ANGE:

I want to tell you about the time the City of Sydney council tried to build a single public toilet.

MICHAEL:

So this is a public toilet that has been earmarked for the suburb of Erskineville, inner city suburb in Sydney, for ten years.

ANGE:

This is Michael Koziol.

MICHAEL:

I'm the Sydney editor at The Sydney Morning Herald.

ANGE:

He’s the one who stumbled across this story. His beat is “the city”.

MICHAEL:

Which at the moment, tends to be a lot to do with planning and housing and development. It's one of the big stories in town, as it is everywhere around the country.

ANGE:

So the story goes that in 2014 the city said that nobody in their council area should ever be more than 400 metres from a public toilet.

MICHAEL:

They said, you know, we need new toilets here, here and here.

ANGE:

One of those spots was a patch of council land right across the street from Erskineville train station. Then in 2021, seven years later, they finally started to put their plan in motion. A company proposed to build the toilet. They pitched one of those steel cubicles that plays music when you’re inside and is open 24/7. And they put in adDevelopment application, or a DA, with the local council.

MICHAEL:

Once that began, it proved very difficult to actually get this toilet up off the ground because they put in two failed development applications, which were both either rejected or withdrawn after a lot of public animosity, negative feedback.

Audio excerpt — Online commenter 1:

“We do not need a public toilet in the centre of Erskineville! I strongly object to this proposal.”

MICHAEL:

There were, I think, 50 something submissions on the last iteration of the toilet.

Audio excerpt — Online commenter 2:

“It will ruin the businesses which are obscured by it, and will ruin the look and feel of our precious traditional high street.”

MICHAEL:

People didn't think it was the right spot for the toilet.

Audio excerpt — Online commenter 3:

“Public toilets of this nature invite drug use, public drinking, rowdy social behaviour, plus graffiti artists!”

MICHAEL:

The shops that it was near, they didn't want a public toilet at the front of their businesses.

ANGE:

And so in the face of the backlash, the council cancelled the DA. They all agreed a public toilet was much needed in the area, that the community wants more amenities, but just not one there. So, the company lodged a second DA hoping a few tweaks might get it past the line. The same thing happened. Rejected.

MICHAEL:

They've just come back now, for a third try, a new development application, in a slightly different spot a few metres away, in a little parklet, I suppose you would call it. So we'll see what happens with that one.

ANGE:

So Michael, what do you think that this story tells us about why it's so hard to make progress and fix the housing crisis that we have on our hands?

MICHAEL:

I think it's sort of an interesting little vignette that shows that even something at this very small scale, you know, one single public toilet, can still be really difficult when you've got a lot of public opposition to something, or at least the perception that there's a lot of public opposition. I mean, when politicians and local councillors see people complaining about something, objecting to something, often it feels like, oh, there's a lot of people in the community who don't want this. And sometimes, you know, it's just a small group of particularly persistent people who complain about lots of things. And, if there's some more nuanced exploration of where those sort of dividing lines lie, then that would be a good thing.

[Theme Music Starts]

ANGE:

It’s fair to say that government at all levels, federal, state and local want to fix the housing crisis.

Audio excerpt — NSW Premier Chris Minns:

“The New South Wales Government is going to do everything it can to remove barriers, so we can lift the amount of houses that will be built…”

Audio excerpt — QLD Premier Steven Miles:

“I’m really excited to be announcing a new initiative that will help us to deliver even more homes.”

ANGE:

So many of these targets and initiatives all come down to arguing that we simply need more places to live.

Audio excerpt — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

“The key to the solution for housing in this country is housing supply.”

ANGE:

At a national level, there’s promises to build 1.2 million new homes over the next five years. They’re also promising 40,000 new social and affordable homes which is on top of state government commitments to help those most impacted by the crisis.

But if it’s so hard to even build a single public toilet, how will we ever meet those targets? And why do a handful of powerful voices have so much sway over what gets built, while those struggling the most get left behind?

I’m Ange McCormack and this is The Great Housing Disaster - a special series from 7am. This is episode 3 - who gets a say?

[Theme Music Ends]

ANGE:

I’m walking through Glebe, in Sydney’s inner city. It's an area with a rich history of public housing, but also one that's sought after and expensive. It's a place where a lot is at stake when it comes to getting housing policy right.

Audio excerpt — Carolyn Ienna:

Hi, how’s it going? Come in!

ANGE:

I’m with our senior producer Chris Dengate, and we’re heading to meet someone who has a lot to say about whose voices are listened to when it comes to the housing crisis.

CAROLYN:

My name is Carolyn Ienna. My pronouns are they/them. I'm a rapper/entertainer, dancer, I live in public housing currently. Yeah, I'm First Nations and Sicilian, and yeah, lots of nationalities in my family.

ANGE:

And, do you wanna read out what your shirt says? I haven’t actually read it myself.

CAROLYN:

No demolition of 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe. Save public housing.

ANGE:

Public and social housing tenants like Carolyn are disproportionately affected by the housing crisis. The lack of affordable homes has pushed more people than ever into public housing. In New South Wales alone, 57,000 people are waiting for a place to live. To address this, and to shift the growing costs away from the states, previous governments had been moving away from full ownership of public housing, to often just subsidising it instead. That’s why they refer to this under the umbrella term ‘social housing’ because many of these complexes are no longer strictly public assets. But no matter who owns them, there’s just not enough to meet the demand. It's estimated that we need around 200,000 new social and affordable homes in New South Wales alone to meet the shortfall. Carolyn has watched these cracks forming first-hand. They say the system is nothing like how it used to work thirty years ago.

ANGE:

And what was that process like back then? Applying and sort of becoming eligible?

CAROLYN:

Hellishly... hellish and long. But from what I've seen, not as bad as now. You pretty much won't get into public housing. You apply now, you won't get it.

ANGE:

Carolyn was one of the lucky ones assigned a flat at 82 Wentworth Park Road Glebe, which was then a new building only five years old.

How many people lived there? Was it a big complex? What were the neighbours like?

CAROLYN:

It was a relatively small complex and it was really good. We actually had a community, first time in my life. You know, we had neighbours that would share plants, food, have conversations out in the backyard. You know, I loved watching all the dogs playing in the park. It was just fun.

ANGE:

Yeah. I mean, we call it like housing or public housing, but, you know, it sounds like it was your home.

CAROLYN:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it felt like it was a permanent thing. And I never had that. Never.

ANGE:

But over three decades of living in Glebe, it grew to become the beating heart of inner city gentrification, a place where even the most unlivable terraces sell for millions of dollars. And that change was also coming for Carolyn. It started with a knock on the door in late 2022.

CAROLYN:

Well, I was just sitting there, probably watching TV, and I see someone coming through my gate and I was like, who's this? Oh, suit. Oh okay, uh, looks official. And they've just turned up and I'm in my pyjamas. I hate seeing people in my pyjamas.

ANGE:

The people in suits were from the Land and Housing Corporation, the state body that looks after public housing. They were asking if they could come in.

CAROLYN:

They said, well, we're going to survey the property for possible redevelopment.

ANGE:

Carolyn let them through. They looked around, and left.

CAROLYN:

Then maybe a month, maybe two months. They come back and it was the same two people, in my pyjamas again, and they said, here's a letter. Yes, we're going to demolish.

ANGE:

What were you feeling in that moment?

CAROLYN:

A whole mix of things. It's the whole instability when you've been told that that's your home for life. That's what I was told when I was moved in there. And it's really scary, but also at the same time, I’m a bit of a force of nature, so the activist in me comes out.

ANGE:

Carolyn tried to fight the eviction. With the help of Hands off Glebe and Action for Public Housing, Carolyn staged a protest outside the flats.

Audio excerpt — Carolyn:

“I guess we’re just sending a message saying that it’s wrong to demolish this perfectly good building, public housing building.”

ANGE:

They tried to argue that the flats should be refurbished instead of being demolished but it didn’t work and, eventually, Carolyn was forced to move to a different housing estate.

That decision to demolish was made under the previous NSW government. Now, the new Labor government says they want to make sure there’s still social housing available in the inner-city.

Audio excerpt — NSW Minister for Housing Rose Jackson:

“The new government really prioritises housing, is bringing together the maintenance, the waiting list, the transfers, building new homes, the whole kit and caboodle is coming into one central, one stop shop. This is about taking housing seriously. This is about getting the settings right to deliver on that promise. So Homes New South Wales comes into existence in New South Wales now. A legacy for the future, taking housing seriously. It's pretty exciting.”

ANGE:

That’s why their plan for the site is to convert the 17 publicly owned flats into 45 social housing flats, which will be available to anyone on the waiting list. That’s more than double the capacity of the old building and it’s a huge part of the state government's plan to provide 250 new social housing units before 2025, which is on top of national targets. And on the surface, that’s a good thing, right?

NICOLE:

In theory, selling public housing to support the construction of more and better public housing and or community housing, in theory, you know, that's fine. You've got to maintain and grow your social housing stock. In practice, properties are being sold off just to fund the existing level of operations, and so that's a real problem.

ANGE:

Nicole Gurran is a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Sydney. You heard from her in episode one.

NICOLE:

It’s distressing for many many reasons, and of course not least, for the communities and residents of that housing as well. And we don't have a lot of transparency over how those decisions have been made and where that funding is reinvested.

ANGE:

82 Wentworth Park Road is just one of the public housing complexes being ripped down across the country. Some, like Carolyn’s place, are still owned by the state. But, generally, this is how redevelopment of public housing works in Australia. State governments own the actual land public housing is on, and so they sell it off to developers.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man 1:

“Across South West Sydney the state government says it has work underway on around 40 sites, 4 billion dollars worth of development, a mix of private and public housing.”

ANGE:

They promise the profits will then fund more homes for social housing than what exists today, either on the land, or somewhere else.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified woman:

“It’s actually about getting more private housing onto the market with social housing at the same time and each of those helping to pay for each other.”

ANGE:

So that’s the promise all governments make, but when you look at what actually happens on the ground, there’s a few problems with that approach.

MICHAEL:

Obviously one of the, the most well-known examples in Sydney in recent years was the Sirius building, in the rocks, inner Sydney.

ANGE:

That’s Michael Koziol again, the reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald

MICHAEL:

A big, brutalist – some people would say monstrosity, some people would say it's absolutely lovely – It was a very divisive building.

ANGE:

The Sirius block was home to hundreds of public housing tenants. It had million dollar views of Sydney Harbour, so the state government, under Mike Baird and then Gladys Berijiklian, sold it to developers in 2018 for 150 million dollars.

MICHAEL:

It was the one that people really rallied against. There were protests, there were big demonstrations.

Audio excerpt — Protesters:

“Save our Sirius! Save our Sirius!”

MICHAEL:

Ultimately, the government opted against heritage listing the building, which was itself a big controversy, and proceeded with putting it up for sale.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man 2:

“Today we’re here to farewell Myra. Myra, the last resident of Sirius, is leaving the building.”

Audio excerpt — Myra Demetriou:

“The things that have happened here to people is just cruel and incredible.”

MICHAEL:

And that building is now being turned into luxury apartments.

Audio excerpt — News reporter:

“The 79 housing commission apartments will transform into 77 luxury homes.”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man 3:

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for developers.”

MICHAEL:

And obviously you know the apartments have already been sold. I mean, the penthouse was sold way back in 2021 for an incredible $35 million dollars to an unnamed buyer from Point Piper.

ANGE:

The state says it reinvested the money from the sale back into social housing, but it highlights a major issue with these housing redevelopments. Namely a huge lack of transparency, meaning that once these buildings are handed over to the market, what gets promised won’t necessarily be delivered.

MICHAEL:

Whether you agree with selling off public housing on prime land or not is one question. But, the point that everyone could agree with is that that money should really be used for more and newer and better public housing.

ANGE:

So if governments are making hundreds of millions of dollars by selling off land, the question is why do we still have a shortage of social and affordable housing? The answer to that is complicated.

After the break, how not to fix the housing crisis.

[Advertisement]

ANGE:

Public housing tenants feel like they’re the ones bearing the brunt of the government’s attempts to fix the housing crisis.
So why is it so hard to do the obvious thing that needs to be done, to build more social and affordable housing?

The thing is, governments at all levels say that they’re doing this.

Audio excerpt — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

“All governments recognise the best way to ensure that more Australians have a safe and affordable place to call home is to boost housing supply. That's why the National Cabinet has agreed to an ambitious new national target to build 1.2 million new well-located homes over five years from the 1st of July 2024.”

ANGE:

It’s not just the federal government. The states are on board too.

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man 4:

“It's all about making sure that Queenslanders have safe, secure, affordable homes, and this investment in social and public housing will increase the number of social and public houses available for Queenslanders who can't get a private rental or can't afford to buy their own home.”

ANGE:

But housing approvals remain at record lows, leaving the government far short of achieving its goal of 1.2 million new homes.

Audio excerpt — NSW Premier Chirs Minns:

“Well, I mean, obviously we want to get to the average of 70,000 a year so that we can meet the federal government's target, which everybody signed up to, all states and territories, even all local councils, to that national target so that we can deliver more housing.”

ANGE:

The way Australia is heading, we will need to almost double the amount of new approvals delivered each year to reach that target. Which is ambitious, and Michael Koziol points out that when it comes to getting anything approved and built, there's always a bottleneck.

MICHAEL:

It's multiple bottlenecks, right? Because of the number of organisations and governments that kind of have to sign on to really achieve anything.

ANGE:

Say you’re a well meaning state government and you want to build a new social and public housing development. The first thing you’re going to do is send your idea straight up the chain.

MICHAEL:

That then has to go back to a federal department to take a look at and they'll decide whether they like those. And then let's see how long that takes for them to assess that.

ANGE:

Let’s say you get the greenlight from Canberra. Great, but you still can’t build anything just yet.

MICHAEL:

Then these projects have to go through and get development approval. It still has to be lodged through the council system. Depending on the size of the project, it might go to a local planning panel.

ANGE:

And then, if your project is big enough, you’ll start hearing from other parts of the state government, who also want to have their say.

MICHAEL:

The other state government departments like transport, and heritage, and environment, all have to be consulted and prepare their submissions. And all those things take time.

ANGE:

At any stage of this process, the development of new affordable or social homes can blow out by years. And even though we’re in the middle of an urgent crisis, by the time the new homes are finally built, we’re still often left with fewer homes than we need. Nicole Gurran, who you heard from earlier, says that’s when governments often turn on each other, instead of fixing the problem.

NICOLE:

Essentially the strategy from Australian governments has been sound concerned, act busy, but do absolutely nothing to change the structural factors that are creating and perpetuating this problem. And by that I mean, the magic solution there is, you just say we want more supply, and you say it really angrily and loudly. Better still, if you can blame another level of government for, you know, not doing the thing that you say needs to be done.

ANGE:

Nicole says we don’t have a problem with producing new homes in Australia, it’s just the type of homes getting produced aren’t fixing the affordability problem.

NICOLE:

Pretending that we just need a bigger volume of houses and then we’ll resolve affordability is just fantasy land, and everybody knows it's fantasy land. So, you know, we can say all the words about supply, but if we're not going to invest in social and affordable housing then, you know, it's just words.

ANGE:

That leads us back to this question of who gets a say in what’s built and where. Because whether it’s about a single public toilet block, or thousands of social and public homes, there are vested interests who have a louder voice in what kind of development actually gets built.

MICHAEL:

The difficult thing with the housing debate, I think, is that our systems of consultation, everybody loves consultation. And it's kind of built into the planning system, built into the development system. But there's a question mark over, alright well who are you consulting?

ANGE:

And Michael Koziol says there’s one interest group in particular that tends to benefit more than the rest.

MICHAEL:

Here in NSW, it was interesting to see that a lot of the local councils were quite miffed that in the recent planning reforms that the state government has announced, there was a lot of evidence of consultation with the industry groups like the Property Council, Urban Task Force, which represents big developers. There’s also the Housing Industry Association and the Urban Development Institute. These were also widely consulted, you know, the industry helped design policy really. And you know, I mean, maybe to be fair to the government, they wanted to find a policy that would actually be feasible. And hence why they consulted heavily with industry. But I think you'll find obviously, they have a big voice in this, and they have access to politicians, there's no doubt about that.

ANGE:

And then there’s another group. The people who send letters, who want affordable housing, just not on their street.
The “not in my backyard” folks, the NIMBY's.

MICHAEL:

We obviously consult the people that already live in a suburb about the development that might happen there. But there's no real mechanism for us to consult the people who don’t live there yet, but might like to live there. If, you know, we could build some more houses or, if we change the way those suburbs looked and felt a little bit. So there's no real way to kind of, to get the views of those people. And perhaps it is important that we try to seek that out because obviously while the views of people who live in a suburb do matter, they're probably not the only voice that should be consulted in a debate about what a suburb looks like or what a city looks like, if there's a whole bunch of people who would love to live there but presently can’t.

ANGE:

When we decide what our cities look like and who gets to live where, more and more we don’t really think about places like Carolyn’s old one at 82 Wentworth Park Road. They’re not in the scale models of redevelopments and that means there aren’t as many homes in the centre of our cities for people like them.

Back in Glebe, Carolyn feels like the redevelopment of 82 Wentworth Park Road is part of a broader pattern of kicking poor people out of a trendy inner city suburb.

CAROLYN:

It's awful because It's all just more gentrification. They'll cherry pick tenants, they won't want problem people because that's the demonisation of public housing tenants. We're all drug addicted or blah, blah, blah. So they’ll look at each person that applies and they'll only want people in there that don't cause disruption.

ANGE:

Carolyn was one of the last residents to leave, over a year ago, and since then the block of flats have sat empty. It’s a troubling picture, especially when right across the road, in Wentworth Park, there is a growing number of people experiencing homelessness. They’re sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and under makeshift shelters. One of them, according to Carolyn, is a guy who used to live at 82 Wentworth Park Road. Homes NSW told us they’re planning to temporarily turn it into crisis accommodation for people who are homeless. But last year, the City of Sydney calculated that there’s around 267 empty public housing properties just like this one, and that’s in their council region alone. Carolyn now lives in a different public housing unit in Glebe, but moving out of the only place they really considered to be home has been hard.

ANGE:

How did it impact you emotionally? Sort of, you know, it's your home for 30 years.

CAROLYN:

Yeah. It was just really difficult. I just, I think about them all the time. You know, it's not like we're all perfect. You know, there were times that even neighbours wouldn't talk to each other for a couple of years, you know? And then somehow we would work things out. I don't have my community anymore.

ANGE:

It’s pretty clear that governments at all levels have a long way to go when it comes to rebuilding trust among public housing tenants like Carolyn.

ANGE:

You know, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese grew up in public housing in Sydney.

CAROLYN:

Over at Camperdown, I know exactly the place.

ANGE:

Yeah. And also the federal housing minister Julie Collins, grew up in public housing in Tasmania. So I guess they had the lived experience of what it's like to be a public tenant. Do you think people like that really get it, even if you have had that experience?

CAROLYN:

No. I think that they've been convinced by maybe others around them, let's not keep public housing, let's get rid of it, hand it over to private concerns, everything will be alright. True affordable housing is public housing. At the end of the day, the government doesn't want to be responsible for public housing. They don't see it as an asset. They just have a mindset that they just want to sell off. So, the more that we fight for public housing, the more that we get housing for everyone.

ANGE:

Carolyn wrote a song about public housing. They uploaded it to YouTube a few months ago and I watched it after I left their place.

Audio excerpt — Carolyn’s song:

“Let’s talk about so called Australia. There is public housing. They selling public housing…”

ANGE:

It names and shames all the issues with the evolution of public housing in Australia that we’ve talked about. It’s passionate and urgent and it doesn’t hold back. But it only has about 160 views. It doesn’t have any comments.

Audio excerpt — Carolyn’s song:

“...they are saying they are building more housing, more shelters. What they really do is selling to private developers…”

ANGE:

As with everything in our housing debate, those in the worst of the crisis, the voices like Carolyn’s are the ones that aren’t really being heard, or even noticed. So, how do we fix it? What are the solutions? That’s in the next episode of The Great Housing Disaster.