Housing activists highlighted New South Wales Labor’s destructive housing demolition agenda by temporarily occupying public housing at 82 Wentworth Park Road, Glebe, on June 20.
Occupiers entered the front yards of the property at 6.30am and hung placards and banners which read: “No empty homes in a housing crisis”; “Save Glebe estate”; and “no demolition of public housing”.
The protest was organised and supported by local public housing tenants, Action for Public Housing (A4PH), Socialist Alliance, Australian Communist Party, Grassroots Action Sydney and student activists from the University of Sydney (USyd).
A previous occupation in 2023 at the site won a reprieve from Labor’s initial demolition plans. But with the new Sydney Fishmarket nearby and new zoning laws allowing higher builds, protecting this site from government-developer greed was always going to be difficult.
A4PH activist Rachel Evans told the media conference that the state government is “making the housing crisis worse by trying to evict people from estates like this, demolishing them and privatising the land.
“Labor promised to solve the housing crisis, but then goes and privatises public land, gifting billions to developers. They want to demolish this site, Waterloo, South Eveleigh, Mascot, Kingsford and Maroubra, but we will fight this tooth and nail.”
Evans pointed to the successful pickets of public housing towers in North Melbourne and Flemington in Victoria, which won a reprieve from demolition. “This shows we can win,” she said.
The 82 Wentworth Park Road site is only 35-years-old and includes five three-bedroom units and 12 one-bedroom units — 27 bedrooms in total. It is set to be demolished at the end of June; windows and doorways have been, for the most part, boarded up.
The Land and Housing Commission claims that the new development will be 70% private but will include 30% “social housing”.
Activists decided not to enter the largely boarded-up site as, incredibly, crisis accommodation services had just placed someone there, highlighting just how desperate the situation really is.
They ended the protest in the afternoon after being told that no demolition would start while the tenant was there. However, workers from Bridge Housing then boarded up the remaining entrances.
Karyn Brown, a resident of Waterloo public housing who has been fighting against the demolition of the Glebe estate for years, told Green Left that NSW needs more public housing to be built, and the existing housing should not be knocked down.
“There are 17 perfectly good homes here [in Glebe] and there are homeless people everywhere who could be housed here.”
Brown said public housing tenants should not be “fobbed off into charity-run community housing” and governments should take responsibility for ensuring people are housed.
Grace Street, general secretary of the USyd Student Representative Council, told GL that housing is an important issue for students. She said international students and immigrants are often blamed for the housing crisis, when the lack of affordable housing and rentals is the real issue.
“This building has been mostly empty for two years and now they are trying to demolish it. There are student housing sites that have been sitting empty since the COVID-19 pandemic, because the university refuses to clean it up.
“Many students are getting ripped off, living in poorly maintained places and having to work so much just to survive.”
Vince Ashton, a public housing tenant from Eastlakes and a former member of the Builders Labourers Federation and Construction Forestry Maritime Employees’ Union, criticised successive governments for “handing over so much land to developers”.
[Get in touch with Action for Public Housing if you would like to get involved.]