Geelong Residents Speak Up: 'We're Being Squeezed Out of Our Own City'

Geelong's housing crunch has a human face, and it's exhausted. Renters, first-home hopefuls and long-term residents across the Barwon region are describing a planning environment that feels like it was designed for someone else, as median house prices in greater Geelong still hover around $680,000 and the rental vacancy rate sits below one percent.

The frustration is hard to miss right now. Nationally, first-home buyer activity has stalled despite falling prices in some markets, and mortgage brokers across Victoria are reporting declining application volumes from under-35s. In Geelong, where the City Deal, the federal government's $370 million investment framework signed in 2022, promised to drive jobs and population growth, many locals say the infrastructure investment has attracted new residents faster than the housing supply has caught up.

Growth Without the Housing to Match It

Armstrong Creek, the growth corridor south of the city, keeps getting cited. Residents there describe infrastructure rolling in slowly behind a building blitz that has seen the suburb's population roughly triple since 2018. The Surf Coast Highway has become a daily grind for families who bought into Armstrong Creek because it was affordable, $550,000 to $600,000 for a four-bedroom home two years ago, only to find services and public transport lagging badly behind. Armstrong Creek Town Centre still lacks a train station despite being flagged in successive regional transport plans.

Closer to the city core, Newtown and Highton residents have a different complaint. Rezoning decisions pushed through the City of Greater Geelong council have allowed multi-unit developments on streets long characterised by single-dwelling blocks, and some locals say they found out through a letterbox drop rather than genuine consultation. The council's planning portal shows 47 applications for medium-density dwellings lodged in those two suburbs alone between January and June 2026.

Community advocacy group Geelong Residents for Responsible Planning, a coalition that formed in 2024 and now has over 1,200 members on its Facebook group, has been lodging submissions to every major rezoning proposal this year. Members describe spending weekends learning VCAT procedures just to participate in decisions that once happened largely without them.

Deakin University's Institute for Frontier Materials added an economic dimension last month when it released modelling showing Geelong will need approximately 18,000 new dwellings by 2036 to house the workforce growth the City Deal is expected to generate. The question locals keep asking is where those homes go, and who decides.

The Rental Wall

For renters, the conversation is even more immediate. In Belmont, a suburb where the majority of households are renting, residents describe inspection queues of 40 or 50 people turning up to open homes for three-bedroom properties listed at $480 a week, prices that have risen nearly 22 percent since 2023 according to Real Estate Institute of Victoria figures. Community housing provider Barwon Community Housing is operating a waiting list that now stretches to 1,400 households, and staff there say the list grew by 300 names in the first six months of 2026 alone.

Local GPs and social workers say the stress is showing up in consulting rooms. Housing insecurity sits behind a significant number of the mental health referrals processed through Barwon Health's Gateway Health service in Corio and Norlane, two of the region's lower-income suburbs already carrying the heaviest load from Geelong's post-Ford manufacturing transition.

What happens next depends heavily on the state government's revised Housing Statement, expected to be updated before September 2026, which will determine whether mandated affordable housing targets apply to Geelong's growth precincts. Residents in Armstrong Creek and Belmont are already organising deputations to the City of Greater Geelong ahead of the council's August planning committee meeting. For anyone wanting to lodge a formal submission on local rezonings, the council's Have Your Say portal accepts responses at any time, and advocates say submitting before hearing dates is the only way to get a voice into the room where decisions actually happen.