The Coronavirus pandemic presents additional challenges for people living on the streets and those who work with them. Greg Denham is an outreach worker in the Yarra area and a member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Action Partnerships) a former police officer and a long time advocate of drug policy reform. He tells us about the impact of Covid-19 on his outreach work and on the lives of the people he's seeing.

The 'hard lockdown' of nine public housing towers in North Melbourne and Flemington on Saturday, July 4th, has been described as hard-handed and discriminatory. it has also shown the strength and connectedness of the people who live the towers and support for them from the broader community. For Dr David Kelly, a research fellow at the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT, the risk Covid-19 presented for the people living in the towers was a result of years of neglect of public housing by the Victorian Government.

Links to public housing advocacy groups

Save Public Housing Collective https://www.savepublichousing.com/

Renters and Housing Union https://www.facebook.com/rentersandhousingunion/

And if you want to dig deeper, here's the link to the report David Kelly referred to in the interview:

https://www.ahuri.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/43214/AHURI-Final-Report-315-Social-housing-as-infrastructure-rationale-prioritisation-and-investment-pathway.pdf