By Callum Ludwig
A powerful campaign in support of homeless people is set to be held in Warburton in August.
On Sunday 13 August, all are welcome to join in the Cerini Walk from the Wesburn/Millgrove CFA to the old Cerini Centre in Warburton via the Warburton Rail Trail.
The Cerini Walk is symbolic of the walk Father Charles Cerini, who established the original St Joseph’s Primary School in the Cerini Centre, did in 1966 when in marched 35 students from Yarra Junction to Warburton in protest of the local school bus not taking children up to the school from the high school after it moved to Yarra Junction.
Owner of the Warburton Holiday Park and Vice President of the Warburton Advancement League (WAL) David Pratt is heading up the Warburton Affordable Housing Group and said what we need to do is to start adding to the housing stock within the community.
“We came up with the concept of developing a social and affordable housing project that utilised the caravan park rules to permit us to develop a community with two, three and four-bedroom homes,” he said.
“The Cerini Centre site had the ideal location, it is close to schools, close to public transport, close to the shops, and is a site that needed to be repurposed in the role of doing good for the community.”
The Cerini Centre was built by Fr Cerini in the 1950s after he arrived in town and was the start of St Joseph’s Primary School. A Yarra Junction campus opened in 1987 and all students were moved there after the Warburton campus closed at the end of 1994.
In 2021, WAL was able to conduct a full feature survey of the site to identify the titles and boundaries of the land surrounding the Cerini Centre. The site is currently part-owned by the Catholic Diocese, the Department of Education and the Yarra Ranges Council.
Mr Pratt said Council and the Catholic Parish are on board and the Department of Education had determined the two blocks of land they are seeking are surplus to requirements and not currently used by the Warburton Primary School.
“Our plan is to build homes that will be able to be rented for up to five years so that people can get themselves established in their next forever home, we don’t want to lose valued members of the community simply because they can’t rent a property,” he said.
“At the moment, if they have to move out for some reason, there’s nowhere for them to go but to leave the valley, so what we’re trying to do is to keep people within their community and have it run and managed by locals.”
The project aims to have between 10 and 15 homes in a Manufactured Home Estate (MHE) on approximately 13,000 square metres of developable land, which under Part 4 of the Residential Tenancies Act allows for one to five-year tenancies. At least two of the homes would be set aside as short-term family crisis accommodation.
The neighbouring electoral districts of Evelyn and Croydon which include some of the Yarra Ranges have been identified as two rising hotspots for homelessness in Australia in an analysis of the 2021 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data by the Council to Homeless Persons. Evelyn came in at number 16 of the top 20 districts where homelessness is surging with an increase of 67 per cent, while Croydon ranked 17 out of 20 with an increase of 65 per cent.
Mr Pratt said he has gotten consent and approval from a lot of major housing providers that operate within the caravan park sector who would be willing to register themselves as registered housing providers of this and similar projects.
“We just need this one to start and then I believe it will open up floodgates to allow more housing to be built more affordably, a registered housing provider can take it to State Government and have it funded under the Big Housing Build,” he said.
“This model that we’re creating has never been used before, but it is an affordable model that could be rolled out to different towns and suburbs to deliver the number of houses that are really needed to provide people with appropriate shelter.”
Attendees of the Cerini Walk can meet at the Wesburn/Millgrove CFA on Sunday 13 August for an 11am start to support awareness for the project and homelessness in the region.
More information about the project and the history of the Cerini Centre can be found at www.cerinicentre.com.
