Banking on Housing: Credit Foncier Loans and The State Savings Bank of Victoria, 1890–1941

Following the collapse of the Australian property boom in the 1880s, public trust in the volatile colonial land market — largely fuelled by overseas speculation — was exceptionally low. Colonial governments and financial institutions attempted to stabilise the economy in part by making ownership of property more accessible to greater portions of the domestic population. In the colony of Victoria, this led to the introduction of a transformative financial instrument: the credit foncier loan. Credit foncier loans are fixed-term loans, secured against the value of land and backed by the government, in which principal and interest are repaid on a regular basis. The State Savings Bank of Victoria (SSBV) established its first credit foncier scheme in the 1890s. Loans covered the cost of land, construction and connection to utilities, as well as one of the many designs preapproved by the bank under the scheme. These designs prescribed suitable materials, methods of construction, fixings and appliances. By the 1920s, around 1,300 so-called bank houses were being constructed in Victoria annually and the SSBV had established a dedicated Building Department to ‘design and supervise the erection of low-cost housing’ for the people of Victoria. This essay explores the ways in which the credit foncier scheme effectively transformed a Protestant-inspired savings bank into a real estate developer. It examines how the architecture of the bank houses was designed to meet the commercial imperatives of the SSBV: by mitigating risk, acting as collateral, attracting insurance premiums and through the sale of architectural plans produced for the scheme. At the same time, the paper examines how the terms of the credit foncier loan also facilitated homeownership for a financially indebted — and thereby ‘settled’ — 20th-century population, propelling the settler colonial project in Victoria towards a pervasive paradigm of ‘residential capitalism’ based on the commodification of dispossessed Aboriginal land.