The view from the fourteenth floor

Having done a lot of work in social housing high-rises in Melbourne over the years in various guises, as well as having visited friends who lived in the towers, I have come to understand and know intimately many of the people that lived there.

The first time I went up to the fourteenth floor, I didn’t notice the view.
That’s the part people always tell you about, the view, mate, the view from up there, as if the tower’s great consolation prize is that it can show you the whole city while the city pretends not to see you. But on that first visit I was too busy trying to look normal. Too busy monitoring my own face, my own posture, my own instincts, like a person arriving in a place they’ve only ever heard described as a problem.

I’d been invited over by a friend, someone I’d known long enough to trust, but not long enough, at that point, to understand the full geography of his life. He’d texted me the building address and then, almost as an afterthought – Buzz 14B. Lift’s cooked sometimes. If it stops, just whack the button again.

That line, casual, weary, told me more than the rest of the text.

Outside, the tower had the blunt honesty of public housing architecture – not trying to charm you, not trying to seduce you, just existing, upright, and unapologetic. A big slab of concrete and windows, rising out of the suburb like a verdict. The kind of building people point at as they drive past and say things they’d never say about the people inside any other kind of home.

There was graffiti on the lower walls. Not the artistic kind you photograph, the quick kind that says someone was here and someone is bored and someone is angry. A security camera angled down at the entrance, either a promise of safety or a reminder of suspicion, depending on what you bring into the scene. A small patch of grass that looked like it had stopped trying.

I walked in through doors that didn’t so much welcome you as allow you. The foyer smelled like disinfectant, damp carpet, and the faint sweetness of someone’s cooking drifting down a corridor. The air carried overlapping traces of domestic life – laundry powder, cheap deodorant, fried onions, cigarette smoke that had settled into the building’s bones years ago and decided to stay.

I buzzed 14B. A crackle. A pause. Then my friend’s voice, distorted through the intercom, as if arriving from underwater.

“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
A click. The door unlocked with a sound that always feels slightly moral in public institutions – permission granted.

Inside, I found the lift.

The lift had a scarred metal door and a small sign taped above the buttons – PLEASE DO NOT URINATE IN LIFT. It was written in block letters, the kind you might use for children. I stared at it longer than I should have, not on account of it being funny, but because it condensed a whole social story into one sentence. It said – the building has been neglected long enough for dignity to become optional. It said – someone has done this, and someone has had to clean it. It said – the things we treat as unthinkable in polite places become thinkable when people are pressed hard enough.

I pressed “14.” The button lit up weakly.

The doors closed and the lift began to climb with a sluggish determination, like an old man forcing himself up stairs. It rattled. It paused between floors for a fraction too long, then continued. I watched my own reflection in the scratched metal interior and saw, faintly, the expression on my face – alert, slightly tense, trying not to look like a tourist.

That’s when I noticed the other details. The mirror that had been partially cracked and then stuck back together with tape. The grime in the corners. The graffiti carved into the panel, names, dates, a heart pierced by an arrow, the crude mathematics of bored teenagers.

Halfway up, the lift stopped and the doors opened.

A woman stepped in with a pram and a sleeping toddler. She didn’t look at me. Not due to her being rude, but because city life teaches you to conserve your eyes. Her hair was pulled back, practical. She had grocery bags hooked onto the pram handle like extra limbs. The toddler’s head lolled, mouth open, the sweet surrender of a child who has been carried through adult errands.

The doors closed again.
The lift resumed its climb.

I wanted to say something polite, how’s your day?, but it felt intrusive, like speaking in a church. So, I stood quietly, hands at my sides, sharing the small vertical space while the building’s machinery did its tired work.

When we reached her floor, she manoeuvred the pram out with a kind of practiced patience, the skill of someone who has solved this puzzle a thousand times. She didn’t need help from a stranger. She needed a lift that worked.

The doors shut again.

And only then, somewhere between the thirteenth and fourteenth floors, did the view announce itself, not through windows, but through a shift in my own stomach. The sense of altitude. The feeling of being held up by concrete. The slight pressure in the ears.

The lift opened onto a corridor that smelled like cooking oil and damp plaster.

The hallway lights flickered in that institutional way, half-bright, half-giving up. The carpet was threadbare in patches. Doors lined the corridor, each one a sealed world. From behind some of them came sounds – a television, a baby crying, laughter, an argument in a language I didn’t understand, a kettle whistling. Life, compressed.

My friend’s door was at the end. 14B.

People just trying to live

He opened it before I knocked, as if he’d been waiting with his hand on the latch.

“Mate,” he said, and smiled, bright, unembarrassed, the smile of someone who refuses to apologise for their address.

Inside, the flat was warm.

Not warm in the emotional sense yet, though that came, but warm in the literal way – the heat trapped behind concrete, the air slightly heavy. A small living room with a couch that had seen better decades. A coffee table scarred by use. A stack of school books. A bowl of fruit. A cheap fan in the corner, pointed at nothing, as if even it had run out of conviction.

On the wall, a child’s drawing was stuck up with masking tape. It showed the city skyline, crudely rendered – a few rectangles, a sun, a bridge. The most striking part was the angle. The child had drawn the city from above, the way you would draw it if you lived high up and spent a lot of time looking down.

“Tea?” my friend asked.
“Yeah,” I said.

He moved into the tiny kitchen, more kitchenette than kitchen, and boiled the kettle. The movements were familiar, domestic. His life, for all the public narrative wrapped around it, was made of the same small gestures as any life – making tea, folding laundry, reminding a kid to do homework, worrying about money, laughing at stupid things.

While the kettle heated, he pointed at the drawing.

“Jess did that,” he said. “She’s obsessed with the skyline.”
“How old is she now?” I asked.
“Eight. Reckons she’s gonna work in one of those buildings one day.” He smiled again, but this time there was something bittersweet in it.

I turned and looked through the window.

And then I finally saw the view.

The city sprawled out beneath us, impossibly close and impossibly far. You could see the high-rises, the cranes, the river glinting, the distant line of suburbs fading into haze. Cars moved along major roads like blood cells. The whole thing looked orderly from up here, as if problems were just design flaws you could smooth out with a finger.

My friend must have read something in my face.

“Wild, hey?” he said, placing mugs on the table. “People pay millions for this view.”

“Yeah,” I said, and then, before I could stop myself, added – “It’s… insane.”

He laughed. “Tell me about it.”

We sat down with tea. The kid, Jess, came out of a back room in a school uniform, hair messy, face serious in that way kids get when adults are talking. She looked at me, assessed me, decided I was safe, and then went straight to the window.

“Look!” she said, pointing. “That’s the stadium. That’s where they play the big games. And that’s the bridge. And that’s where Mum says the rich people live.”

The bluntness of children – naming the invisible.

My friend winced slightly. “Jess,” he said, warning tone.
“What?” she demanded. “It’s true.”
He sighed, defeated by accuracy.

Later, as she did homework at the table and we talked in low voices, he told me the story that sits underneath so many public housing stories in Australia – not a tale of laziness, not a melodrama, just the slow accumulation of bad luck and structural limits.

He’d worked. He’d been on his feet. He’d done what people are supposed to do. Then a workplace injury, then casual work that didn’t quite cover rent, then a landlord selling, then moving, then moving again. He told it in the flat tone of someone describing weather. You could hear the exhaustion in the repetition – we tried this, we tried that, and then,

“And then we got offered this place,” he said. “And honestly? It was like… breathing again.”

Breathing again.

That was the word he used. Not “winning.” Not “getting a freebie.” Breathing.

Public housing, when it works, is oxygen.

It is refuge. It is the difference between spending your life in survival mode, one rent rise away from collapse, and having enough stability to plan. Enough stability to let your kid join a sports team. Enough stability to go to the doctor. Enough stability to think beyond Friday.

And yet the stigma clings to it like smoke.

Even as he spoke about the relief of having a secure place, he also spoke about the way people’s eyes changed when they learned where he lived.

“You don’t tell people straight away,” he said. “Not if you can help it. You wait. You see who they are first.”

“Because of judgement?” I asked.

He snorted. “Because people think you’re dangerous. Or lazy. Or… contagious.”

Contagious. That was another word that hit me hard. Not on account of it being dramatic, but because it was so precise. Stigma works like contagion in the imagination – a fear that proximity might infect you with the same fate.

He told me about school forms where he hesitated before writing the address. About other parents who didn’t let their kids come over. About the way tradies sometimes rolled their eyes when they saw the building. About the way police cars seemed to linger longer outside their entrance than outside the new private high-rise down the road where, statistically, plenty of violence and drugs also existed, just behind better curtains.

“The thing is,” he said, and his voice dropped, “there’s good people here. Mostly good people. People just… trying to live.”

Public Housing

That’s the truth that gets lost in the public narrative. “Public housing” becomes a category, a headline, an idea. People talk about “the towers” as if they’re a single organism. They use the buildings as shorthand for disorder. They treat the residents as a problem to manage rather than citizens to house.

And because the towers are visible, because they rise above the skyline like a public confession, the stigma becomes public too.

That’s what I mean by the politics of visibility.

There is a kind of poverty in Australia that is hidden – the family living in a motel room, the teenager sleeping in a car, the older woman couch-surfing because rent rose and she had nowhere else, the person working full-time and still unable to secure stable housing. That poverty is scattered, private, hard to photograph. It doesn’t produce a single building you can point at.

The towers do.

The towers concentrate disadvantage in a way that makes it easy for the rest of society to look, judge, and then move on. You can drive past and feel a brief flicker of either pity or contempt, both equally comfortable emotions because neither demands action.

Meanwhile, somewhere out of sight, a waiting list grows. A waiting list made of people who are not visible at all. People who don’t live in a tower yet because there is no place for them. People in unstable rentals, in crisis accommodation, in violent homes they can’t afford to leave. People with disabilities sleeping on couches. Elderly people choosing between medication and rent.

The tower is the visible symbol. The waiting list is the invisible crisis.

And we, as a society, have become strangely comfortable with that invisibility. We treat the waiting list like weather – unfortunate, unavoidable, the way things are. We do not treat it like a policy failure so profound it should keep ministers awake at night.

Sitting in my friend’s flat, watching Jess do her homework, I kept thinking about how children experience this visibility.

Jess had the view of the whole city. She could see the towers where lawyers and executives worked. She could see the stadium where the country’s most celebrated bodies performed. She could see the glossy architecture of wealth. She could see the trains moving like veins through the grid. She could see, in other words, the promise that society holds out as normal.

And yet she was being quietly taught, through other people’s reactions, through the jokes kids make, through the way addresses become whispers, that the city wasn’t really for her.

That is a particular kind of psychological cruelty – to let a child look at everything and still feel excluded from it.

I asked my friend if Jess had ever spoken about it directly.

He nodded, eyes on his tea.

“She said to me once, ‘Dad, why do people hate where we live?’”

I felt my throat tighten.

“What did you say?”

He shrugged, helpless. “What do you say? I told her people don’t hate it. They just don’t understand.”

I watched Jess erase a maths answer and try again. Her pencil scratched softly on the table. Ordinary childhood. And yet, layered over it, the social lesson she was learning without anyone explicitly teaching it – some doors are heavier for you than for other kids.

That’s the thing about public housing stigma. It doesn’t just affect adults’ pride. It shapes children’s expectations of themselves. It teaches them to anticipate rejection. It makes them careful in ways children shouldn’t have to be careful. It forces them to translate their lives into acceptable narratives – No, it’s not like what you think. Yes, it’s safe. No, my dad isn’t a criminal. Yes, we’re normal.

It takes energy to constantly defend your right to exist.

A little later, my friend took me out onto the balcony, more a concrete lip than a generous outdoor space. The wind up there had teeth. You could smell the city – exhaust, hot asphalt, faint river damp.

He pointed down at a small playground near the base of the building.

“See that?” he said. “That’s where they play. And you know what the weird thing is? Half the city thinks this place is full of monsters. But most days it’s just kids, mate. Just kids on swings.”

He said it with a quiet anger, not theatrical, but deep. The anger of someone who has had to watch their child be treated as suspect by association.

We went back inside. He talked about the building’s problems – the lift breaking, the mould that crept back no matter how much you cleaned, the delays for repairs, the way maintenance always felt reactive rather than caring. He wasn’t romanticising the place. He was grateful for it and also furious about how little the state seemed to value the conditions of the refuge it had provided.

“Like,” he said, gesturing at a patch near the window where paint had bubbled, “if you’re going to house people, at least do it properly. Don’t act like we should be grateful for damp.”

That sentence matters. Because one of the ways stigma is maintained is through neglect. If you let buildings decay, you confirm the public’s worst assumptions. You create environments that breed distress, conflict, and illness, and then you point at the outcomes as proof that the residents are the problem.

It’s a self-fulfilling cruelty.

Public housing is often treated as a last resort, something you provide in the cheapest way possible to those you have already mentally classified as marginal. But if we are serious about dignity, public housing cannot be a last resort. It has to be a standard.

It has to be a place you’d be willing to live if you had to.

Not for the reason that everyone should live in towers forever, but because the measure of a society is whether it will provide decent conditions even for those who are not profitable.

But housing should never be a moral reward, it is infrastructure, it is the foundation on which people build lives.

At one point, Jess looked up from her homework and asked my friend if she could go down to play.

He checked the time, checked the weather, and then said, “Yeah. But stay where I can see you from the window.”

She rolled her eyes with the theatrical exasperation of a child whose parent worries too much, then ran to the door.

As she left, my friend moved to the window and watched her cross the concrete courtyard below. The protective instinct in his posture was unmistakable. He wasn’t just monitoring for ordinary dangers. He was monitoring for the particular risks that attach to stigma – the way other kids might treat her, the way adults might assume things about her, the way the environment itself, poorly maintained, under-resourced, could turn minor problems into real ones.

Watching him watch her, I felt a wave of something like grief. Not for him alone, but for what it says about our collective choices.

We have decided, in Australia, to treat public housing as something shameful, scarce, and politically toxic. We have decided not to build enough of it. We have decided to concentrate it in visible towers and then act shocked when those towers become targets of media panic. We have decided to let waiting lists stretch into years while telling ourselves that the market will solve housing if we just get out of its way.

And then, when people fall, we blame them for landing badly.

The next time I visited, weeks later, the lift was out. A handwritten sign taped to the foyer wall announced it with the bluntness of institutional failure – LIFT OUT OF ORDER. SORRY FOR INCONVENIENCE.

Sorry for inconvenience.

Fourteen floors.

People with prams. People with disabilities. Elderly residents. Bags of groceries. All climbing stairs or trapped upstairs or relying on neighbours.

“Inconvenience” is a funny word when the cost is breath.

My friend met me downstairs, sweating.

“Jess is sick,” he said. “Try taking a sick kid down fourteen flights.”

He wasn’t complaining in the whiny way politicians imagine welfare recipients complain. He was stating a fact. The building’s failures landed on bodies.

We climbed the stairs together. Stairwells have their own smell, concrete dust, sweat, sometimes urine, sometimes bleach, sometimes all of it at once. The stairs were narrow. The landings were scuffed. Someone had left a broken chair on the tenth-floor landing, as if the building had become a museum of abandoned objects.

Halfway up, we passed an older man gripping the rail, taking breaks on each landing. My friend nodded at him.

“How ya going, Ron?”

Ron looked up, breathless, and gave a weak grin.

“Bloody lift,” he said.

“Yeah,” my friend said. “You alright?”

Ron waved him off. “I’ll get there. Eventually.”

Eventually. That’s the timeline the poor are asked to live by – eventually things will be fixed, eventually the system will work, eventually you’ll be seen, eventually your turn will come.

We reached the flat. Jess was on the couch under a blanket, cheeks flushed, eyes glassy. My friend touched her forehead and cursed softly.

“Need to get you to the GP,” he said.

“Do we have to go down the stairs again?” she asked, voice small.

His face tightened. “We’ll work it out,” he said, too quickly.

That moment, small, domestic, painful, collapsed the whole argument into a child’s question.

Public housing is refuge, yes. But if the refuge is neglected, it becomes another site of harm. And the harm is not abstract. It is stairs. It is mould. It is broken lifts. It is the feeling of being stuck.

Later, when Jess was asleep again, my friend and I stood at the window and looked out at the city. The sun was setting, throwing long shadows.

“Sometimes,” he said quietly, “I look out there and I feel like… I’m watching a party I’m not invited to.”

I didn’t have an immediate answer. Because what do you say to that without turning it into a pep talk? Without saying something false like You can do anything, when the whole point is that structural barriers make “anything” harder?

So, I said the only honest thing I could.

“It’s a lie,” I said. “The idea that it’s not your city. It is.”

He laughed, soft and sceptical. “Tell that to the people who cross the street when they hear ‘commission’.”

I wanted, in that moment, to take his scepticism and turn it into policy. To turn his tired humour into a budget line. To make the moral stakes visible to the people who argue about housing in abstract terms.

Because here is the reality – we cannot be a stable society while housing is a lottery.

We cannot keep pretending the private market will deliver dignity for everyone. Markets deliver to those who can pay. That is their nature. If we outsource housing entirely to market logic, we will get exactly what we are getting now – insecurity, inequality, and the slow spread of homelessness into categories of people we once assumed were safe.

Therefore, the argument for large-scale, dignified public housing is the foundation beneath everything else we claim to care about, education, health, safety, productivity, community.

By the time I left that day, the lift was still out, so I walked down the stairs again, my legs sore, my mind busy. On the ninth floor, I passed a teenager sitting on the steps scrolling his phone, earphones in, hoodie up. He looked up at me with a brief flicker of suspicion and then looked away. A normal teenager, bored, trapped in a stairwell because sometimes there’s nowhere else to be.

On the ground floor, the foyer felt colder. The security camera stared. Outside, the suburb continued its normal life – cafés, traffic, joggers, the confident flow of people who did not have to think about lifts and waiting lists.

I turned back and looked up at the tower.

From the street, the building was all windows and repetition, identical squares stacked in a grid, each one a frame around a life. From a distance you couldn’t see the drawings on the wall, the sick child under a blanket, the old man climbing stairs, the kettle boiling, the homework on the table. You couldn’t see the tenderness. You couldn’t see the effort. You couldn’t see the way people keep living despite being treated as a category.

You could only see “the tower.”

I drove home and, later that night, I found myself thinking again of Jess’s drawing taped to the wall. The skyline from above. The sun in the corner, drawn too large. The city simplified into shapes a child could hold.

Children are always drawing the world they want to belong to.

The question is whether we let them.

A city that lets children grow up in public housing while being told, implicitly and explicitly, that they are less than, is a city with a moral fault line. It is a city that will pay later, in resentment, in fractured trust, in wasted potential.

A city that builds dignified public housing at scale, by contrast, is making a different promise – that the right to a stable home is not contingent on luck, that the skyline is not reserved for those with capital, that a child’s address is not a prophecy.

I don’t romanticise towers. I don’t pretend the concentration of disadvantage hasn’t caused harm. I don’t deny that some estates have been sites of real trauma, real crime, real despair. But I refuse to accept the lazy conclusion people draw from that – that public housing itself is the problem.

Neglect is the problem. Stigma is the problem. Scarcity is the problem. Isolation is the problem.

Housing people is not the problem.

If anything, the most morally obscene feature of our current situation is that we have turned shelter, the simplest human need, into a competitive sport, and then we act surprised when the losers of that sport are bruised.

When I think about the fourteenth floor now, I think of two images layered on top of each other.

The first is the view – the city spread out like a promise, the river catching light, the skyline sharp against the sky. The second is the stairwell – the broken lift sign, the older man climbing, the sick child asking if she has to go down again.

Those two images together are Australia in miniature – a wealthy, sophisticated city, and a neglected refuge inside it, abundance and rationing, beauty and bureaucracy, visibility, and invisibility.

And I think, too, of my friend’s word – breathing.

Housing is breathing space. It is the physical precondition of calm. Without it, everything becomes urgent, reactive, chaotic. With it, people can do what human beings do best – plan, care, learn, recover, contribute.

So, if we are serious, if we are serious about fairness, about productivity, about health, about education, about a future worth living in, then we have to stop treating public housing like a shameful leftover and start treating it like what it really is – essential social infrastructure.

Not a warehouse for the unwanted.

A foundation for lives.

And maybe, one day, a child on the fourteenth floor will still draw the skyline, but the drawing won’t carry that hidden knowledge that the city is not really for her. She will look out at the stadium and the towers and the river and feel, without having to argue for it, that she belongs to it all.

Not due to the fact of someone being generous.

Because someone finally built a society that understood that shelter is a human right.

It is the first proof, in concrete and glass, that we mean what we say when we talk about a fair go.