And,seriously,three million bucks for,ah,the amenity,seems like a bargain in a city where prospective downsizers never sleep. Even at up to,so help me,God,it’s a steal. And it was stolen. As NSW Minister for Housing Rose Jackson puts it,NSW residents were dudded on the sale of Sirius. Sure,she says,the $150 million we got from the sale is ring-fenced for public housing but “it was an outrageous transaction”.
And what will it give us? “Underwhelming numbers,maybe 500 homes,a drop in the ocean.”
The Sirius is being redeveloped into luxury apartments.Wolter Peeters
But here’s the real reason why those who live in the Sirius are lucky. It was built by governments to last. And that’s unlike the housing we’ve seen go up in the past 20 years. There is zero likelihood that we will see anything in The Rocks like the mayhem in Mascot or Macquarie Park. Sirius will stand forever. No cracks,except in the social fabric.
How we got to this point felt punitive and was horrific.. Who can forget those images of longtime tenant Myra Demetrious – Sirius’s last public housing tenant? Who can forget the lights which flashed from her window across The Rocks,blinking “Save our Sirius”? We answered that call. We saved this astonishing and perfect example of Sydney brutalism. But what we do to public housing tenants in this city was – is – brutal.
The suburb I live in is split in two. There’s the fancy end,currently strewn with asbestos tape,and the Parramatta Road end,where there’s lots of public housing. About 15 years ago,the state government bought a small block of units at the pointy end to turn into public housing.
My God. Grown adults attributing the worst traits of the human condition to others while exhibiting the worst traits of the human condition. It was hideous,and I lost confidence in people who I’d previously thought were perfectly normal but who thought “housing commission” was somehow akin to cholera.
Yes,we Sydneysiders want someone to fix our public housing problem,but we don’t want those tenants in our streets or in our suburbs. Turns out that the folks who live in those units are just as likely to put their overflow recycling into someone else’s bins as the rest of us but more likely to laugh if they catch you doing it to them. As opposed to getting a lecture on sustainability.
Recycling is the other reason we were lucky to save Sirius. Repairing,reusing,recycling,refurbishing are far better for us,far better for the environment. As one of our most-loved Australian architects,Brian Zulaikha,said,“It’s a completely poor attitude to demolish anything if you can leave it there … adaption is the only moral thing we should all be thinking about”.
So was it right to adapt this site? Was it OK to evict the most socially disadvantaged from an area of property desirability? If you had ever walked around the Sirius before 2014,you would have seen the most shocking decline in its care and maintenance. As Shaun Carter,one of the activists who saved Sirius says,“In recent memory,the government has been a poor landlord”. He’s not kidding. If you ever want a tour of rotten window frames and leaking roofs,just ask any inner-city public housing tenant. It’s a shitshow.
Carter says we need to follow Paris and London and put affordable housing at the centre. Stop with all the chitchat and big talk. Get a move on because the post-Boomer generations won’t forgive us for forcing them out of the city. Public housing,social housing,community housing,just regular accessible housing for all generations. That’s what’s going to mend our social fabric,he says. Carter is a people-before-profit guy.
But there’s something else magical about Sirius. And that’s its perfect exemplification of Sydney brutalism,says Heidi Dokulil,whose glorious bookwas published late last year.
“It’s part of our architectural history,and it tells Sydney’s story. If you miss out on modernism,you miss out on a whole chunk,” she says.
Plus,she adds,Sirius shows how the cycle of recycling can work:“There can be new life in old buildings.”
Let’s be serious,we want our homes to last,not just for the wealthy but for all of us. In fact,let’s get Sirius for all of us.
Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist forThe Sydney Morning Herald.