With housing availability becoming a political issue, it’s interesting to review the last time the shortage of shelter reached critical levels.
The 1940s and 1950s were desperate times for many. World War Two absorbed materials and labour so housing construction tapered off dramatically.
Anticipating the forthcoming crisis and needing to house war workers, the McKell Labor Government created the NSW Housing Commission in 1942, as the conflict was still raging. A Commonwealth Housing Commission was established by the Curtin Government the following year. Under the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement in 1945, nearly 100,000 dwellings were built nationwide in a decade.
More than 300 of those existed as one, two and three-bedroom units in Greenway, the largest development of its kind in Australia. Named after the colonial architect Francis Greenway, this group of four buildings was designed by Percy Gordon of the firm Morrow and Gordon. He was inspired by Stuyvesant Town on Manhattan’s upper east side.
The land for the development had remained vacant since the late 1920s when hundreds of buildings in Milsons Point and Kirribilli were demolished in preparation for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Construction began in 1948 and Greenway was opened by the State Minister for Housing Clive Evatt in 1954. Evatt’s childhood home had been one of those destroyed during the Bridge works beneath the site of the new flats.
Greenway, and the smaller unit blocks built in Sydney’s inner areas, represented the acceptance of medium and high-density planning solutions to the housing shortage in a society that prized the suburban house. When Betty Lorraine moved into Greenway in 1953, a year before the official opening, her husband exclaimed: “This is living. This is fantastic, who wants a house!” The Lorraines, like other tenants, had entered a ballot open to all who did not already own real estate. Greenway, like other public housing, was intended to provide accommodation to those who could not afford a home.
It was the epitome of modern housing. The building had its own substation which powered the kitchens, laundries and lifts. In August 1953, Pix magazine pictured the complex towering over, what it called, a ‘terrace of ancient slum housing’.
Two years after Greenway was officially opened, the Menzies Government entered into a second Commonwealth State Housing Agreement. Where previously the emphasis had been on building rental accommodation, the focus now was on home ownership.
Fifty years later, the purpose of public housing had shifted from providing affordable accommodation to social safety net. Around this time, real estate prices surged as housing became an investment alongside stocks and shares.
Greenway survives as public housing, an example of how NSW responded to its earlier housing crisis.
Historical Services, North Sydney Council.