Amid the rumble and rubble of a demolition derby, Sydney’s public housing tenants speak out
Note: this article appeared in our July 2024 print issue. It has not been updated since then. References to “last year” therefore mean 2023.
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A housing rally with Carolyn Ienna, a former public housing tenant at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe, front right.
I
When Wayne Gardener first moved into the Franklyn Street Estate in Glebe, a public housing block, he seemed happy.
“He was talking to people, not hiding in his apartment,” Emily Valentine, a neighbour, tells me over the phone. “He did up his unit and put in new curtains and a new wardrobe.”
Roughly three months later, in November 2020, public housing tenants at the Franklyn Street Estate received an early Christmas present from Big Brother: eviction notices in the mail. Soon after this, Rachel Evans, a long-term housing activist, journalist and Socialist Alliance organiser, received a phone call from Wayne Gardener. Wayne knew Rachel as a staunch defender of public housing. Distressed and seeking solace, he told Rachel that he was frightened about his future. The next day Wayne boarded himself inside his apartment and set the place alight, killing himself.
Wayne’s neighbours maintain that the news of eviction tipped the scales, dumping Wayne headfirst into a mental abyss from which he could not escape.
Following the suicide of Wayne Gardener, Hands Off Glebe, a local activist group, reached out to then City of Sydney Councillor Kerryn Phelps, seeking advice and help. According to Denis Doherty from Hands Off Glebe, Phelps organised for a delegation to meet then Mental Health Minister Bronny Taylor who listened intently. After this meeting Denis received one phone call from a health representative but nothing eventuated for the tenants at Frankly Street in terms of direct intervention by mental health support services.
Emily, meanwhile, sent a letter to the NSW Coroner’s Court, hoping to make the court aware of the links between poor mental health and the demolition of public housing. In that letter, dated 11 May 2021, Emily wrote that Gardner took the news of eviction badly: “He only took the tenancy about 3 months earlier. I believe he had been ‘moved on’ [evicted] before and so he was fearful and depressed by the Housing NSW procedure and total lack of care and respect. His need to harm himself and the department’s property is confirmed by the way he chose to die.” Despite sending multiple emails, Emily received no feedback beyond court staff requesting she send comments. The court never passed a report onto any tenants or activist groups.
This failure – some might call it negligence – is so hard to take because the manner of Wayne Gardener’s death is hardly an anomaly. This is hardly a paranoid-houso conspiracy theory. At this point, it’s almost a given that, across the nation, the demolition of public homes and eviction will trigger a spate of deaths within the blocks under threat. Within Sydney alone, there are numerous cases of suicides in the days and weeks after politicians make headline-grabbing announcements. It happened during the campaign to save Millers Point. And again, more recently, during the campaign to save a public housing complex at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe. The phenomenon is well documented in the media and prevalent in the academic literature. The knowledge is there in the public domain, hidden in plain view.
But it’s a familiar story for public housing tenants: a tragedy strikes and concerned citizens reach out to local politicians and bureaucrats who send off a few emails and tee up a meeting. Like traffic cops in the blazing sun, they pass requests along the chain of command, ensuring the local constituents are happy and the traffic continues to flow, but they do so without exerting too much energy. Almost inevitably, housing activists reach a bottleneck.
“We’re always the last on the agenda list,” Emily says.
II
Carolyn Ienna, a non-binary Wiradjuri tenant at 82 Wentworth Park Road, a public housing block in Glebe, woke one morning to find a man and woman walking through their back gate. This act wasn’t especially unusual within the tight-knit community that called those orange-brick walls and angled terraced roofs home. Over the years Carolyn, a 30 year resident, had developed close friendships with some of their neighbours. They’d share recipes, plants, seeds and cuttings. They’d chuck slabs of food on the barbie outside together. Carolyn knew all the regulars – the neighbours, extended family members and Struggle Street battlers who’d sometimes stay while they got back on their feet.
The housing complex also attracted strays and marauders. A few years ago, a drug dealer moved in and “took over the building”, Carolyn tells me. When his mates from prison became tenants in the same building, he employed them as runners shifting gear for him. For almost three years, until the most unruly tenants were evicted, it was a “horrible place to live”. During that period, Carolyn became accustomed to the shrieks of customers and the eardrum-shattering explosions of glass windows. Used needles littered the communal areas. The drug baron and his girlfriend fought incessantly – verbally and physically. When a neighbour, an elderly woman, finally snapped and shrieked at the pair to “shut the fuck up” from a stairwell, the girlfriend turned on her and allegedly stabbed her with a knife. Carolyn heard it all unfold. The cops rocked up in the aftermath but dropped the case because no one who directly witnessed the fight was willing to speak out.
Long story short: Carolyn knew not just the friendly faces but the people to avoid. But Carolyn didn’t recognise the pair in the backyard of their ground-level unit that day in 2022. Although still in their pyjamas, they approached the two strangers.
The man and woman – “suits” Carolyn calls them, although they might not have been wearing literal suits that day – were from the Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC), it turned out. Carolyn “grilled” them for half an hour. They knew better than to beat around the bush with these bureaucrats. The woman “seemed less inclined to engage” but the man let slip that they were there to survey the property for possible redevelopment.
“A couple of months later, they come back. Same two people,” Carolyn recalls. “They said they were going ahead with redevelopments plans.”
With those words, the ground titled sideways. What Carolyn had tried to find for so long in their younger years, a stable home, disappeared underneath their feet, leaving them in free fall.
Then, in late January 2023 LAHC (now Homes NSW) formally lodged an application to demolish the building at 82 Wentworth Park Road and construct a four-storey residential building, dedicated to social housing, in its place. Quite a few tenants didn’t even know what was happening because there was no community consultation. It was Carolyn who broke the news to those upstairs.
Local activists quickly rallied behind the tenants, kickstarting a campaign to prevent demolition as the process of eviction began for tenants. In March 2023, City of Sydney staff received an inundation of submissions in response to the development application (DA) for 82 Wentworth Park Road. There were hundreds. Almost all pointed out flaws in the DA and condemned the intention to demolish the building.
The decision caused widespread confusion in the local community. Why, during a housing crisis, was the government leaving public homes vacant for months on end and reducing public housing stock, all in the name of adding a small handful of extra units? Why bulldoze a building that is structurally sound and not even 40 years old?
In April, a local community group, The Glebe Society, released a statement in which they outlined advice they received from the original architect for 82 Wentworth Road Park, John Gregory. LAHC had claimed in their DA that the existing building had reached the end of its useful life. Gregory took issue with this conclusion, writing: “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.”
In June, once all but two units were vacant, activists stormed and occupied the remaining public homes at 82 Wentworth Park Road with ladders and sleeping bags, following a snap protest. There they remained for six days, immersed in adrenalin-fuelled continuous protest. There were regular speak-outs, media interviews, a barbeque and a film screening, while Nine Network cameras swarmed the joint. There was even a guest appearance and speech by Wendy Bacon, a grey-haired investigative journalist who was heavily involved in the defence of inner city public housing in Sydney in the 70s and 80s. It seemed that anyone and everyone involved in grassroots activism in the city wanted to express solidarity.
Police and staff from a private security firm contracted to the government visited the premises regularly, disrupting sleep during the twilight hours between midnight and morning. Plain clothes cops monitored the property from a vehicle across the road, seemingly unable to believe that these rabble-rousers weren’t indulging in property damage. The squatters had a plan in place to minimise aggression and maximise politeness but they still expected violence.
None eventuated.
Protestors stand outside vacant public homes at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe, June 2023. Original photo courtesy: Wendy Bacon.
By all measures, the occupation was a success. The squatters made headlines on news.com and Channel 9. Their key demands – no demolitions of public housing, the construction of new public homes on government-owned land and further government acquisition of land for public housing amid Sydney’s housing crisis – infiltrated even the mainstream press. Crucially, although it took days, activists received direct contact from the Housing Minister’s office. There was a pledge to not sell off and privatise 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe.
So, after six days, the protestors packed up their gear, cautiously optimistic.
III
“Do you even ask if we actually want it?” yells one audience member.
It’s not a question but an accusation. Even the distortion of Zoom’s subpar audio and my in-built laptop speaker cannot mask the tone.
It’s July 13, 2023, and I’m watching a meeting between housing bureaucrats, alarmed locals and public housing tenants. Yet “meeting” somehow feels like the wrong word. It’s more of an update – well, an opportunity to update and reassure locals – on the future of a public housing complex on Explorer Street in Eveleigh, which sits on the doorstep of the city’s hipster capital, Newtown. Like 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe, this Eveleigh public housing block is slated for demolition.
As the audience member who interrupts points out: this is hardly a discussion. Staff from the Department of Environment and Planning (DEP) and the Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC) have come with a “pre-determined” outcome, he correctly asserts.
In December 2022, the state’s former Liberal government introduced a scheme called the Rezoning Pathways Program, which has granted developers the authority to bypass councils and obtain rezoning approvals directly from the Department of Planning and Environment. Intended to fast-track large-scale housing developments, the pilot program has attracted significant criticism. Not only does the program sideline local councils, critics have said, it has also fostered haphazard urban planning and rewarded the lobbying power of private developers. The approval of a 12,900 home development in Appin, for example, where there is no existing or planned public transport, insufficient water supplies and a fragile koala habitat is just one recent case that has raised eyebrows.
The Rezoning Pathways Program is not just about state-assessed planning proposals, however, it has also enabled state-led renewal in specified sites. Explorer Street is one such site, and this is why REDwatch, an inner-city community group, has teed up this July meeting. In a nutshell: people want answers. They want to know what the fuck is going on.
People in that room have already begun to realise, however, that perhaps nobody knows what is going on – or those that should know what is going on know very little.
We’re only five minutes into proceedings.
On the phone to me afterwards, Sarina Afa, who has lived at the Explorer Street site since 1997, recounts that “the meeting started on a strange note”. The opening slide of the PowerPoint presentation contained photos of privately-owned houses on Henderson Road in Eveleigh, rather than Explorer Street homes. (While Henderson Road is nearby to Explorer Street, the redevelopment will not demolish any homes on Henderson Road.) It made the meeting feel disingenuous, Sarina tells me. It’s a blunder she called out during the meeting itself, prompting a flustered apology from the presenter.
When public housing tenants and government bureaucrats meet, and the suits are suddenly confronted with real breathing humans, loud humans, it often makes for jarring conversation.
From the office desk, housing is all straight lines, cadastral grids and percentages. From the microphone stand, however, opinions and voices rise from diagrams and graphs like monsters in a pop-up children’s book, shattering the military precision of these documents. Numbers on Excel spreadsheets begin to move and probe the edges of columns and rows. One the one hand, you have the cold calculations of bureaucracy. On the other, you have vulnerable communities facing eviction.
For a public housing site to be redeveloped, there is a lengthy process of community consultation, report writing and (usually) negotiation with local councils. This process involves appraisals from a host of experts – surveyors, landscape architects and historians, to name a few. Sometimes, for particularly contentious redevelopment proposals, a local planning panel will provide recommendations and oversight. In short: there are a lot of information sessions and meetings to bring the public up to speed. As a journalist, I’ve sat in on my fair share of such meetings.
These meetings are dense with urban planning jargon. Civil servants talk of “floor-space rations”, “building codes” and “development control plans”. They litter their speeches with abbreviations – DCJ, LEP, SEPP. These bland statements stretch out and fill silences with their significance, placing a suffocating weight on those present.
At a later November meeting with public housing tenants and supporters, a LAHC staff member revealed that, according to proposed redevelopment plans for Explorer Street, two bedroom units will contain 0.7 of a car space (the one bedroom units won’t have any parking spaces at all).
“What’s 0.7 of a car and how can I drive it? What’s that?” Sarina Afa exclaims on the phone to me during another late-night phone call. “Maybe that’s a motorised wheelbarrow,” she says wryly. “I don’t know what 0.7 of a car is. I haven’t quite worked that one out.”
Her derisive humour speaks to an underlying frustration: how can a faceless suit boil down the entirety of a human’s existence to a figure with a decimal point?
IV
NSW Labor came into power last year on the back of a “Hands Off Waterloo” pre-election campaign. In the build up to the state selection, local Labor MP Ron Hoenig sent letters to Waterloo public housing tenants telling them they could “stop the sell-off of the Waterloo Public Housing Estate” and “protect” their homes by voting Labor.
Labor’s backing of public housing did not emerge from thin air. At a NSW Labor conference in October 2022, Labor made a concrete pledge to implement a moratorium on the sale, outsourcing and leasing of any public housing assets or services.
But an inconsistent stance on public housing and slow communication with tenants has plagued the new Labor government post election, sowing confusion among public housing residents. Housing Minister Rose Jackson has stuck to the rhetoric that Labor will defend public housing, having told the audience at a REDwatch meeting in June last year that she considers the aforementioned conference resolution to be the state government’s policy. But critics have pointed out that Labor’s housing policy runs contrary to the pledge of no privatisation. The state government is selling public housing “by stealth” Zac Gillies-Palmer has written for Jacobin.
The aforementioned letter to public housing tenants in the Waterloo Estate prior to the last NSW election.
In press releases, interviews and meetings, wherever you look, you’ll find that government bureaucrats and Labor staffers favour the terms “social housing” and affordable housing” but the definitions are murky. Social housing, which is an umbrella term for both public housing and community housing, can be managed by third-party operators. Not only do not-for-profit organisations and religious groups tend to manage community housing sites, but community housing providers can also charge higher rent and more easily evict tenants.
The painting was on the wall for public housing tenants in Waterloo.
In August last year, mere months after the state government election, what many feared became a reality: the NSW Labor government made an about-turn. They committed to the demolition and redevelopment of the Waterloo public housing estate, sparking frustration among tenants and advocacy groups.
A protest organised by Action for Public Housing to defend public housing in Waterloo. Original photo courtesy: Action for Public Housing (Facebook).
The announcement represented an improvement on the former Liberal government’s mandate of 34 percent social and affordable housing. Instead, half of the 3000 new apartments planned for the Waterloo South portion of the estate will be social and affordable housing. The new plan will add 53 social homes, as well as 373 affordable homes, to the number currently sitting there today.
For many activists and Waterloo tenants though, this wasn’t good enough. Their homes were under threat for what? A handful of extra social homes? What rankles most for those on the frontline of the battle to save Waterloo, however, is the fact that NSW Labor lied to the 3,000 odd tenants at Waterloo. The commitment to a mixed-tenure vision of social, affordable and normal market-rate housing for Waterloo represents the partial privatisation of public land, so it’s yet another broken promise from Labor.
For many activists and public housing tenants, this feels like a shady operation of smoke and mirrors. In June last year, Waterloo tenants told The Guardian they felt misled. Some had dug into their own pockets to fund home repairs, erroneously believing their homes were safe following Labor’s promises.
Both Carolyn and Sarina tell me they also feel duped. Carolyn says she showed Rose Jackson, now the Housing Minister, through the complex at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe, prior to the last state election. “She said no privatisation. I can’t remember the exact words. But she said that.”
Sarina expresses scepticism of community housing, warning “it doesn’t take long for you to lose your place if you don’t get along well with your neighbours”. Sarina has witnessed this firsthand. She tells me about a friend of hers, a Tongan woman with five children, who was evicted from her community home after two years. Neighbours had complained incessantly over the ruckus caused by her children and community housing staff took their side. When Sarina spoke with the lady in charge, she told Sarina that her friend “doesn’t know what it’s like to live within a white society”.
“I’ll remember that until the day I die,” Sarina tells me.
Carolyn says the state government is “trying to push us into community housing or homelessness because many people give up on community housing and go back to living on the street. As an activist, I’ve seen these realities for a long time.”
V
“We’re trouble-makers and proud of it,” says Dr Hannah Middleton from her wheelchair.
She’s addressing a motley crowd of grey-haired inner city socialists, public housing tenants, and councillors inside Town Hall. They are there for the launch of the Wentworth Report, a community-driven alternative to the current redevelopment plans for 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe. (While Housing Minister Rose Jackson had promised activists, after the housing occupation at 82 Wentworth Park Road, that the NSW government would not sell-off or demolish the site, these words turned out to be empty words. It was business as usual.)
Dr Middleton is right. They are trouble-makers, and like all efficient trouble-makers they have a long list of detractors: private developers and real estate tycoons, the mainstream press, NSW Labor, even the centre-left Twitterati.
In the eyes of the real estate lobby, they’re NIMBYs – long-time locals who are anti-development and scared of change. These wispy-haired residents may want to see a boost in the city’s housing supply – heck they probably even parrot the importance of a rental freeze and the moral failing of landlords at the dinner table – but they can’t bear the din of jackhammers and boom-filled construction sites in their own neighbourhood. “Housing developments are for the outer suburbs where there’s space,” the straw man shrieks. It’s a trope plastered so frequently across the pages of the nation’s big mastheads that many, even those who are no fans of the real estate industry’s power and corruption, automatically question the motives of resident action groups.
In this case, however, the cartoonish figure of the NIMBY gremlin does not hold up to scrutiny. Far from it.
“We want to see more public housing,” says Ian Stephenson of the Glebe Society later that night. “We’re not arguing about the quantity of rooms in the design but the quality.”
It’s an important distinction. 82 Wentworth Park Road is a small public housing complex – the land is barely the size of a soccer pitch and the building is low-rise – but this battle has a significance that extends beyond the walls of this block. As Dr Middleton explains, 82 Wentworth Park Road is a “test case” because it is the first time in NSW that a local community has offered an independently-reviewed alternative pathway to the demolition of public housing. This alternative proposal, provided pro bono by Hector Abraham Architects, is the Wentworth Report.
Rejecting demolition, The Wentworth Report suggests refurbishment and additional density at the rear of the complex where the car park is currently located. It also proposes a building height that is, in fact, higher than the LAHC-supported DA.
An illustration from the alternative plan for 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe - the Bellevue Street elevation of the infill building. Image courtesy: Hector Abrahams Architects.
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. Hector Abraham Architects estimates, meanwhile, that the firm’s own plan, which will deliver 52 bedrooms, only one less than the current DA, will save a whopping $7 million. The Abraham Architects plan also includes three-bedroom units which, under the current proposal, would disappear entirely from the site.
But the debate isn’t simply about economics; it’s about the style and quality of housing we choose for the city’s most impoverished residents. Under the current redevelopment plans, 8 units will have less than 15 minutes of sun in winter; the Hector Abraham Architects scheme, meanwhile, contains more green space and more sunlight, and all apartments have a front door facing a public street or courtyard to foster a sense of neighbourhood. Under the current redevelopment plans, there is one monolithic building; the Hector Abraham Architects scheme proposes two separate buildings with a shared communal space. Under the current redevelopment plans, a monotonous building with a box-like form will be erected; the Hector Abrahams scheme seeks to maintain the architectural camouflage of the current building, which blends into its surroundings – mostly terraces – with steeped roofs, front gardens and balconies.
You get the point: this alternative scheme is a step away from the customary cell-block architecture of public housing complexes.
“Although having a certain number of units, deeply shaded, complies with current regulations, it clearly is a disgrace to ask people who are in a vulnerable situation to live in that way,” Hector Abraham tells me over email. He also highlights the “wasteful” impact of demolition on the environment. It’s a topic that is increasingly entering architectural debates. Cement production, alone contributes to 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, making cement production the single biggest industrial cause of carbon pollution. For comparison: this is roughly the same amount as the world’s car fleet contributes.
Numerous inner-city public housing tenants have told me that the environmental impact is a key reason they’re against demolition. Sure, not everyone I’ve talked to mentions the environmental angle, but the banner of climate justice does appear a uniting one. It casts a shadow over houso stereotypes and obliterates the classist myth that housos are simply dole-bludgers, too drug-addled, impoverished or self-centred to see the bigger picture.
Community groups including Hands Off Glebe, the Glebe Society and Action for Public Housing (A4PH), have long argued that the planned demolition of inner-city public housing sites does not align with contemporary, gold-standard architectural practices. This isn’t just a left-wing conspiracy theory: international architectural firm and prizes favour the approach of refurbishment and infill, and a whole host of architects and urban planning experts have thrown their support behind the community’s alternative to demolition at 82 Wentworth Park Road.
The public too is certainly convinced. When Hands Off Glebe conducted a letterbox campaign in August last year 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. The community organisation received over 430 supportive responses, representing a substantial hit rate of almost 10 percent. Denis Doherty from Hands Off Glebe tells me 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]… I’ve run stalls around the AUKUS issue and haven’t had the same response.”
VI
“Every time we have a meeting, my heart sinks a little bit more, thinking we have less and less say,” Sarina Afa tells me on the phone, a long-time resident at Explorer Street public housing.
It’s clear that the news of rezoning and proposed redevelopment has taken a toll mentally, not just on her but her neighbours too. She paints a grim picture of the atmosphere at the public housing block. She talks of “neighbours living in fear” and “crying all the time”. Some have fled war-torn countries and they’re struggling to comprehend that their cherished homes may not be as permanent as they originally thought. Since their command of the English language is limited, few make it to the community consultation sessions organised by government bureaucrats. Sarina has become their de-facto spokesperson, and a tireless one at that, frequently door-knocking and attempting to drum up support.
It’s obvious from the length of our phone calls over the past few months that Sarina feels simultaneously silenced and up for the fight.
“I don’t see the government making any kind of alternative to raising this place to the ground,” she tells me in November last year. “I don’t care how they like to tart it up; it’s ridiculous. Empty rhetoric, empty words and empty promises. How can we trust them?”
“I want to let them know that we as a community are not happy about decisions that have been made without us, around us and for us. It doesn’t fly.”
Like her neighbours, Sarina has little faith in the capabilities of government bureaucrats and the intentions of politicians. She believes the government has intentionally facilitated the deterioration of the housing complex in order to legitimise its reconstruction. Neighbours have spent “thousands” maintaining their homes out their own pockets, installing basic comforts such as air conditioning, Sarina recounts. One neighbour put in a water purification system “because the water comes from old pipes from the [nearby] railway yard, and it tastes horrible and metallic. Nobody drinks it. We all drink bottled water or purified water.”
Supporters at a rally criticising the proposed demolition of Explorer Street public housing. Original photo courtesy: Friends of Erskineville/Facebook.
Aware that she is a tenant in an under-occupied public home – some of her children have now grown up and moved into other homes – Sarina says she requested a transfer to a more suitable, smaller home in 2006. Issues with a leaking roof and flooding also contributed to that request. But she received no offer of a transfer. This lack of responsiveness makes Sarina sceptical that bureaucrats can ensure a swift right of return, following evictions, demolition and construction, if the redevelopment project proceeds as expected.
“I don’t know how they can achieve all these promises if they don’t even stick to the basics at the moment,” she says.
It’s clear Homes NSW has a PR issue on its hand. Máire Sheehan, a member of A4PH and the Better Planning Network, tells me that many inner city public housing tenants are “worried about speaking out”. Layers of anecdotal evidence, impossible to ignore, have smothered activist organisations, giving weight to the sentiment, unfounded or not, that publicly voicing concerns will result in different treatment from state housing representatives, or even harassment. In short: there’s a pervasive feeling of distrust.
VII
The demolition of public housing is akin to installing paper-thin wallpaper. Peel back the wallpaper, which is designed to mask a history of shoddy maintenance, and you’ll find gyprock filled with black mould and gaping holes. But poor maintenance is not the root cause; it’s simply an excuse for the government, another layer of distraction. There’s no real economic, environmental or moral basis for these public housing demolitions, for leaving bulldozed blocks vacant for years on end amid a housing crisis. It’s absurd to try rationalise this process. No, there’s something else going on.
Buried underneath this neglected fortress of public housing is a nefarious ideological project accelerating the rate of demolition, an invisible force that causes toxic chemicals to leak into the water table and corrode the foundations. This monument to once-enlightened thinking is rotting at the core.
Herein lies the Great Australian Scam: that deregulation and privatisation create a more efficient, more productive, system. Sure, the demolition of public housing may help balance the books for a self-funded government department (LAHC) and it may line the pockets of private developers and community housing providers, but who is it really serving?
“What the government is really trying to achieve is a massive privatisation of public land,” housing activist Rachel Evans tells me. “They want to hand over prime land to their developer mates and give them and the new kids on the block – community housing providers – government support to make significant profits.”
“We are in a neoliberal phase of capitalism: governments are handing swathes of public monies to the private sector to run what was previously run by state departments. These ‘private-public-partnerships’ are a total abdication of responsibility and deflect criticism away from governments and towards these community/church groups that run community housing, as well as employment services, old people homes and disability services.”
Rachel Evans at a housing rally in Sydney. Photo courtesy: Peter Boyle.
VIII
The day after the launch of The Wentworth Report at Town Hall – Wednesday 13 December (2023) – a Local Planning Panel, made up of four independent experts, convened to assess the fate of 82 Wentworth Park Road. Due to the substantial amount of public interest and opposition to the DA, this decision was out of the hands of elected councillors. I say assess the fate of the housing complex because determine is too forceful a word. In reality, not even the Local Planning Panel has the power to refuse a crown application; it can only offer recommendations.
A range of local activists and public housing tenants spoke before the panel in a last ditch attempt to sway the minds of the experts in front of them.
“This is vandalism by the state,” yelled Emily Valentine, a public housing tenant from Glebe, in a fiery speech replete with microphone crackles and booms.
“All our literature repeats defend and extend public housing but it is falling on deaf ears,” Denis Doherty from Hands Off Glebe pleaded.
The vote went down to the wire: 2-2. Ultimately, the chair, who was in favour of the DA, used her casting vote to push the development over the line.
Placards and flags at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe. Original photo courtesy: Action for Public Housing (Facebook).
“That was a farce and a half,” Carolyn Ienna tells me over the phone afterwards. “I noticed how the committee didn’t question the Land and Housing Corporation [staff] properly on the definitions of what public housing and social housing mean. They weren’t consistent enough and they allowed the Land and Housing Corporation to dance around the subject. That really made me frickin’ mad.”
It would be easy to assume that this is dispiriting loss for common sense planning but City of Sydney Councillor Slyvie Ellsmore a Greens councillor who has industriously supported the campaign against demolition, finds a silver lining when we discuss the result. “It’s very very unusual for the Local Planning Panel to ever vote against a development application that has been worked on as much as this one has. The fact that we came so close to the panel rejecting the proposal is a very big win for the community. It shows how strong the arguments are that this is a bad development and the government should take a different approach.”
IX
I meet Ruby in the graveyard at Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, Newtown in August 2023. They’re decked out all in black – black boots, black trench coat, black hair, long and scraggly, and black tattoos, which snake up their chest towards their neck. From afar, they bear the look of a Victorian-era vampire, one of the undead marching forward through time, resolute. I sense their black attire is their uniform; it’s not just a sign of respect for the memorial service we are both attending.
We are here to remember Jesse Deacon, a man shot and killed by police in his own home amid a mental health episode in the Franklyn Street public housing estate in Glebe.
Tipped off about time and location of the funeral service by Rachel Evans from Action for Public Housing, I’m here, in part, as an interested party, possibly even what you’d call an activist, which places me in precarious unchartered territory as a journalist. I am not formally a member of A4PH but the small volunteer group lack the (wo)manpower to send anyone else on this day. I’m also here as – worse – a reporter. So I’m met, at first, with creased foreheads and narrowed eyes by the mourners which includes family and friends.
I explain that I have come as a representative of A4PH and as a news editor – not for the mainstream press juggernaut but for City Hub, an independent community newspaper. In truth, I feel obliged to attend. I don’t wish to be another faceless name writing about public housing tenants from behind a computer screen, although I struggle to find the words to convey this sentiment to the mourners present.
Throughout the service, I notice Ruby watching me, not with a gaze of suspicion, but with intrigue. Over cups of straight whisky, we suss each other out. I learn that Ruby is a tenant in Waterloo public housing, a metalhead, a self-declared “miscreant” and a “thorn in the side of government authorities”. They became close friends with Jesse, another metalhead, in the months before his death.
Their external identity is a mosaic of jagged edges, sharp subcultural points that poke and maim and strengthen their personality, criss-crossing between communities. Their tattoos and piercings simultaneously scream metal freak, transgender and houso but there is curiosity and softness underneath the tattooed flesh and leathery skin. Before parting ways, we pledge to go to a metal show together, to share another drink.
When the news breaks a couple of weeks later that the Waterloo public housing estate will be demolished and redeveloped, I reach out to Ruby over Facebook. They send paragraphs of thoughts to me, eager to help.
While a relatively new resident at the Waterloo Estate, Ruby says they do not feel at all secure in their current housing. The uncertainty of the site’s future has fostered an atmosphere where residents are “barely able to talk to each other” and “do not feel comfortable voicing their opinions to a largely white middle class government about their business plans for the area”. Ruby emphasises that “there should be more public housing” but gives me one important caveat: “fix and maintain what you have. It seems a huge project for not much gain.”
Despite the atmosphere of apprehensiveness and the presence of crime within the Waterloo Estate, Ruby expresses affection for their home, labelling the tower blocks “a safe haven” and the people “vibrant”.
It’s a common theme in all my interviews with public housing tenants. Their housing blocks may be chaotic, sometimes even crime-ridden, but those daily struggles, none more unifying than the threat of demolition, have also brought them together. As public housing tenant Emily Valentine tells me over the phone, “public housing people know their lot and their troubles”. While petty issues between home owners clog up the courts and swamp local council meetings – I can almost hear and feel spit leaking through my phone speaker at this point in our conversation – public housing tenants practice “respect”.
She points to a mixed residential complex on Elger Street in Glebe with private rental flats, affordable housing and social housing as an example of poor governance, as a petri-dish for the failed experiment of privatisation. Co-developed by a community housing provider, Bridge Housing, it’s just around the corner from Emily’s own home so she’s done her research.
“Private tenants drive in and out into their locked garage and their locked apartment. The community is left hovering in a little courtyard, smoking,” she says. “This is perpetuated segregation.”
In Sydney’s inner-city public housing blocks, however, many tenants have found what they have long lacked: a relatable, consistent, loving community. While Sarina Afa has had ongoing maintenance issues with her home in Eveleigh – some have persisted as long as ten years without repair – she gushes with appreciation for her current home. She adores the DIY spirit of her estate, which she calls “a perfect little oasis”. She talks of her neighbours as “family”.
Carolyn Ienna, meanwhile, directly links the deaths of three friends and neighbours at her old public housing block to the news of demolition. She suggests that the disruption to their lives prompted a rapid decline in their mental and physical states. One neighbour, Peter, suicided.
“I’ve lived in a lot of places before I moved in there [82 Wentworth Park Road] and I’d never had that level of community before,” Carolyn tells me. “Peter’s sister even said to us: ‘look, we got twenty more years out of him than we envisaged, thanks to all of you [neighbours]’. His sister said that to us.”
Protestors stand outside vacant public homes at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe, June 2023. Original photo courtesy: Wendy Bacon. Graphic design by Carissa Costa.
