The image in the title is everything that was wrong in our past social housing. It’s the NSW Housing Commission’s original urban design for the suburb of Cartwright, near Liverpool in SW Sydney. All one type of dwelling (houses), all one class (social), and all in one place. It was fashioned as a ‘Radburn suburb’, a middle-class conceit of parkland, not streets, wholly unhelpful for social housing.

Plagued with social unrest, every part is being undone less than 40 years later. The lots are being privatised, the zoning changed, and good riddance to the Radburn. Just BTW, the red dot indicates a low-rise building of 31 apartments (30% affordable) which we designed and had approved to replace just three houses.

It’s not that we don’t need social housing. We need it more than ever. Once in excess of 5% of all housing stock, social housing has dwindled to being less than 3% (through sales and fewer replacements). So, if we need much more, maybe 10%, we should ask, “What can we learn from the past about what works and what doesn't in social housing?” Or, perhaps another way, “How could social housing be better designed?”

There are five key ideas that could ensure a better outcome.

Dispersed

The temptation in solving a big problem is to use a big stick. But that failed in the last big ideas in state-built housing. The post-WW2 solutions of high-rise towers in Sydney's Waterloo and South Melbourne created ghettos of social dysfunction (which cannot be solved by an equally misguided ‘big stick’ idea of demolition).

In the 70s, making whole outer suburbs in social housing, such as Sydney’s Green Valley, was equally fraught. Cramming residents with low incomes, many with social and mental health issues and some with poor life choices, in one area can only lead to ghettos of resentment and anti-social behaviour. Poor media and increasing costs to address the issues only increased the stigma.

Tomorrow’s social housing needs to be everywhere: dispersed through all suburbs and towns. People with social needs should not be congregated in the annulus of inner-city areas or aggregated in far-flung suburbs with poor amenities and transport.

Diverse

The temptation in the big idea approach is a tendency to monoculture. All ‘3-bed houses’ in one area, all ‘2-bed apartments’ in another. Social housing should be diverse, not just one type. Family homes in the suburbs, solo apartments in high-rise towers, and a mix of all typologies in between.

Our multicultural society and our variety of households (with less than 50% traditional families) compel a matching variety of different spatial arrangements. And when you combine dispersed and diverse, you design social housing to be mixed everywhere: a few houses in a street, some apartments here and there within a building. An end to uniformity.

Indistinguishable

The 80s brought a more subtle form of stigmatisation: the ‘housos’ got experimental houses. Haughtily designed as first-past-the-post modernism. Instead of being subtly integrated into a community, with equity and equanimity, they stood out by being housed in theatrical interpretations of early 20^th-century workers’ housing. Philip Cox in Woolloomooloo and Edmunds and Corrigan in Carlton juggled polychrome brickwork, more hysterical than historical.

Social housing should be indistinguishable from the surroundings. Residents mixed into the community rather than being stigmatised into ghettos of the past. Imperceptibly built so that only its rental operation distinguishes it from the housing next door. The worst social housing shrieks, “Look at me, look at me”; the best goes unnoticed.

Durable

Social housing must be durable, because it will be held in perpetuity by the providers. Costs for maintenance, upgrading and replacement must be minimised to ensure low costs into the future. An incentive to be better built than the ‘all show and low go’ market-based housing that plagues poor building quality identified by the NSW Building Commissioner.

Divested

Crucially, social housing cannot be delivered solely by a singular top-down state organisation. Whilst a reincarnated housing commission is needed to plan state-wide, the delivery of social housing should be by multiple Community Housing Providers, or CHPs. Locally based, to know local areas, local problems, and local issues. Replace the centralised big stick approach by letting a thousand flowers bloom.

And in closing…

Successful social housing in the 21st century can learn from past missteps by addressing the real needs and desires of residents. Well-designed social housing is dispersed, diverse, indistinguishable, durable and divested.

Easy to say; oh, so hard to do, but that’s how we get the best outcome for the much-needed investment in what will soon be the poorest 10% of households.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, following on from the Tone on Tuesday columns (where some of this was discussed in May ‘24). Remember: amateurs draw plans, professionals draw sections; never at cross purposes.

Next week: The mid-rise pattern book schemes have been released, prompting many more questions than answers.

Tone Wheeler

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