Late last month, the NSW Labor government began fencing off the first block of 150 homes at the Waterloo South public housing estate as part of the first stage of its redevelopment plan. At least three tenants were still living on site, and none of them knew the fences were going up until they woke to find construction workers outside their doors. One of the residents, Julie, an aged pensioner who has lived in Waterloo since 2001, told the ABC: “Waterloo is my home, I want to stay here”.
Activists from Action for Public Housing have set up camp at the site to protest against the demolition. Since then, Housing Minister Rose Jackson has gone on the offensive to justify the redevelopment. She told the ABC that the remaining people on site were “not tenants”, and that estates like Waterloo are “not functional communities”.
This is the language of a government that has spent years running down public housing in order to justify handing it to developers. Any deterioration of the Waterloo estate is the result of deliberate neglect. Fund nothing, fix nothing, then point to the decay and say, “See, it has to go”, as justification for giving it to the private sector.
The “not functional” argument is a euphemism for concentrated poverty. But instead of doing anything to address poverty, the government would rather hand over prime real estate to developers to build homes for the already wealthy. In the process, they are displacing public housing tenants from their established communities, severing them from their support networks and pushing them further from services and employment and to the outskirts of the city.
Waterloo has been home to Indigenous people, pensioners and workers for decades—people who built social networks and maintained community life despite chronic underfunding. But the government has decided the land is worth more than the people on it and their histories and communities, and so they will be destroyed.
Before the 2023 state election, NSW Labor ran on a “Hands Off Waterloo” platform. Labor MP Ron Hoenig wrote to Waterloo tenants promising they could “stop the sell-off” by voting Labor. Jackson herself toured public housing and told residents she would not allow the privatisation of public housing to continue. Once Labor came to power, the party backflipped and the sell-off happened anyway.
The plan for Waterloo estate is to demolish 750 public housing units that serve the most vulnerable in our society, with the headline of building 3,300 new homes. What Labor doesn’t say is that at least half of these properties will be sold at market prices and therefore unaffordable for those currently living there. According to real estate site Domain, the current median price of a two-bedroom unit in Waterloo is more than $1 million.
The rest of the dwellings will be divided between “social housing” and “affordable” housing. But “social housing” is not public housing. It’s an umbrella term that includes community housing, in which private organisations manage housing owned by either the government or private companies. Tenants have fewer rights, and the rent charged by social housing providers is higher than in public housing. According to the ABC, in the last two years the rate of evictions from community housing has been around five times higher than from government-run public housing.
“Affordable housing” in NSW is worse still. It refers to housing that is rented at 75-80 percent of the market rate. In a city where rents have risen roughly 48 percent in five years, that will not be affordable for the displaced Waterloo public tenants. In high-priced suburbs, government-subsidised affordable apartments built by private developers are so expensive that only a high-income earner could afford to live there—which highlights that this plan involves an elaborate transfer of public money from the poorest to the wealthy.
Even the window dressing on this privatisation plan is not guaranteed—when asked directly whether the affordable housing component would be protected in perpetuity, Jackson admitted she couldn’t say. It was “yet to be finalised”. So it is likely to revert to the full market rate at some point anyway.
This conduct is typical of NSW Labor. Planning Minister Paul Scully recently accused the campaign to save Bellambi public housing in the Illawarra of running a misinformation campaign, insisting “public housing in Bellambi is not being sold off, pure and simple”. But the Bellambi rezoning proposal says otherwise. While Bellambi estate currently sits at 93 percent public housing, under the proposal, just 30 per cent will be “dedicated to social housing” (not even public housing). Trashing the lives of public housing residents simply doesn’t have the political overhead of appeasing developers and opening more land to the wealthy.
This is no way to solve the housing crisis—it is a way to increase the profits of property speculators, developers and the banks. The housing crisis is not caused by a shortage of homes; it is caused by the market treating homes as investment assets. Over the past ten years, the number of new homes has been growing faster than the population, yet rents and house prices have risen regardless.
The Waterloo redevelopment, which will take ten to fifteen years to complete, will result in a net gain of roughly 240 social housing units. And when you compare this with the NSW social housing waitlist of 69,051 households, the logic of demolishing existing public housing to increase the net total slightly over a ten-year period doesn’t make sense.
The real winner in Waterloo’s redevelopment will be Stockland, one of Australia’s largest property developers. The total project is valued at $4 billion, and Stockland is set to make profits of up to $600 million, according to Citi analysts.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people languish on the public housing waiting list, while tenants and home owners struggle with unaffordable rents and mortgages. A government that took this crisis seriously would be massively expanding public housing, not demolishing it.
