The great public housing fire sale continues, despite worsening affordability crisis

Kirsty Needham April 24, 2016  State Politics Editor, The Sun-Herald

Going fast: The NSW government has sold off $54.4 million in public housing since January. Photo: Erin Jonasson

                        It looks like a fire sale. Or an end-of-financial-year clearance. Since January, the Baird government has sold off $54.4 million in public housing to private owners. 

This excludes historic terraces in Millers Point. It also excludes a $67 million sale to a Singapore developer in Glebe.

Across metropolitan Sydney, lot by lot, public housing is being steadily sold.
In one week in April, $20 million worth was sold, a Fairfax analysis of government contracts shows.

A house in Ashfield fetched $1.6 million for the Land and Housing Corporation, a brick cottage in Seaforth went for $1.4 million on the same day, and one in Lilyfield for $1.3 million.

The bulk of properties sold are in middle and outer ring suburbs including Parramatta, Hurstville, Granville, Greenacre, Panania, Campsie, Fairfield, Wentworthville, Lalor Park and Canley Vale.
It is puzzling, because the Baird government gave the impression in January the days of using public housing stock as a cash cow were over.

In 2014 the NSW auditor-general said selling public housing to pay for maintenance and operations was not financially sustainable -  the government would run out of houses.

The waiting list has never been longer - 60,000 families are in desperate need of shelter. An Anglicare report last week revealed Sydney's rental affordability crisis now extends to the outer metropolitan area.

So Family and Community Services Minister Brad Hazzard got a warm welcome when he unveiled a 10-year plan for social housing. The government would fund a boost in social housing by selling estate land to private developers, who would turn sites into mixed communities with a 70:30 ratio of private residents to social housing tenants.

The children of the socially disadvantaged would grow up in streets alongside working families, who would be role models.

Yet the minister's office now says this doesn't mean the sell-off of individual houses to prop up the budget will end - LAHC must fund its operation through rent and asset sales.

Shelter NSW's Mary Perkins said she was surprised at the data, because the department had told housing groups in January "they had stopped cannibalising themselves".

In the same period, $65 million was spent to acquire or build new stock - but the government had previously said 1500 new dwellings would be funded by an expected $500 million in sales from Millers Point.
In January, LAHC signed $431 million in maintenance contracts.

Anglicare Sydney's chief executive Grant Millard said he would be "really concerned if there is any ongoing practise to sell off stock to fund maintenance".

This week, LAHC sold six houses in Lane Cove, marketed as "development opportunities", in an area zoned high density. A glitzy new private apartment building recently sprung up next door.
A department spokeswoman said a larger public housing estate elsewhere in Lane Cove would be redeveloped into a mixed community. The houses sold were "smaller, isolated and do not meet council's minimum size for redevelopment."

But Perkins said social mix shouldn't be a one-way street. "You don't just rip down Redfern, Waterloo and make it a more economically mixed community and then say to the North Shore, well you're not going to have any public housing because it's a cash cow."
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