Bulldozing the past

The Macquarie Fields riots of February 2005 showed that all was not well in Sydney's large public housing estates. As suggested by the images of dozens of youths throwing Molotov cocktails at police and firefighters, these places suffer from high levels of just about every social problem you can name.

But this was hardly news to the social workers, police and urban planners who had been struggling with this state of affairs for many years. In fact, a radical plan to break up the estates had already been adopted by government. Now being implemented, it is one of the more ambitious changes in state social policy in years.

Many of the big estates, at places such as Minto, Claymore, Macquarie Fields and Bonnyrigg, incorporate the Radburn model, in which houses are built back to front, with garages facing the street while the fronts open on to public space. The award-winning design was imported from New Jersey, where it worked well. But it was for middle-class living in America. In Australia it began as a model for working-class living, but social change turned the estates mostly into colonies of welfare dependence.

Intended by idealistic planners to encourage walking and a sense of community, Sydney's Radburn precincts are now more often associated with crime. Two failings in particular are that they provide insufficient scrutiny of public areas from residences and that the many laneways give access and escape routes for thieves.

But while urban design does affect behaviour to some degree, a far greater source of problems has been the change in the circumstances of the people who live on the estates. When they were built in the 1970s, most of the residents were working-class families who found themselves in need for one reason or other. Today things are very different.

Says Mike Allen, the director-general of Housing NSW, the former Department of Housing, "in the 1970s, 70 per cent of applicants for public housing were couples with children. Another 17 per cent were couples without children, while nearly all the rest were elderly singles."

Now married couples with children make up just 11 per cent of tenants. A third are single adults, often on disability pensions, and many of the rest are single parents. Cliff Haynes, general manager of the department's Greater Western Sydney Division, says 90 per cent of the people in an estate such as Minto depend on welfare.

There are two main reasons for this change. The first is that the quantity of public housing did not increase as population grew. This is because in the 1980s federal government policy changed from building public housing to giving welfare recipients rental assistance so that they could lease property built by private investors with the help of negative gearing. Over time, public housing - about 130,000 residences in NSW - became the housing "of last resort" for people in relatively desperate circumstances.

Today, such people are far more numerous than they were previously. The proportion of Australians of working age dependent on welfare has increased more than fourfold since the 1960s. And while welfare solves some problems, it creates others. Public housing estates have become concentrations of some of the most troubled people in our society. And due to a phenomenon known as the neighbourhood effect, putting together people with problems makes the sum of those problems even greater. So the estates, which were once well-intended attempts to give battlers decent accommodation, have turned into counterproductive welfare sinks.

This has been a problem in many countries, and for some time now there has been a move to break up these conglomerations of disadvantage and distribute public housing through the rest of the community. The rule of thumb adopted in NSW is that no more than 30 per cent of housing in any one area should be public. Bernie Coates, director of community-building strategic projects for Housing NSW, says, "There's now plenty of evidence from overseas to show that this provides better social outcomes. Britain has been doing it for 10 or more years."

Some tenants I spoke to support the move to a social mix of housing; others don't. Ross Smith, who lives in Waterloo, disagrees with the policy of dispersal because it breaks up communities. Lesley Browne, of the Minto Residents Action Group, told me last year: "A majority of those who've moved so far are happy, although they were upset at the time."

Mary Perkins, the chief executive of the tenant advocacy group Shelter NSW, says: "The jury's still out on whether social mixing is a good idea. Some ex-Minto people say now they're more lonely than ever in their lives, because they're the only public housing residents in a street of 'privates'."

Coates says the British experience shows that if you talk to tenants a few years after their move, "Most of them will admit it was for the best".

NSW is now seeing a variety of changes to the estates, depending on local circumstances. Most of these have gone largely unreported, but together they make up a massive transformation. The notorious Gordon estate in Dubbo is being shut down completely and some properties are being sold to tenants. In Macquarie Fields, 135 houses are to be sold over the next three years. Large redevelopment projects involving a mix of public and private housing have been announced for Glebe-Ultimo, Waterloo-Redfern, Villawood, Riverwood north, Airds, Minto and Bonnyrigg.

The Minto project is the most advanced. It involves razing much of the estate and building new housing, a lot of which will be sold to private buyers. The profits will be used to build public housing elsewhere. So far, 377 houses have been demolished and there are 452 to go. The new residences will not be built on the old model. Says Mike Allen: "We all feel more comfortable with traditional streetscapes. We want to achieve crime prevention through design. Radburn wasn't helpful in keeping eyes on the street." In fact, the new housing will be the same for public tenants and private buyers. In the long term it is hoped these changes will remove the stigma that can now be attached to living in suburbs with public housing estates.

The Minto project involves moving a lot of tenants away from the area, in some cases against their will. In the earlier stages there was criticism of the department for lack of consultation, but it has lifted its game and a lot of effort is being put into helping shifted tenants make a go of things.

Mary Schulha, manager of the department's Minto Renewal agency, says: "We're giving people more opportunities for their lives, trying to help with schools and jobs and skills. It's not just about the physical aspect of the move."

At Bonnyrigg, the redevelopment is being done by a public-private group called Bonnyrigg Partnerships. It's more complicated than most public-private partnerships because as well as the public partner (Housing NSW) and the private ones (Westpac, the developer Becton and the property management company Spotless), it involves a community housing organisation called St George Community Housing.

Community housing involves not-for-profit organisations managing, and in some cases owning, housing for poor people and is a growing phenomenon. Housing NSW is helping the sector expand its number of homes from 13,000 to 30,000 over the next 10 years, on the basis that it's good to have a more diverse system.

"Community housing has some advantages over public housing," says Bruce Judd, of the City Futures Research Centre at the University of NSW. "In Australia at present their administrative scale is smaller and management can be more user-friendly." (The term "social housing" is now used to describe public and community housing.)

At Bonnyrigg, St George is responsible for most dealings with tenants, and there's been a lot of consultation. Claudia Stevens, general manager of Bonnyrigg Management, says, "Groups of tenants have been taken on bus trips, with interpreters and staff, to look at private housing estates and tell us what they like about them." Paul Hourigan, development manager of Becton, says, "We then did the initial designs and showed models to the tenants, and made changes to the design based on their feedback."

By increasing the density on the site, 833 public housing residences will be turned into 2330 new places, of which 700 will be social, the rest being sold to private buyers. This is the first public-private partnership project of its kind in Australia and it has already attracted visitors from other countries. It will be worth more than $700 million over its 30-year life.

One issue is whether house prices on these redeveloped estates need to be struck below the general area average in order to overcome old stigmas and attract buyers. This creates a useful incentive for those involved to make the redevelopments as physically attractive and socially successful as possible.

There's a refreshing sense of purpose and optimism among those engaged in these changes. Reflecting on the history of places such as Minto and Bonnyrigg over the past 30 years, Bernie Coates says, "It's time we did this. Some of these housing estates are no longer good places for people to live."