2017-04-11 P&E Agenda Attachment 1 to Item 1 Housing Needs Assessment

Facebook, which received an overwhelming 312 applications. Applicants were between 18 and 25
years of age, had housing difficulties and an interest in spending time with the elderly. A
minimum of 5 hours a week would have to be spent socialising with the seniors in the home.
Eventually 3 young people were chosen.

The response from the young people has been very positive, saying they felt very welcome and
enjoy the time they spend together with their elderly neighbours. The main result from the first 9
months of the project is that the feeling of isolation of older people has decreased significantly.
They have said that they feel more normal and the young people are like a peer group. Older
residents have more social contacts and the atmosphere in the house has changed.

Rudolf Seniors Home houses 134 seniors and adding only three young people to the mix has
highlighted that there should be more young people in the senior home to optimise the social
interaction opportunities. However they have reported to feel the pressure of not being able to
spend enough time with each resident.

The ‘Homes that Fit’ model is spreading through Finland with another few cities implementing
similar projects. It provides a model for mixed housing solutions that could be considered in the
planning and construction stage of aged care homes.

Inside Story of How Melbourne Became Marvellous All Over Again36

In 1994, Melbourne City Council embarked on a groundbreaking study of its citizens and their
city. Places for People was carried out again in 2004, and is now nearing completion for a third
time - giving Melbourne a contemporary record and 20-year archive that only a handful of cities
can boast. “Almost unique, especially in that part of the world,” says Danish architect and urban
design guru Jan Gehl, who pioneered Places for People in Copenhagen. Melbourne was one of his
first foreign experiments. Under Gehl’s guidance, Melbourne started watching its people closely -
where did they come from, how did they get here, where did they go, how did they go there,
where did they linger, where did they sit and where did they stroll?

Out of this attention to the smallest details - even the colour of the pavement and the awnings
on the buildings - the MCC now has 20 years of hard numbers - data credited with underpinning
all that global praise about Melboume’s ‘liveablity’. By this measure, Gehl considers Melbourne in
2014 close to the global gold standard - and that’s as much a surprise to him as anybody, given
what the CBD was like when he first saw it in 1976.

Robert Doyle quotes a 1978 Age article decrying “an empty, useless city centre”. Former Labor
premier John Cain says: “Very much a dead heart.” Jan Gehl: “Completely neutron bombed.”
“There were only about 100 residents in the CBD. There was nobody there ... what we did was say,
‘We’ve got to enable the buildings to house people and we’ve got to bring the street life back.”

The most significant impact was the arrival in 1983 of a migrant, urban designer Rob Adams, of
Zimbabwe, who was employed by Melbourne City Council (MCC). He too found a city whose
workday population seemed to be sucked out to the suburbs at 5pm as if by a giant vacuum. “It
was deserted. The biggest change was realising that city’s didn’t have to be like that.”


36
     Excerpts from The Age, Article November 1 2014, by Neil McMahon. Available at
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/inside-story-of-how-melbourne-became-marvellous-all-over-again-
20141030-11d7f9.html




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