When it comes to public housing, there's a short answer and a long answer to that question.
The short answer is that the reserve funding available for capital renewal simply hasn't been available to the vast majority of publicly owned housing providers. The more complicated issue is that housing in the public housing sector historically has been built almost entirely at a very low income level.
What we've learned in recent decades, and it's the way we build now when we build social housing, is to build mixed income communities, communities that are actually self-funding from an economic perspective. I can fund the upfront 20% of a development, I can finance the rest and I can collect enough rent off those just-below-market rentals to pay off the entire cost of the development. That's not the approach we took in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, unfortunately, and we're left with some of that legacy.
