[This is an abridged version from Alistair Sisson’s Substack, A more social housing. Read and subscribe at moresocialhousing.substack.com.]

Housing activists and tenants are currently occupying part of the Waterloo public housing estate to stop the demolition of 150 homes. This would be the first stage of the redevelopment of Waterloo South, a project with a long history and major problems.

The Waterloo estate, a 2012 home estate of around 17 hectares in the north-west corner of the suburb of Waterloo, was built over several decades — the earliest homes in the 1940s and most recent in the 1980s.

It includes two 30-storey towers (Matavai and Turanga) and four 16-storey slab buildings (Cook, Banks, Solander and Marton). These six buildings — 1263 apartments — make up the Endeavor Estate, completed in the 1970s. More recently, they have been relabelled Waterloo North and Waterloo Central.

The rest of the estate is a mix of walk-up and mid-rise apartment buildings. These 749 homes, across two-thirds of the total area of the estate, make up Waterloo South. This is the part undergoing redevelopment; the future of Waterloo North and Central is unclear.

Homes NSW delivered relocation notices to 150 Waterloo South households in March 2025 and another 99 received relocation notices in April. Of these, 70 moved to new social housing above the Waterloo Metro station. The remainder moved, or will move, to other vacant public or community housing dwellings.

Tenants are supposed to be offered suitable homes in their local area but vacancies are rare and Homes NSW typically provides just two offers.

The current plan for Waterloo South is to demolish all public housing and build 3300 new homes. Of these, 30% will be social (community) housing. Another 20% will be affordable housing, but two-thirds of these can be sold after 25 years and there is no information on rent setting (affordable housing in NSW can be up to 80% of market rent). The remaining 50% will be privately owned, market-rate housing.

The project will be delivered by a consortium, led by Stockland, involving community housing providers Link Wentworth, Birribee and City West.

The Waterloo estate redevelopment has had a long and complicated history, with the first plans drawn up in the early 2010s.

Both the Waterloo and Redfern Estates were within the ambit of the Redfern Waterloo Authority (RWA), the government agency established to “revitalise” Redfern-Waterloo in 2005, as part of the then Bob Carr Labor government’s response to the so-called Redfern riots.

The RWA’s draft plans for the estates, released in 2011, did not align with those of the Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC, now........

© Green Left Weekly