In the mid-1990s, Professor Evan McKenzie, a US lawyer and political scientist, published a book called Privatopia. It charts the exponential rise of private residential communities, with extensive common property, run by residents sitting on owners corporations. Think the Real Housewives of Orange County. Or Breakfast Point in Sydney.
McKenzie demonstrates that the growth of private communities was driven by planning ideals, land economics, developer profit and a neoliberal conviction that the private sector could always deliver services more efficiently than government.
The dispute-plagued Italian Forum in Leichhardt is an example of how strata schemes can go horribly wrong.Credit: Kate Geraghty
What was conspicuously absent was any evidence that homeowners wanted to run their own communities; that they were clamouring to be members of private local governments, responsible for services and finances, including garbage collection, road and park maintenance and even schools. However, today, that is exactly what 75 million Americans, almost a third of the country, must do.
Whether they like it or not, they govern, and are governed by, their neighbours. This also locks them into paying for expensive assistance from the management and other industries that collectively owned housing has spawned. McKenzie says: “One point cannot be overemphasised: the entire institution of common interest housing [strata and community title] rests on volunteer directors, yet they are unpaid, untrained, often unqualified, and almost entirely unsupported by the governments whose work they are often doing.”
To date, Australia has largely avoided this fate. We have private residential government in the form of owners corporations in strata schemes, but the vast majority of schemes are low to medium rise with limited owners, residents and infrastructure. Two or three-storey walk-ups, they are human scale, manageable by lay people, and provide functional, quality housing.
Premier Chris Minns wants to fast-track high-density development in Sydney, but strata termination legislation means apartment-dwellers are in a vulnerable position.
That is now changing. Despite Sydney’s desperate need for affordable housing and a “missing middle”, inadequately drafted strata termination laws are predictably leading to the demolition of Sydney’s existing middle, or their gentrification into luxury apartments. Having drunk the Kool-Aid that residential property is all about building wealth, we’ve been convinced that so long as everyone makes a profit, it’s OK to forcibly take somebody’s home, as the legislation permits.
If you want to put people off apartments, making them live with the threat of involuntarily losing their home is a good way to do it. Of course, that can never happen to people living in freestanding houses, who, unlike those in apartments, contribute nothing to density.
There has also been a steady growth in US-style community title estates, with populations in their thousands. They are private suburbs where homeowners are responsible for roads, parks, infrastructure (increasingly renewable energy) and community harmony. They have complex governance structures with multiple bodies corporate, all required to comply with hundreds of sections of legislation. These communities do not have to be structured this way; they could be ordinary residential subdivisions.
Two missing words explain why Sydney’s making a terrible housing mistake
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18.02.2024
In the mid-1990s, Professor Evan McKenzie, a US lawyer and political scientist, published a book called Privatopia. It charts the exponential rise of private residential communities, with extensive common property, run by residents sitting on owners corporations. Think the Real Housewives of Orange County. Or Breakfast Point in Sydney.
McKenzie demonstrates that the growth of private communities was driven by planning ideals, land economics, developer profit and a neoliberal conviction that the private sector could always deliver services more efficiently than government.
The dispute-plagued Italian Forum in Leichhardt is an example of how strata schemes can go horribly wrong.Credit: Kate Geraghty
What was conspicuously absent was any evidence that homeowners wanted to run their own communities; that they were........
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