to come up with the dollars to check the ratings and to check the buildings. The measures we’ve used so far have clearly got holes through which people can get away with building to a lesser standard, and unless we check them more rigorously we just don’t know how well they’re performing.”

Building the ratings into a home

Chris Jensen, from Greensphere Consulting, has conducted over 10,000 house energy ratings. He also lectures in building energy modelling at the University of Melbourne’s architecture faculty.

But when he came to renovate his own home in Port Melbourne, he was shocked at the disconnection between the software modelling and the finished product.

“We’re at lock up stage, and I could have put cheese in the walls. There’s no point at which the energy efficiency measures in the building really get checked. As the builder, I’m just expected to have met that standard, because that’s what the building permit states,” he says.

He says that while he strongly supports the energy rating system, he is concerned about the way it translates into built houses.

“Insulation, gaps and cracks are the main issues, because you can’t see them. The other big worry is that the report doesn’t make it easy for builders to understand what’s required,” he says.

“My house could be built at two-star, if it wasn’t done properly, and I wouldn’t know. It really is that bad.”

Read this article at The Age online