Sydney’s last stand: the residents holding out against gentrification

As private developers wait to pounce on expensive land occupied by public housing, the fate of an iconic building in inner Sydney has fuelled debate over the welfare of the city’s poor

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An SOS sign lights up in the window of the home of 90-year-old Myra Demetriou, one of two remaining residents of the Sirius building in Sydney’s Millers Point. Photo: John Dunn

Published: 5:00am, 8 Feb 2017Updated: 5:49pm, 8 Feb 2017

It is one of the last few weeks in the slow emptying of Sydney’s Sirius building , and Myra Demetriou is keen to talk about spoons. Sitting in her waterfront apartment, the 90-year-old former church deaconess has relocation on her mind, and in a cabinet above her sofa, enamelled souvenir spoons keep track of every city she’s ever visited.

Demetriou lives alone by the harbour in the suburb of Millers Point. Her building, an architecturally adored icon of Sydney public housing, has found itself on land too valuable for its own good. In 2014, the New South Wales government told its 400 residents their government housing would be sold to private developers.

Millers Point resident Myra Demetriou. Photo: John Dunn

Demetriou has clung on and is one of the building’s last two residents. But every week she is forced to test alternative accommodation, despite having, by her own admission, knees that don’t work, no sight in one eye and less than 5 per cent in the other.

“Someone told me that in other states, in social housing, once you’re over 65 they can’t move you out,” she says. “Not here.”

In the nearby suburbs of Waterloo and Redfern, 4,000 social housing residents are facing a similar prospect. The Central to Eveleigh project is a A$550 million (HK$3.26 billion) revitalisation plan to turn rail yards into high-rises and public housing into part-private development. Its centrepiece is a new train station on land where the Waterloo estate now stands.