Locals throw support behind petition to save Glebe public housing

By ROBBIE MASON

Public housing tenants and supporters met with Greens MP Kobi Shetty on Wednesday morning to hand over a petition with hundreds of signatures which opposes the planned demolition of public housing units at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe. Activists invited Housing Minister Rose Jackson to the staged handover but she declined to attend.

Carolyn Ienna, until recently a 30-year Wiradjuri resident at 82 Wentworth Park Road, presented the Member for Balmain, Kobi Shetty, with the thick wad of documents.

Bar one unit, almost all of the 17 homes at the site are currently sitting empty during a citywide housing crisis.

Denis Doherty from community group Hands Off Glebe said the local community want the building filled immediately.

“The sooner we get it back into operation the better,” he stated.

Shetty said, “the government needs to renovate, not detonate. This plan will remove public housing stock for years to come.”

Noting that the public housing block is directly opposite the arches and bridge that stretch across Wentworth Park – where a number of homeless people sleep – Ienna said, “the time for housing the homeless is now.”

Ienna wants the units at 82 Wentworth Park refurbished and “used for their original purpose – to house people on low incomes”.

Hands Off Glebe conducted a letterbox campaign to assess the perspective of the local community on the planned demolition and redevelopment of the Glebe public housing site. Volunteers dropped off unsolicited letters to 5000 mailboxes and received over 430 supportive responses, representing a substantial hit rate of almost 10 percent. Local shopkeepers stepped in, offering up their shop fronts as drop-off points for the forms.

Denis Doherty from Hands Off Glebe told City Hub that the community response to the campaign to save 82 Wentworth Park Road has been heart-warming and well above average.

“Whenever we’ve run stalls in the local high street, we’ve been amazed by the number of people who are more than happy to sign [the petition],” Doherty said.

“I’ve run stalls around the AUKUS issue and haven’t had the same response.”

Government bureaucrats out of touch, critics say

Community groups including Hands Off Glebe, the Glebe Society and Action for Public Housing, have argued that the planned demolition of the Glebe site does not align with contemporary, gold-standard architectural practices.

Emily Valentine, Secretary for Hands Off Glebe, said, “the Royal Institute of British Architects has created a new prize to encourage architects to pour their creativity into refurbishing existing buildings, rather than demolishing them.”

“If developers replace an existing building with a new one, vast amounts of carbon dioxide are created to make the bricks, cement and steel for the replacement. If instead they can renovate the existing building, emissions are greatly reduced,” she said.

Cement production, for instance, contributes to 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions which is roughly the same amount as the world’s car fleet contributes. This makes cement production the single biggest industrial cause of carbon pollution.

Local community groups have demanded a more sensible approach to housing that acknowledges the mental and physical toll of forced relocation on public housing tenants and the substantial environmental cost of demolition and reconstruction.

Dr Hannah Middleton from Hands Off Glebe said, “whoever is advising Minister Jackson has clearly not caught up with the latest thinking on housing construction which respects the human, environmental and economic benefits of renovation instead of demolition.”

“It is time her department moved into the 21^st century,” she added.

In April this year, The Glebe Society, a community action group, released a statement in which they outlined advice they received from the original architect for 82 Wentworth Park Road, John Gregory.

While the current development application (DA) for the site claims that the existing building has reached the end of its useful life, Gregory suggested this is a false claim.

“This is clearly ridiculous given the context (a suburb full of 19th-century housing). The existing building is full brick with cavity party walls for better sound attenuation and concrete floors and stairs – it is a robust building that can easily last the 140 years most of its neighbours have,” he said.

The units at 82 Wentworth Park Road were built in the 1980s.

Activist groups have an alternative plans to boost public housing supply

In July this year, Action for Public Housing hosted a community forum, No more demolitions: Alternatives to public housing redevelopment, where a range of speakers presented alternative approaches to Sydney’s housing crisis. Keeping communities intact and upgrading public housing without demolition and displacement was a common theme at the free public forum.

There, renowned conservation architect Hector Abrahams from Hector Abrahams Architect outlined an alternative scheme for 82 Wentworth Park Road that does not involve demolition but, rather, additional density at the rear of the complex and refurbishment. Embedded in the scheme is a lift for accessibility and a large central garden.

Those backing the plan have emphasised that it makes more sense financially. The current DA for the site proposes 53 bedrooms at a cost of roughly $22 million, meaning each new bedroom will cost in the vicinity of $1 million. But Hector Abraham Architects estimates that the firm’s own plan, which will deliver 52 bedrooms, only one less than the current DA, will save $7 million. The Abraham Architects plan also includes three-bedroom units which, under the current proposal, would disappear entirely from the site.

Ian Stephenson from the Glebe Society pointed out that “professionally-developed alternative plans to refurbish ‘82’ and create more homes through infill construction have been presented to the [Housing] Minister [Rose Jackson].”

“However, she and her staff appear unwilling to budge,” he continued.

In a letter to Kobi Shetty, addressing the Glebe Society proposal, dated 24 July, Housing Minister Rose Jackson told the Greens politician that Land and Housing Corporation staff had “fully reviewed” the alternative proposal and decided to plough ahead, business as usual, with the current DA, rather than the proposal of community activists.

Doherty from Hand Off Glebe said, “They should spend the millions planned for demolition and rebuilding to instead expand public housing on the old Glebe Fish Market site.”

The state government has pencilled in 1200 high-rise luxury apartments for the Blackwattle Bay site with no commitment to any public housing construction.

According to The Guardian’s recently-released gentrification index, which is based on data from the Australian Urban Observatory, both Glebe and Forest Lodge fall into the most severe category for gentrification – “advanced exclusive”. This ranking means that the neighbouring suburbs are “largely exclusive to high income households.”

The City of Sydney Council is seeking public feedback on the current DA for 82 Wentworth Park Road until 5 September.