Losing Sydney’s heritage is too high a price for a housing fix

New York has its brownstones. London, its townhouses. Singapore is busy reinventing heritage precincts after sweeping them away. And Sydney, with its beautiful bungalows in heritage conservation areas, is revving up the bulldozers.

Who can blame anyone for wanting to live in Sydney? And Premier Chris Minns is responding with an ambitious goal of creating 76,000 new homes a year for the next five years.

Houses in Sydenham. Credit: SMH

But for house dwellers who now enjoy good local transport options and live in heritage conservation areas, uncertainty is rising fast. Minns’ Transport-Oriented Development Program places certain parts of the inner west in the zone for six-storey apartment blocks. In suburbs like Lindfield, Croydon and many other picturesque precincts, grassroots opposition is growing to the state government’s intentions.

”Heritage items and conservation areas are part of the weft and weave of any great metropolis,” says Sydney architect Patrick O’Carrigan.

“In Sydney, whether an area is replete with Federation, interwar, post-war or 1960s housing, the pleasing consistency of building typology and streetscape style, form and scale, shines because the areas were created over a short period of time in garden or master built suburbs.

“These estates are not the outcome of haphazard B-grade development, where you randomly find six-storey buildings here and there, according to who owns or amalgamates sites first. Yet once one thread is undone, the whole significance of an area is at grave risk of quickly unravelling.”

We nearly lost the QVB in Sydney, and now it’s a crown jewel in the city’s commercial heart. Likewise, the “green bans” of the early 1970s saved The Rocks for generations of schoolchildren and tourists to learn about our history, attracting their delight and their dollars.

Indeed, on January 4, 1981, The Sun-Herald published an article by journalist Jonathan Dawson, which recounted the campaign to salvage the historic 1880s estate Glenleigh, near Penrith. The property, Dawson reported, was “the centre of a fierce battle for its preservation in 1972, when the Main Roads Department wanted to demolish it to make way for the proposed north-western freeway.” Luckily, it survived.

Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority spruiks the value of its efforts to reclaim the past on its website: “Through sensitive, selective retention and recall of buildings, spaces and uses, our heritage and identity will be kept alive for current and future generations to cherish even as the city develops.”

I don’t blame the NSW government for desperation in the face of high demand for housing. But why can’t we have our cake and eat it? There are plenty of non-heritage areas near railway stations that could be developed without pulling the rug out from the work over many decades of local governments in protecting our built heritage and homeowners who have spent small and big bucks to conserve it. The HCA under which I live, for instance, required us to replace a dilapidated boundary fence like-for-like with hardwood timber palings, unlapped and uncapped, for a price probably triple the cost of a Colorbond version. And it looks lovely.

Then there’s the potential to create new cities. Consider Mittagong, Goulburn, even Canberra. Places up and down the coast from Sydney are under-tapped population gold mines too. Why keep trying to squeeze everyone into the two main capitals?

Developers say they crave certainty, which seems to equate with slippery-smooth approval paths, preferential zoning and sidelined opposition. “But surely the same argument can be made for those who bought into conservation areas – at a premium – thinking this bought them certainty that the charm and ambience of the area would be protected,” O’Carrigan says. “Now these same home-owners face a free-for-all because they live within an arbitrary distance of heavy rail.”

When everything is said and done about heritage, will any of this rush to rebuild in six-storey lots solve the housing problem? Is undersupply in the capital cities the root cause of the problem? Dare we ask about the possibility of over-demand? And will Sydney developers be asked to fork out for beautiful parks between the towers, so their new occupants can be assured of pleasant outdoor spaces to take a breath and enjoy the fresh air?

“Will they provide a balance of tall development with open space, commodious streets, community assets and delightful landscaping?” O’Carrigan asks.

Alas, if this experiment fails we could be left with nothing else to show for it than haphazard six-storey wind tunnels, overshadowing and overcrowded roads, rail and schools. Call that a life worthy of a global city?

Rita Glennon is a desk editor at The Sydney Morning Herald. She lives in a heritage conservation area.