“If you don’t live in Sydney you’re camping out.” “No, somebody falsely attributed those words to me. I, love Melbourne the garden city of Australia”. Former PM Paul Keating, Radio 3AW, 5 Oct 1995.
The election is on. Sadly, it will be presidential, not policy driven. The putative presidents come from opposite sides of the tracks in Sydney, and that fact could serve us well in looking at a key policy difference: ‘homes for all’ or ‘housing as property’.
There is a lot to learn from the leaders’ original homes; moreover, it is what happened to those houses after they'd left that gives a salient view of where we are in our housing policies in Australia.
Go Scomo to have a go
Scott ‘Scomo’ Morrison brands himself as the suburban daggy dad from The (Sutherland) Shire; others see him as the ‘Liar from the Shire’. Either way, he’s not a Shire boy - he grew up in the (now more salubrious) Bronte. Go rugby, not Sharkies.
The modest Federation house on a large block that he first lived in was owned by his aunt, shared with his parents and older brother Alan, in what we would now call multi-generational occupancy. Facing east and north on a corner it had a closed-in veranda but was still open enough to provide ‘eyes on the street’, and a large rear garden for play.
Scomo and Jenny bought their first house in Bronte, but to remake himself he moved to the Shire, swapping football allegiances, teams and suburbs. Scomo’s house seems quite humdrum in a suburb where many are shamelessly gaudy. Think Sylvania Waters, based on a canal, some would say carnal, development. LNP heartland for property investment.
What he left behind in Bronte tells us even more about the sad state of housing now. The family house was sold and redeveloped in 2015 into a hugely over-scaled house that resembles a ‘residential flat building’ (RFB) but is in fact a single house for less people than lived in the original house on the site. The house has no connection to Scomo (other than the site) but is testament to the LNP's belief in the house as ‘property’, and thereby wealth.
Crowding out the neighbours, the vanity statement is a real estate agents wet dream: ‘two living, four bed, five bath, three car, with pool’. The perfect personification of the idea that ‘if you have a go, you'll get go’, or perhaps Scomo’s more recent advice that ‘the way to avoid paying rent is to buy a house’.
Like so much of recent design, the house is a grotesque mutilation of the traditional design values of the suburbs. Gone are the modest houses and landscaped settings, to be replaced by heavy planting to offset the hard concrete and the loss of privacy from overglazing. The irony is that the house goes from being an open, active part of the place, to being aggressively defensive needing surveillance cameras.
Albo from the ‘Houso’
Anthony Albanese often tells his backstory of growing up in Housing Commission in Sydney's inner city; a well-worn story he uses to flesh out who he is, by outlining where he comes from: a modest house that his single mother lived in all her life, as he did for the first 26 years.
The two-storey houses are modest and well built, part of a huge expansion of ‘Council Housing’ between the wars, transferred to ‘State Housing Commissions’ after WW2. However, even when built the technology was old; witness the switch / power point at the end of the wall conduit above Albo.
Albo’s former house is now in poor condition and repair: the once beautiful, cantilevered flower boxes on the second storey no longer hold flowers, many having fallen off the building. It seems ripe for the NSW government’s current approach to social housing: sell it and don't replace it.
Like so many of his generation, Albo used his (and later, wife Carmel Tebbutt’s) earnings to buy houses in Marrickville and Newtown. And like so many he also made a windfall when they sold at double their value, the very rise in property values that is pricing later generations out of home ownership.
When Albo was young, similar houses to his were demolished for a vast 20-storey Houso block. Fifty years later what was left of the Housing Commission (now Department), built a 6-storey homeless shelter (designed by Hassell). Both are remarkable cases of everything that is wrong with ‘State Housing’ as they break the ‘three golden rules of social housing’: it must be small in scale, scattered throughout the city and suburbs and it must be indistinguishable from the houses around it.
Albo has talked about the local area he grew up in: the metal foundry, the Grace Depository, the Weston's biscuit factory (for ‘Wagon Wheels’) and the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children opposite his home. All of which have been turned into upmarket apartments, most of good design quality. Sadly, neither the NSW government nor the City of Sydney Council saw fit to demand any affordable ‘build-to-rent’ housing in this huge redevelopment.
This is the policy conundrum that awaits the Labor party: how to change from property to homes, and how to reinvigorate our social housing. It will take a whole of government approach: changes in tax regimes, seed projects, selective grants and loans. All social housing schemes will hopefully obey the ‘three golden rules’ to have a little of what Albo once knew firsthand, replicated across our cities and regional areas. And to redirect our design energies away from the bloated ego statements that are destroying suburbs.
Tone Wheeler is principal architect at Environa Studio, Adjunct Professor at UNSW and is President of the Australian Architecture Association. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and are not held or endorsed by A+D, the AAA or UNSW. Tone does not read Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Linked In. Sanity is preserved by reading and replying only to comments addressed to [email protected]
