Lauren Kenworthy outside her old house in Minto. Photo: Brendan Esposito
LAUREN KENWORTHY, raised on a public housing estate in south-west Sydney, never believed she was growing up in a ghetto.
”Quite the opposite,” she insisted. ”My childhood in
Minto was perfectly normal. I did not feel any different. I did not
realise until later in life that my area was perceived as having a
concentration of low-income households.”
Ms Kenworthy, a 27-year-old PhD student at the University
of Western Sydney, graduated recently with a first-class honours degree
for her study of life on an outer-suburban public housing estate. Her
thesis focused on the experiences of 10 fellow residents of the Minto
estate, whose families were relocated to ”mixed communities”.
Since the families were dispersed, social contact has
broken down. ”When I was growing up, it was, at most, a 15-minute walk
across the estate to maintain friendships,” she said.
Now it is a logistical ordeal, given most do not have
cars, and Facebook and texting are a poor substitute. ”There was no
reason, except for the maintenance of the housing, for the estate to be
broken up and redeveloped.”
Ms Kenworthy’s study – along with extensive research by
Western Sydney academic Gabrielle Gwyther, published in the recent
edition of the journal Urban Policy and Research – challenges
30 years of conventional wisdom. Over the past 10 to 15 years, NSW
government policy has been to break up the estates.
The One Minto estate, when complete, will contain 800 new
private homes and 230 new public housing units. In nearby Bonnyrigg,
the new development will be 70 per cent private and 30 per cent public.
It is a big change from the old model, where, for example, 88 per cent
of homes in Claymore and 86 per cent in Airds were public housing.
Dr Gwyther, who conducted 22 in-depth case studies with
public housing residents, concludes that relocating residents to mixed
communities ”may in fact lead to their increased social isolation and,
in turn, social exclusion – the very situation policies of ‘social mix’
are intended to relieve”.
She bases her findings on several factors. Many estate
residents rely on face-to-face connection, rather than technology, for
their community life and support. They often have limited access to the
internet, do not have cars and can only afford to use their mobile
phones for texting rather than calling. ”Although low cost, these
mobile [phone] plans had a constraining effect on the size and
composition of personal communities,” she writes.
Dr Gwyther also observed that by breaking up estates, the
community services dealing with education, unemployment, housing,
health and family support were generally dispersed. For most residents,
their friendship group numbered no more than 21, and an average of just
10 people. For some, the welfare workers were the majority of their
social group.
Some older women, who had been community elders and
leaders when they lived on the estates, felt a loss of purpose in their
new, socio-economically mixed neighbourhoods. Another woman ”had
relocated from a supportive but stigmatised community to a mixed tenure
suburb yet had not experienced diversification of her social network”.
Dr Gwyther said she was not opposed to mixed income
communities, but warned that in south-western Sydney many residents had
been moved to estates that lacked good transport and could not afford
the technology that allowed middle income Australians to maintain social
relationships beyond their neighbourhood.
Source: www.smh.com.au/nsw/mixed-estates-found-to-break-rather-than-make-communities-20110410-1d9d7.html