Deconcentration, social mix and poverty

We have heard a lot today about the achievements of estate redevelopment projects to date, the plans and hopes for future projects, and some of the challenges involved in delivering renewal and reinventing public and social housing in Australia.

Eight years after the announcement of the Minto project, physical redevelopment of estates and their replacement with mixed‐tenure housing appears to be about to take a quantum leap forward with the recent announcement of Federal government involvement. It has been going on for much longer in the UK and USA with scores of completed projects, and while much of the rationale for redevelopment appears to be drawn from that experience, no‐one could argue that reinvestment in housing stock, infrastructure and community facilities in many places managed by Housing NSW is not long overdue.

As we all recognise, most of the estates targeted for redevelopment were constructed for a different time and a different tenant community from those they currently house ‐ decades of underinvestment and neglect, targeting and residualisation, and the consequent stigmatisation of particular estates have produced the problems we are now attempting to address. Redevelopment of the built environment and reconstitution of local social and demographic structure is a tremendously complex, expensive and disruptive process ‐ not least for existing tenants – but is justified by proponents on the basis that it is tenants who will ultimately benefit from living in ‘revitalised’ and ‘more natural’ mixed income areas, which will in turn reduce their level of disadvantage.

Here lies the crux of the questions I want to pose about the policy and practices of redevelopment, deconcentration of public housing and the construction of mixed tenure/mixed income developments, which comes down essentially to what we think creates and maintains poverty and disadvantage in our community, and thus to how we should best seek to address or ameliorate it. In other words, what is the problem that mixed tenure redevelopment policies are attempting to solve? We need to address this question before we have any chance of knowing whether it is worth the effort, expense and pain. The point of asking it is not to oppose redevelopment but to ensure that 'best practice' reflects the priorities we really want to pursue. The risk is that by confusing or conflating ‘concentration’ with disadvantage itself, we will fail to address the real issue.

The full paper is downloadable from www.shelternsw.org.au/docs/sem1006estates-darcy.pdf