Dispersing the public housing 'estate': evolution of public housing estate renewal projects in Sydney, NSW

This spatiotemporal analysis exposes evolving renewal logics that have been used to move public housing into private and non-for-profit housing sectors in Sydney. Moving beyond an analysis of a single public housing estate renewal—a common form of public housing analysis—our historical analysis reveals how public housing ‘estate renewal models’ in Sydney have moved from periphery, through middle ring, towards core and back to the urban fringe, with several distinct financialisation shifts. The spatial dimension of our analysis covers five case studies of public housing estate renewal over a 20-year period. Within each case study we analyse, how the state government leveraged publicly owned land and created new land value through mixed tenure policies, changing public/private housing densities profiles, and a suite of different financialisation logics. The aim of our analysis is to track these different renewal logics. We find these logics map onto the geographical, financial, and temporal conditions that were present when each public housing estate was renewed.