A “For Sale” sign in Raglan Street Waterloo sits outside a poor condition terrace house. Prospective buyers and public tenants report this is not the first public housing property put to market in the area and more are said to follow soon. This is not unique to the inner city. Spot sales of public housing are happening across the state.
In the inner city, government gets good prices for its properties, but replacing them with similar size properties in the same area is very expensive. This leads to public housing being slowly downsized and pushed out of the inner city or stock never being replaced.
The BEP2 proposals for the renewal of Redfern and Waterloo public housing estates excluded 700 public housing units in the Waterloo conservation area, many of which are heritage properties needing maintenance. REDWatch argued that the plan needed to address all the public housing stock in the area to guarantee its future.
Unless government replaces the units they sell off in the same area, these spot sales will add to the 700 public housing tenancies BEP2 already plans to remove from the area. Ironically, what is being lost is public housing in a mixed area, which is exactly what BEP2 claims is needed.
