[This is an abridged version from Alistair Sisson’s Substack, A more social housing. Read and subscribe at moresocialhousing.substack.com.]
Housing activists and tenants are currently occupying part of the Waterloo public housing estate to stop the demolition of 150 homes. This would be the first stage of the redevelopment of Waterloo South, a project with a long history and major problems.
The Waterloo estate, a 2012 home estate of around 17 hectares in the north-west corner of the suburb of Waterloo, was built over several decades — the earliest homes in the 1940s and most recent in the 1980s.
It includes two 30-storey towers (Matavai and Turanga) and four 16-storey slab buildings (Cook, Banks, Solander and Marton). These six buildings — 1263 apartments — make up the Endeavor Estate, completed in the 1970s. More recently, they have been relabelled Waterloo North and Waterloo Central.
The rest of the estate is a mix of walk-up and mid-rise apartment buildings. These 749 homes, across two-thirds of the total area of the estate, make up Waterloo South. This is the part undergoing redevelopment; the future of Waterloo North and Central is unclear.
Homes NSW delivered relocation notices to 150 Waterloo South households in March 2025 and another 99 received relocation notices in April. Of these, 70 moved to new social housing above the Waterloo Metro station. The remainder moved, or will move, to other vacant public or community housing dwellings.
Tenants are supposed to be offered suitable homes in their local area but vacancies are rare and Homes NSW typically provides just two offers.
The current plan for Waterloo South is to demolish all public housing and build 3300 new homes. Of these, 30% will be social (community) housing. Another 20% will be affordable housing, but two-thirds of these can be sold after 25 years and there is no information on rent setting (affordable housing in NSW can be up to 80% of market rent). The remaining 50% will be privately owned, market-rate housing.
The project will be delivered by a consortium, led by Stockland, involving community housing providers Link Wentworth, Birribee and City West.
How did we get here?
The Waterloo estate redevelopment has had a long and complicated history, with the first plans drawn up in the early 2010s.
Both the Waterloo and Redfern Estates were within the ambit of the Redfern Waterloo Authority (RWA), the government agency established to “revitalise” Redfern-Waterloo in 2005, as part of the then Bob Carr Labor government’s response to the so-called Redfern riots.
The RWA’s draft plans for the estates, released in 2011, did not align with those of the Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC, now within Homes NSW) and the RWA was dissolved shortly afterwards.
Plans re-emerged in December 2015 as part of the then Mike Baird Coalition government’s Communities Plus program. Waterloo was selected because of its high land value, which could be capitalised to fund the replacement of public housing at no cost to the government. Land value was further enhanced by the construction of the Waterloo Metro station.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2016 that redeveloping the estate was the decisive factor in a cabinet vote on the station’s location.
Brad Hazzard, then Minister for Social Housing, notified tenants of this “exciting” opportunity in December 2015 and indicated that relocations would begin in mid-2017.
The Coalition’s plan for Waterloo was for 7000 new homes: 28% community housing; 7% affordable housing; and 65% private housing. A community consultation and engagement process between 2016—2019 ultimately produced three options that differed in urban design but not density or tenure mix.
A preferred master plan was released in January 2019. The City of Sydney — a critic of the proposed density, design and tenure mix — released an alternative master plan. A protracted dispute between the City and LAHC led to the LAHC splitting the estate into three: Waterloo South would progress through the planning process while Waterloo North and Central were put on hold.
Plans for Waterloo South were approved and tendered in the second half of 2022, incorporating some of the City’s urban design work, but sticking to LAHC’s tenure mix.
NSW Labor’s 2023 election victory changed things slightly. While the tender process was underway, the new government announced that Waterloo South would be 30% community, 20% affordable and 50% market housing. It also agreed, in response to the Redfern Waterloo Aboriginal Affordable Housing Campaign, to devote 15% of the community and affordable housing to Aboriginal housing.
The Minns government added an extra 100 or so community housing units and more than 400 affordable housing units to the plan.
These are very modest improvements and the Waterloo community deserved more, particularly given Labor’s commitments.
In opposition, Ron Hoenig, Labor MP for Heffron which covers Waterloo, labelled the project “social cleansing” and a “smokescreen” to privatise public land.
In 2023 Hoenig sent tenants a letter claiming that a vote for Labor would “stop the sell-off of the Waterloo Public Housing estate and protect your home”.
A text message to the same effect was sent in the days before the election.
A year before the election, NSW Labor Conference adopted a motion binding the party’s Caucus to “a moratorium on the privatisation of public housing, including the sale, outsourcing, or leasing of any public housing assets or services”.
Over 2022 and before the 2023 election, Rose Jackson, then Shadow and now Minister for Housing, criticised the Coalition’s plans for the estate.
In May 2023, Minns announced a “freeze” on the privatisation of public housing. Yet, in June, Labor announced it was proceeding with the Waterloo South project, with only slightly improved parameters.
Redevelopment myths and realities
The Premier and Housing Minister deny that transferring more than half of Waterloo South into private ownership constitutes privatisation.
This is just one of several tendentious claims made to justify redevelopment. One of the more easily debunked is that redevelopment is a solution to social problems on the estate.
There is a widely-held view that mixed tenure developments, like Waterloo South, improve social outcomes. Coalition MP Brad Hazzard espoused this when making the case for redevelopment in 2016. Jackson recently claimed that Waterloo is not a “functional community”.
However, there is very limited evidence that redevelopment can solve social problems like poverty or antisocial behaviour. In any case, social mix is more meaningfully calculated at a neighbourhood rather than project level and there is no evidence that 30% social housing is the socially optimal proportion.
The government’s main argument now is that the redevelopment will improve the quality and quantity of social housing.
But while there will be a 32% increase in social housing within the boundaries of Waterloo South, the uplift over the estate as a whole will be much smaller.
Waterloo Central and North are denser, with less room for growth. They make up about one third of the estate’s area, but two thirds of its housing.
Capping social housing at 30% of Waterloo South therefore severely limits the potential for more social housing across the whole estate.
Capping social housing at 30% in the redevelopment of North and Central would mean a net loss of social housing on those sites and only slightly better than breakeven across the whole estate.
There is also a question of when new social housing becomes available.
Estate redevelopment causes significant strain on the social housing system, because homes are lost to demolition in the short- to medium-term, as tenants move into vacant dwellings that could otherwise be offered to applicants on the waiting list.
While the redevelopment may eventually produce a larger quantity of homes, there is a significant loss of capacity to house low-income people during relocations, demolition and construction.
Redevelopment should improve housing quality. Public housing generally is poorly maintained, and some of Waterloo’s homes are 60 to 70 years old; however, this does not mean they are beyond repair.
No condition assessment has been made public, nor has there been any refurbishment feasibility study. Using original architectural plans, we found that most buildings in Waterloo perform fairly well against NSW’s current Apartment Design Guide.
Given the strain that redevelopment places on the social housing system, the focus should be on replacing the worst quality homes and building as much as possible without demolitions.
The core problem with the redevelopment of the Waterloo estate, and most others, is that the process is not primarily driven by concerns about social housing quality, quantity, or outcomes for tenants.
Waterloo was selected because it is highly coveted real estate. Land values were high enough for the project to go ahead with no net loss of social housing and no (or minimal) cost to the NSW government, while advancing a state-led gentrification agenda that dates back to the early 2000s.
Rethinking redevelopment
Most public housing in Australia is at least 40 years old. It has been badly neglected and, in some cases, badly built. This reality needs to be reckoned with. But alternative approaches to redevelopment are possible.
First, tenants should be empowered to decide whether and how redevelopment proceeds. Binding and independently resourced resident ballots are one mechanism. Ballots in London have led to better, rather than fewer, projects going ahead. These include refurbishment and retrofits.
In Australia, OFFICE has led several design and feasibility studies for retrofitting public housing, including for Waterloo North and Central. The Retain, Repair, Reinvest: Waterloo North and Central project found that refurbishment and infill offered significant cost savings — as well as social benefits — from minimising the impact of relocations, while also adding to housing supply.
Where demolition and redevelopment happens, relocations and construction should be staged so that tenants move directly into new homes.
[Alistair Sisson has researched the Waterloo estate redevelopment for more than 10 years. He was involved in the Waterloo Public Housing Action Group from 2016 to 2018 and Action for Public Housing from 2021 to 2024.]