Bluff Road, Hampton East

The Bluff Road development replaces 146 older-style social housing dwellings with 285 high-quality new social, affordable rental, market rental and specialist disability accommodation.  

The bright, modern and energy efficient new homes will be spread across 3 and 4 storey buildings, as well as 2-storey townhouses. They have been carefully designed to complement the character of the Hampton East area, with one-, 2-, 3- and 4-bedroom options to better meet the needs of Victorian families and households.  

The project will include green open spaces with landscaped gardens and a new civic park with children’s playground and community gardens, improved pedestrian and cycling facilities and mixed-use indoor spaces including a café, community room and opportunities for social enterprise.  

You can view the development plans on Engage Victoria.  

• Located just 17 km from Melbourne’s city centre in the inner-city suburb of Port Melbourne within the City of Bayside, the 31,200 sqm site has the land capacity to provide more and better homes for more Victorians, and is ideally positioned close to public transport, jobs, and service 
• The Bluff Road development will better integrate with the surrounding neighbourhood and provide quality open spaces and landscaped areas that residents and the local community can enjoy 
• The redevelopment will include spaces for a new café, multi-purpose community room and an on-site office for tenancy support. 
• The new homes at Bluff Road will be leased for a 40-year term to our not-for-profit project partner Building Communities, which includes ICON as the builder, and Community Housing Limited as the community housing organisation. Importantly, all land remains in public ownership, and there will be no sale of public land. 
• All homes will be more comfortable and easier to heat and cool with a 5-star Green Star rating, and 7-star NatHERS average rating. 
• New homes at Barak Beacon will include specialist disability accommodation. 
• Previous renters will have right of return to the site once the redevelopment is complete, based on their ongoing eligibility and needs. 
• The Ground Lease Model 2 projects located in South Yarra, Hampton East, Port Melbourne and Prahran will jointly support approximately 7,600 jobs across the Victorian economy. 

We consulted the Hampton East community for the first time on their vision for the future of the Bluff Road housing site during Stage one engagement, which ran from June and July 2022.  

Once we appointed a project partner to deliver the new homes, we invited the community to view and provide feedback on the proposed development plans during Stage 2 consultation between February and March 2024.   

Feedback received during this consultation period helped shape the final plans for the site and we would like to thank everyone who took part in this process.  

For more information about how we engaged the community and to download the consultation reports for this project, please visit our Engage Victoria webpage for the Hampton East redevelopment. 

The Ground Lease Model (GLM) program is an innovative partnerships approach to housing in which Homes Victoria leases the land to not-for-profit project partner, Building Communities.  

Building Communities is responsible for financing, building, operating and maintaining the new homes for the next 40 years. After the 40-year lease term, the land and all assets are returned to Homes Victoria, ensuring there is no sale of public land. 

Building Communities refers to the not-for-profit project group that Homes Victoria appointed to deliver new homes at the Bluff Road housing site under GLM2.  

The Building Communities consortium includes Tetris Capital, ICON, Community Housing (Vic) Limited, Women’s Property Initiative Limited and Aboriginal Community Housing (Vic) Limited. 

Once the new homes are complete, relocated renters of the former Bluff Road site will be invited to return to the new homes if they would like to.  

The remaining social housing homes will be allocated to people on the Victorian Housing Register and the affordable and market rental homes will be advertised online.