'Cowardly' act forces Millers Point residents to move

Last Monday, 63-year-old public housing resident Colin Tooher left hospital after recovering from a heart attack.

On Wednesday morning, he got a shock almost big enough to put him back there, when wife Terry answered a knock on the door of their modest terrace house at 9 Windmill Street, Millers Point.

Two young women from Housing NSW were on the doorstep with a letter informing Mr Tooher that the government-owned house he had occupied from birth would soon be sold and the couple moved to an as-yet unknown destination.



Portrait of Barney Gardner at his home in Millers Point, Sydney. Photo: Tamara Dean

The Toohers were not alone. All over Millers Point, one of Sydney's oldest and most picturesque precincts, long-time public housing residents were getting the same message.

Tenants' spokesman Barney Gardner said the way people were informed of the decision, with no opportunity to see or comment on a social impact study commissioned by the government, had left them seething with anger. ''It was a dog of an act, cowardly,'' he said.

Residents were not the only ones complaining of the government's stealth-bomber tactics. NSW lower house independent MP Alex Greenwich said he contacted Community Services Minister Pru Goward's office as late as Monday asking if a decision had been made on the fate of the precinct and was given a point blank no. (Goward's office claims Greenwich was only told there had been ''no announcement'').


Portrait of Colin and Terry Tooher outside their home in Millers Point, Sydney. Photo: Tamara Dean

Yet, by early Wednesday, when Goward dropped her bombshell, the department had already put a sophisticated media package together.

Nearly 300 public housing properties in Millers Point, near Gloucester Street and the high-rise Sirius apartment building in The Rocks, are to go on the market, with proceeds to be ''reinvested'' in the broader state social housing system.

Goward says the heritage-area properties, many more than a century old, cost four times as much to maintain as public housing elsewhere and that effective subsidies to tenants in Millers Point are three to five times higher than those for public housing tenants in areas like Newcastle or Minto. With 57,000 families on the housing waiting list, she says, she can no longer justify sinking ''millions of dollars into a small number of properties.''

               

Portrait of Colin and Terry Tooher in their home in Millers Point, Sydney. Photo: Tamara Dean

The sale will undoubtedly reap a bonanza. Millers Point, its architectural heritage protected by the union green bans of the 1970s, sits on elevated harbourside land a stone's throw from The Rocks on one side and Barangaroo on the other.

A recent government-commissioned report praised its ''extraordinary range of [early colonial] fine buildings and spaces'', all within walking distance of Sydney's best amenities.

But there is deep scepticism about the sale among housing policy experts contacted by Fairfax Media this week.

Many felt the two-year time frame was too rushed and that the brutal impact on long-term tenants - some of whose families had been in the district for generations - had been underplayed. There was concern too that possible compromises such as partial sale over a longer period, with proceeds ploughed back into public housing renewal within Millers Point, had been overlooked.

And there is considerable doubt about whether proceeds from the sale - which might well reap more than $300 million to $400 million - will be ploughed back into new public housing stock.

''The public housing system is basically bankrupt and the state government is desperate to find ways to prop it up,'' says Hal Pawson, professor of housing research at the University of NSW. ''Asset sales are being used to balance the books.''

Shelter NSW executive officer Mary Perkins also doubts that money from the Millers Point sale will end up back in new public housing stock.

She says phrases used by the minister, such as ''reinvestment'' in the ''social housing system'', are a deliberate fudge.

''If it's not about increasing the supply of stock and it's just about stemming the operating deficit, then it won't create a sustainable system, it will simply be this round of sales followed by the next, followed by the next,'' she says.

Anxious tenants of public housing estates in inner city areas such as Glebe and Woolloomooloo are already wondering if they might be next.

More broadly, policy experts worry about the social and economic impacts of driving lower-income people out of one of the few remaining vestiges of affordable housing close to the city.

Sydney University's associate professor of urban geography, Kurt Iveson, says ''if we run out of all the affordable housing in the city centre, then we've got nobody to teach in the schools, nurse in the hospitals, work in the bars and restaurants to keep the global city humming''.

Pawson agrees, saying: ''There is something slightly seductive about this idea that we can sell these very valuable properties, which potentially could fund the construction of another two of three elsewhere for each one sold … but what you get is a completely socially segregated city where there isn't any affordable housing in any neighbourhood which has a high land price.''

Peter Phibbs, professor of urban planning at Sydney University, says the logical extension of the government's argument is that you ''relocate everyone in housing need out to western NSW''.

There are also the social costs of breaking up a community which, although low-income, has been highly functional compared with newer public housing estates in outer Sydney.

Stretching back to the earliest days of the colony, when the area took its name from a local miller, the point has been home to generations of maritime workers from 19th-century whalers, sealers and wool traders onwards.

When the housing was under the control of NSW Maritime, low-paid workers passed on leases from father to son. This contributed to the high social cohesion of the area, though the tenant mix started changing when the precinct passed to the control of the Department of Housing in the mid-1980s.
In 2003, the whole of Millers Point was listed on the state heritage register as a ''living cultural landscape'' with ''an unusually high and rare degree of social significance''.

Former Whitlam urban development minister Tom Uren told Fairfax Media this week ''the people of the inner city are a very special breed''.

Uren was responsible for buying the Glebe housing estate from the Anglican Church in 1974 for public housing and says ''the social mix is good for people - that's been my philosophy all my life''.
Particular concern has been raised by housing policy experts about the long-term elderly residents of Millers Point. They say the rush to get them out directly contradicts the competing philosophy of the Health Department, to let people ''age in place''.

Phipps says ''the big risk for an older person is social isolation; the last thing you want to do is move someone out of a network where people keep an eye out for them and they can navigate their way around a neighbourhood''.

He says he is ''OK with them selling some houses but in a way that minimises social disruption …

What the government is doing at the moment is getting a large piece of four by two and whacking them around the head''.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/cowardly-act-forces-millers-point-residents-to-move-20140321-358g9.html