Tenants and housing activists vow to fight NSW government's housing demolition plans

In the worst housing crisis in living memory and 57,000 people on the public housing waiting list in NSW, the state government is still planning to demolish swathes of public housing in the inner city. 

They are facing a growing opposition, led by public housing tenants, who are campaigning to defend and extend public housing as a solution to the housing crisis. 

Despite promising before the NSW state elections to put a stop to privatisation, the Chris Minns ALP government reneged on its promise and are pledging to evict thousands of tenants from their homes, demolish 82 Wentworth Park Rd, Glebe, Waterloo South and South Eveleigh public housing estates and sell off the land to developers. Mascot public housing is under threat. The Minns government has finished demolishing the Arncliff public housing estate while allowing Telopea’s ‘Three Sister’ towers to lie empty.  

82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe is slated for demolition at the beginning of this year. Carolyn Ienna, public housing tenant, and Action for Public Housing spokesperson, was recently evicted from their home at 82 Wentworth Park Rd, Glebe. They said,  ‘my former estate, now empty, is perfectly liveable and over the road from many homeless people living in Wentworth Park, who need a home. It should not be demolished. Housing Minister Rose Jackson just wants to privatise the land, and is willing to throw us tenants under the bus to get there. It still boggles my mind how evicting the most vulnerable during a housing crisis is somehow supposed to help it,” Carolyn Ienna noted.  “No-one should have to endure what I endured,” they concluded.  

Waterloo South public housing tenant and Action for Public Housing spokesperson, Karyn Brown said,  “ALP MP for Heffron Ron Hoenig sent Waterloo tenants a text the night before the NSW state election saying ‘only an ALP government can guarantee your home’, then told a press Conference after the elections that Waterloo was a ‘failed community and had to be demolished and the land given over to a private consortium of developers.’ They say we’ll be given eviction notices in July 2024 and our homes may be bulldozed as soon as January 2025,” explained Brown.

“This is a complete betrayal of their promise to tenants and a travesty to demolish housing in a housing crisis,” Brown continued. “Public housing is not the problem, it is the solution,” Brown said. “Instead of selling off public land and giving it to corporations, we should tax corporations properly and refit public housing and build more,” concluded Brown.

Sarina Afa, an Explorer street South Eveleigh public housing tenant activist who is resisting a demolition proposal for her estate said, “we are going to fight this one tooth and nail. I know I have my community behind me and we are going to fight to win.” South Eveleigh residents have been told they will receive eviction notices as soon as December 2024.

Siobhan Patton, an economist specialising in urban issues and renters rights campaigner with Action for Public Housing, notes even “the 2021 Australian Housing Urban Research Institute report is concerned the current incentive structure for ‘public housing urban renewal’ increasingly favours Government balancing the books over delivering for public housing tenants and the wider community.”

“The government has decades of neoliberal damage to make up for, but it appears to be doubling down. There are so many sites in Sydney that the Government could develop that wouldn’t involve displacing so many people, it doesn’t add up to target some of the most vulnerable people in this state during a housing crisis,“ Patton explained. 

Carolyn Ienna noted, ‘we know community housing providers and social housing are really for-profit outfits, with their CEOs on $300,000 a year. Social housing is privatisation of public housing and public land. It is more expensive than public housing, and more privately run housing is not what this housing crisis needs. We need mass, beautiful public housing.’

Action for Public Housing is organising against the government's demolition plans. A4PH elected a co-ordinating committee for 2024 of four public housing tenants, renters, a struggling mortgagee, whose apartment has major cracks and defaults, and a housing co-operative tenant - Carolyn Ienna, Emily Valentine, Karyn Brown, Sarina Afa, Siobhan Patten, Rachel Evans and Andrew Chuter.  

Contact Siobhan 0448 231 312, Karyn 0432 409 711,  Carolyn 0415 362 793 for comment and information