It is not even a month since residents received a mail out advising them of plans for 92 townhouses and apartments on three separate blocks in Holder, Chapman and Wright.

To say many were not amused would be to put it very mildly.

A public consultation meeting, organised by the Weston Creek Community Council and attended by members of the Public Housing Renewal Taskforce had to be cancelled last week when hundreds of people turned out. It just wasn't physically possible to fit them into the venue.

While that meeting will now be held at the Chapman Primary School this Thursday the council has been told the taskforce representatives won't be present this time around.

Apparently there are concerns they might not be treated with respect and that people speaking in support of public housing won't be heard.

The chief minister, Andrew Barr, has left himself open to accusations of pre-emptively verballing his government's critics ahead of Thursday's meeting by saying "No-one has a right of veto to say `no, there will be no public housing in my suburb'... as long as the debate does not move to `I don't want people like that living in my suburb'... I'm not even entertaining that debate."

His government plans to build a total of 141 public housing flats and town houses in five suburbs across Canberra's south.

They will be used to relocate the public housing tenants being relocated from the Northbourne Avenue unit blocks being levelled as part of the light rail redevelopment.

Home owners and private renters, particularly in and around Holder, are disappointed at the lack of notice and community consultation with some arguing the ACT government has stretched the law to its limits in order to grab land originally intended for community facilities, including public recreation.

They have dismissed Mr Barr's suggestions their concerns are thinly veiled NIMBY-ism and say while the government stands to collect tens of millions of dollars from the Northbourne sites it will pay little or nothing for the land for the new public housing developments.

Stirling resident, Keith Burnham, said it can do this by using a technicality inserted into the Territory Plan in 2015 that allows community facility land to be used for social housing, not just for supportive housing such as aged care.

Rivett resident, Jeff Carl, said one objection to the Holder units was that they would be built on one of the last remaining public open spaces in the suburb, the old Holder Primary School.

These appear to be valid concerns that need to be addressed publicly.

While the government is giving every indication of wanting to dismiss its critics as self-interested and elitist "NIMBY's" this may prove to be a dangerous error.