Jed Smith news.com.au
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| The iconic Sirius building in Millers Point, with some of the best views in Sydney, has been sitting practically empty for over a year, with the Baird Government kicking public housing tenants out to redevelop the site.Source:News Corp Australia |
THE unprecedented property boom sweeping our nation’s cities has driven house prices out of reach for most ordinary Australians.
Described as a “
slow burn crisis,” by one academic, the real worry is how this price growth is affecting Australians who are already vulnerable and disadvantaged and how the growing gap between rich and poor could change the shape of our cities.
Ultimately, Sydney has become a “very, very divided” city, says University of NSW Professor of Housing Research and Policy, Hal Pawson. And he says those divisions are along the lines of wealth.
This division causes untold problems. In Paris and Brussels for example, home of some of the worst recent terror attacks in the west, their failure to integrate public housing tenants located in “ghettos” rife with unemployment on the fringes of the city, was seen as
a key precursor to the unrest.
“We are certainly seeing an ongoing spatial polarisation of Sydney’s rich and poor, but more through the operation of the private housing market than through public housing policy,” says Prof Pawson.
“For decades now in Sydney there’s been a slow shift of low cost private rental property from inner areas towards much less accessible places on the city edge. And while a responsible government would have countered this trend by protecting and expanding inner city social housing that unfortunately has not happened”.
In Sydney, the property boom is seeing the bulk of inner-city Sydney’s once extensive public housing network dismantled and sold to developers with the government promising to spend the proceeds on building more affordable housing in cheaper locations.
But exactly what this will amount to remains unclear, says Prof Pawson.
“It would be very, very interesting to be able to analyse the quite significant building program the state government says it is undertaking on the back of the Miller’s Point capital receipts,” he says, referring to the
sell-off of the Sydney harbourside public housing community at Miller’s Point.
“But we actually don’t know enough about what is being built and where,” he says.
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| This former boarding house at 5 Lower Fort Street, Millers Point sold recently at auction for $4.675 million. Not exactly affordable inner city housing.Source:Supplied |
A press release from the Housing Minister last year loosely listed several suburbs where replacement public housing would be built, though the size, scope and exact locations of the developments were not revealed.
Of the suburbs located in the greater Sydney area (Condell Park, Padstow, Chester Hill, Yagoona, Kingswood, Beverly Hills, Casula, Gymea, and Miranda) all but two (Miranda and Gymea) are located in the inner and outer southwest zones of the city, both areas already subject to the highest youth unemployment in the state.
In light of this, I took a trip from the city to Casula and Macquarie Fields, two neighbouring suburbs in the Campbelltown area, one of which is earmarked for a new public housing development and the other already home to a large public housing estate.
What was advertised as a 59 minute drive took closer to two hours and routinely slowed down to a bumper to bumper crawl.
After passing a large army base and barracks, complete with a sign asking me to give thanks for the road I was driving on because it belongs to them, I arrived at the Glenquarie Housing Estate in Macquarie Fields where a 2005 riot left several police injured.
The town centre consisted of two service stations, a Red Rooster, a McDonalds, a shopping centre, and the Glenquarie Tavern, which I found to be dominated by chart music, poker machines and a TAB.
The woman working behind the bar was a 20-year veteran of the public housing commission at Glenquarie. She didn’t have a problem with it. She’d managed to raise three children there (her youngest daughter was now at university). Her house hadn’t been broken into once in all that time though she knew of others who’d been broken into up to 20 times in the same period.
“It’s just the luck of the draw. Our street is pretty nice, not super nice, but everyone says hello, kinda, you know,” she said. The woman said she had no trouble picking up work locally “as long as you weren’t fussy” and willing to do cleaning jobs, bar work, and other odd jobs.
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| Google Maps might say that the drive from Campbelltown to Sydney city is just over an hour, but in traffic it’s more like two hours. Good luck if you’ve got a job in the city.Source:Supplied |
Macquarie Fields is located in the Campbelltown district, an area which was lumped with public housing in the 1970s in what was one of the most infamous chapters of Sydney’s urban planning make over.
“Campbelltown is a good example of a concentration of public housing infrastructure that was put there in anticipation of the growth in employment and services that never really happened or has taken much longer to happen than anyone expected,” says Prof Pawson.
“It was expected that there would be a lot of industry locating there in the seventies and these estates that were built around the time would be well located. But of course the economy has changed since then and not only did those jobs never actually happen but the employment structure of Sydney has been changing really quite radically, especially in the last decade and more and more of the job growth is in and around the inner parts of the city a long way from where the main concentrations of public housing are,” he says.
By shifting the city’s battlers to an area already lumped with the highest youth unemployment in the state, are we not just compounding their problems?
“If this produces a significant net increase in public housing then three cheers for that,” says Prof Pawson, of the government’s plans to sell-off inner-city public housing to be able to build a higher quantity of homes.
“But if these new homes are mainly being built in remote suburbs that’s far from ideal for people who specially need to be close to jobs and services to get their lives back on track.”
As Prof Pawson points out, building affordable homes is just part of the equation when relocating Australia’s most vulnerable people — a mix of the elderly, the abused, disabled, single parents, and key service industry workers.
Equally important is easy access to job opportunities, transport, and the social and cultural services needed to lead a good life. Replacing inner city public housing with new blocks in isolated city edge locations already suffering high unemployment suggests the government is not taking this issue as seriously as it should, says Prof Pawson.
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| The sale of properties like this at Millers Point might have made the State Government more than $100 million, but there’s little transparency about where that’s going. Picture: Adam WardSource:News Corp Australia |
“The public housing system is becoming more and more stripped down in terms of what it can offer beyond a minimal service of providing emergency repairs. Doing more than that and providing community support, community development type input is something the public housing budget finds more and more difficult to stretch to,” he says.
“Living near public transport is the most important thing. If that’s the case then at least even if it’s gonna take you some time and cost some money to get to jobs and services you can do it without a car. Ideally, you have services close enough that you don’t even have to take a bus or train,” he says, adding:
“There needs to be opportunities to have a social life; the kinds of places where Australians meet and socialise. So things like sports clubs, social clubs, pubs, being near enough to somewhere like that is important if you’re going to have the opportunity to have a social life even if it’s a long way from employment.”
This callous Liberal Premier, his Ministers and their bureaucrats put out a media release this morning, Sunday 31st July 2016 that the Sirius Building would not be "Heritage Listed"!!!
