Sydney mayor Clover Moore slams NSW state housing sell-off
The O’Farrell government will not rule out selling millions
of dollars worth of public housing at prime sites in inner Sydney after a
decision to force out tenants in 300 harbourside properties.
The opposition and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore warned
public housing in suburbs such as Redfern, Balmain, Glebe, Surry Hills
and Woolloomoolloo is at risk as the government sells homes to reverse a
deficit in the public-housing system of $330 million a year.
Community Services Minister Pru Goward said on Wednesday 293
public-housing properties at Millers Point, The Rocks and Gloucester
Street would be sold in the next two years.
The sale includes 206 heritage-listed homes at Millers Point,
where residents have long feared the government wants to gentrify the
area to support the nearby Barangaroo development.
It also involves the landmark Sirius building at The Rocks, a concrete, 79-apartment complex close to the Harbour Bridge.
Ms Goward said the properties would be sold because of the
high cost of maintenance, a significant amount needed to bring the
properties to an acceptable standard and the ”high potential sales
values”.
The sale is expected to raise hundreds of millions of
dollars, which the government says it will reinvest into the
social-housing system. Some Millers Point homes were sold under the
Labor government five years ago at an average of $1.3 million, and the
government hopes this sale will fetch more.
Ms Goward said the government recognised some residents had
lived at Millers Point for decades and specialist teams would help move
them.
Department of Family and Community Services secretary Michael Coutts-Trotter
said the homes to be sold were in a ”very, very expensive area of
Sydney” and the sale would free up a large amount of money for
reinvestment in social housing.
Asked if Ms Goward planned to sell other high-value,
public-housing properties in inner Sydney, a spokesman said she was
”not prepared to rule [it] out”, adding ”no decisions have been taken
by the government to sell any of those other properties”.
But the Opposition spokeswoman for family and community
services, Linda Burney, said the sale sent a message to inner-city
public-housing tenants that ”this government could well sell off your
properties because they want to make a buck out of it”.
Cr Moore slammed the sale as ”Barangaroo-driven” – a claim rejected by Ms Goward.
”All public housing tenants in inner-city properties are now
put on notice that if the value of your home goes up, the government is
going to put you out of your home,” Cr Moore said.
About 57,000 families are on the public-housing waiting list in NSW.
A government report to a recent parliamentary inquiry said
the public-housing system has operated at a deficit since the early
1990s, equating to about $330 million each year. During the past decade,
more than 9000 properties have been sold to fund replacements and
maintenance.
Affected public-housing tenants packed the gallery during debate on the issue at Parliament on Wednesday.
Sydney MP Alex Greenwich called for a halt to the proposed sales and accused the government of ”social cleansing”.
Shelter NSW’s executive officer, Mary Perkins, said the
announcement contained little detail about how the money would be used
to address long housing waiting lists.
She also expressed concern over ”the geographic divide
happening in the city, between these areas [that] are for rich people
and these areas [that] are for poor people”.
Also see: Point of no return for one of the city’s most historic spots
REDWatch Note – The above article was acompanied by a graphic showing inner city public housing locations. The graphic indicated it was drawn from Census and Australian Property Monitors data. The diagram and figures used later in the week in an article Predictions of Pleasantville threaten to ruin identity of inner city areas shown Redfern as having only 1,144 tenants and Waterloo as having 1818 tenants. THe governments BEP2 found 4,300 units of public housing in the Redfern-Waterloo area covering in the 2006 census approximately 6,000 public housing tenants. Under-reporting of public housing ocupancy is also a recognised problem. Figures for other public housing in the inner-city is also understated.