Thursday, 3 April 2014

"Social Cleansing" in inner Sydney?

The New South Wales state Lieberal gov is selling off a big chunk of public housing in Sydney's Miller's point. Old housing mostly, but as the area is in Millers Point close to the city it's worth a fortune. So they're gonna sell it all and boot out the tenants, many of which are old and/or sick.

If this was an isolated event perhaps there'd be much less concern, but the fact is that people living in central Sydney in places that have large rental subsidies are being put under pressure from the Dept of Housing to move. for example, I know of two people on the private rental subsidy scheme, one is being hassled to leave, and the other has been told to after the Housing lease ended. These are people who were put in private residences and subsidised by the gov because the gov didn't have the Housing stock to house them, and they are ill and unable to work.

The video below, there's some shots of the high rises in Redfern as some kind of place to put the Millers Point residences. I've been in there visiting years ago. Although it's high rise, you could barely swing a cat in the individual units, and the balcony's looked nice from the outside but were so narrow in reality it's like they were put there only for show. There was also a lot of trouble with so many people jumping/suicide that new tenants had to fill out a psychological test before moving into the place. This is where they sent our friend to go and look at who's being booted out of his place. 

Aside from all the other issues involved (including the fact he has two cats), when he walked into the complex on the way to the unit a dark man told him "Fuck off whitey". He told this to the people at dept of Housing and so they didn't even count his visit as one of three options he could accept. That's how fuckin bad these places are. I said to him straight out that they couldn't send him there.

  

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