Public housing redevelopment faces storm of protest

Glebe’s Cowper Street public housing estate is set to be knocked down and replaced with mixed housing, sparking outrage among locals in the area, who view it as a disservice to the original tenants.

NSW Housing will oversee the $170 million project in the inner west suburb, which will replace public complexes built after the Second World War with a mix of social, affordable and private housing.

Balmain state member Verity Firth says the 134 run-down units will be replaced by 153 new public housing properties, 250 private units and 90 units of affordable housing, the latter intended for key workers such as nurses and bus drivers.

“All the research from around the world says that social and affordable housing works best when there is a mix,” she said. “All the funds from the sale of the private stock will go directly back to Housing NSW and to Public Housing NSW, to pay for the construction of more social and affordable housing.”

But local activist Denis Doherty is sceptical that money resulting from private sales will be funneled back into public housing, believing there are better ways to do this.

“If you made an entirely new building and charged people rent, you’d be making money that would go back into the housing as well,” he said. “But once you sell it, you only sell it once, so there won’t be money constantly coming in.”

Currently the building has room for 289 public housing tenants, and many are being evicted to prepare for renovations that will introduce private and affordable stock into the same estate.

Doherty recently released a flyer calling this ‘social cleansing’, on behalf of Hands Off Glebe – a movement he created to protest against selling public land to private tenants.

He believes that turning public land into private property disadvantages people in urgent need of housing, who are uprooted from communities they may have spent up to 50 years in.

“They’ve got contacts here, they know where to buy their milk, they know where their doctor is, they know everything like that. They’re happy here,” Mr Doherty said.

Greens City of Sydney councillor and public housing tenant Irene Doutney likewise opposes the redevelopment, and worries about how people will cope after being removed from their homes.

“I heard a terrible story in committee – a gentleman came to speak against the housing development and he said that his mother, who I think is about eighty, had a heart attack at having to move,” she said.

According to Council, Cowper Street housing tenants have nothing to worry about, as they will be granted the right to return once the project is completed.

“Any public housing tenant that is living down there at the moment will be re-placed, preferably somewhere in the inner west, to a housing location of their choice,” Ms Firth said.

But this commitment has raised a few eyebrows, with critics calling it a hollow promise.

“The figures are that less than 20 percent of people come back to an area when they’ve been moved out. By the time they’re ready to come back, all their connections with the community are broken,” said Mr Doherty.

The Hands Off Glebe flyer argues the project will reduce social housing in the estate by 105 bedrooms, even though it claims to boost public housing units.

They believe this will fail vulnerable people, especially when demand for cheap housing continues to soar – a view shared by the Greens.

“When there are 43,000 people on the waiting list, we’re selling off really priceless, public land, and once it’s gone to the private market, it’s gone forever,” Ms Doutney says.

Verity Firth says the reason there will be less bedrooms in the public housing apartments is because many tenants tend to use only one room.

“Many of these bedrooms at the moment are not being used, because the demographic of the sorts of people living there at the moment and those looking for this accommodation tend to be single, elderly people,” she said.

She is angered by comments made by the Hands Off Glebe Movement and The Greens, who she says should support this project. “The Greens have been asking for this sort of affordable housing policy for years – it’s in their policy documents that we should have mixed developments.”

Irene Doutney agrees that The Greens would like to see more mixed housing, but says the focus should be on affordable and public housing.

“You would want the private section [of the development] to be a lot less, at the moment it’s more than half.”

by Melissa Lahoud