My friends and I scour flatmates dot com and Facebook marketplace, searching for a semi-affordable share house near the University of Sydney. Nothing meets our budget; I trawl through Redfern, Glebe, and Marrickville. The rent in these suburbs, formerly industrial or working-class hubs, has skyrocketed exponentially, particularly post-COVID. The average house rents for $1,000 a week in Redfern, $1,050 in Glebe, and $950 in Marrickville. The maximum weekly youth allowance rate for unmarried, childless adults living away from their parents’ home is $331.65. These areas are rapidly gentrifying and becoming increasingly unaffordable; students cannot afford to live near campus, and those in the local community are being priced out of their homes as an influx of landed gentry arrive on their doorstep.
Gentrification and Capital
Through the application of Marxian economics, we can make sense of gentrification through ‘geographical materialism’. In Greater Sydney, uneven development clearly derives from the colonial introduction of capitalism to the basin. Radical heterodox political economy generally acknowledges the historic settler colonial frontier as primitive accumulation manifest, relative to Marx’s critique. Such colonial developments within Australia coalesce with the international historic and ongoing offenses of imperialism.
In the urban context, gentrification in Sydney consolidates a spatially stratified class structure which corresponds with ethnographic intersections; race and gender. A critique of gentrification on the lone basis of whiteness, then, is misguided as the intersectional composition of settler colonialism contributes to the commodification of Aboriginal land.
Reducing causes of gentry to settler presence and labour rightfully criticises the white supremacist architecture of historic Australian populate or perish policy, as Randah Abdel-Fattah has written in her book Islamophobia and Everyday Multiculturalism in Australia. However, the basis of capitalist critique fuses wage-labour, adjacent to colonial reliance on slavery, with the industrial scale appropriation of land and natural resources for commodification in order to materialise into market goods.
While the State formally represents the persistence of the colonial project, its developments in financial markets reveals the cause of gentrification — uneven development — to be in the movements of capital.
Capital compels governments to adopt the most insidious form of gentrification: state sanctioned relocation, visible through the neoliberal logic of moving public housing estates away from ‘desirable’ locations to build private or commercial housing. The Sirius building, renowned for its Brutalist architecture and located in harbourside neighbourhood The Rocks, was designed to house public tenants displaced by redevelopment in the area. In 2019, the NSW government sold the building to developers and residents were forcibly relocated; it has now been “reimagined and reinvented as luxury homes”. In 2025, there remain large swathes of public housing in coastal areas such as Maroubra, Hillsdale, and Pagewood. These were initially industrial areas or designed to house the public and working class, much like Glebe in the Inner West. Unlike Glebe, it has managed to remain so, but they remain potential victims to government gentrification given the ever-increasing value of land proximate to the ocean.
Housing commissions in South East Sydney are expensive to maintain, and costs have risen in recent years. More importantly, so has the price of land near the coastline. The argument for potential policy from the government — which could be dubbed ‘noble gentrification’ — is simple neoliberal market logic. It follows as such: the value of housing commission land rises exponentially; after selling desirable land to developers, the profits are used to create significantly more public housing on different land. This land is, in the interest of financial costs and acreage, often in Western Sydney or the outskirts of the city’s metropolitan region. It is often disconnected from the level of public transport, infrastructure, and amenities these residents otherwise had access to in South East Sydney.
One may say that this is simply an argument for increased development and connectivity in Western Sydney, but the two are not mutually exclusive; this response ignores the primary humane values and principles against government gentrification. Despite the alleged net benefit of extra public housing — which, even if completed, suffers from the time lag of awaiting development and bureaucratic approval as thousands continue to suffer on the public housing waitlist — forcible relocation of vulnerable communities through government gentrification has a myriad of economic, social, and political harms.
As Eda Gunaydin has written on Parramatta, in her essay Second City, current gentrification is historically connected to the initial dispossessions of land since the colonial frontier. The Western Suburbs are associated with unique demographics among broader Sydney with more diverse non-European populations, and higher concentrations of constituents with English as a second language. Yet, immigrant settler history has gradually overlaid Indigenous history.
In Parramatta, changes in individual income quartiles from 2006–2021 hypothesise a gentrification effect of lower income individuals becoming priced out of the local government area. Within the period, growth in medium-highest and highest income quartiles outpace the growth in medium-lowest and lowest. Concurrently, change in housing rental quartiles shadow the trend of income. Over the fifteen year period, the increased number of households in the upper two rental payment quartile groups, relative to decelerated growth in the lower two, reveals a trend of aggregate rent-cost increase. This data is sourced from Western Sydney University’s research organisation ‘.id Community’.
Highly organised, neoliberal, state-sanctioned gentrification maximises class and wealth stratification to the fullest extent, creating enclaves in Sydney where the working class, gentry, and bourgeoisie remain within their own bubbles — either happily refusing to cross the Spit Bridge or trapped in an urban desert with no public transportation access. We create ways to understand the reality of gentrification; concepts like the ‘Red Rooster line’ chart division between the city’s North/East and South/West. But it’s not just the prominence of Red Rooster’s which splits the city: HSC outcomes and community health can be charted by postcode. Gentrification, propelled by the State’s neoliberal capitalist logics, decimates communities and further widens the gap between the city’s Indigenous and settler populations, entrenching class structures.
Resisting Gentrification
For anti-gentrification movements to have intersectional purpose, anti-capitalist critiques against privatisation must consist of decolonial-feminist notions of post-capitalist reality. Anti-gentrification necessitates anti-capitalism, not just a superficial critique of housing bubbles which provoke the question: ‘affordability’ for whom?
Unless anti-gentrification is tied to Land Rights, the colonial a priori assumption of humans as dominant over nature which validates the logic of commodification, thus of land. In the settler colonial Australian context, it is vital that decolonial, post-capitalist conceptualisations are led by whom we dispossess. But it is not an excuse for settlers to remain idle.
Ethan Floyd’s PULP article Towards a Blak Australia Policy commences an effective strategy for post-capitalist realisation beyond academic theory. Floyd also brings into focus the existential dimension of gentrification as displacement, that “under settler-colonialism, even the air is stolen from us.” Creating a post-gentrification reality must not be entirely delegated to the realms of ‘policy’, but part of the political lives we live as constant actors of praxis.
Action
Resisting requires sustained and collective action. For example, the Waterloo public housing precinct is being demolished and redeveloped for mixed-use housing, forcing almost one thousand people, many Indigenous, to relocate. Government gentrification is particularly harmful for Indigenous people, who make up a significant cohort in housing commissions, up to twice the national average, due to centuries of disenfranchisement and systemic racism. Indigenous communities also have unique and deep cultural ties to the land, frequently spending multiple generations in the same area; thus, relocation must be resisted against as a form of cultural violence enacted by the state.
Pressure from grassroots community organisations such as Hands Off Glebe and Action for Public Housing, Greens MP Jenny Leong, and local residents, have resulted in significant amendments from the original Waterloo redevelopment plan. The new developments are still designed for a level of gentrification: 50 per cent will be privately owned, the homes set aside as ‘affordable’ housing are unaffordable for low income earners, and the estimated completion timeline is 10 years. It seems unfortunately plausible that the community sustained throughout decades in Waterloo’s public housing estates will be, if not forcibly relocated, priced out of the area. Despite this, after years of campaigning and action, the Redfern-Waterloo Aboriginal Affordable Housing Campaign were able to eventually secure their demands that 10 per cent of the units will be made available for First Nation peoples.
Mutual Aid
As a model of income redistribution, mutual aid materially addresses the immediate effects of gentrification. Fundamentally, the mutual structure allows for disengagement from private lending which induces cumulative debt cycles. Mutual aid itself is not enough, as institutional wealth redistribution obviously requires a scaling beyond local progressive communities; too often this looks like wealth cycling between those being gentrified. However, the mutual aid model can collaboratively reconfigure methodological individualism as a Eurocentric core economic assumption and manifestation of financial behaviour. Mutual aid thus undermines an ideological and material demarcation of class, which has become internalised through accumulations of wealth from one’s wage, salary or allowance.
Divestment
Those of us who mainly engage in markets through the sale of our labour have a moral obligation to realise the role of superannuation as a portfolio for superfunds. The growth in wealth conducted by superfunds, on our behalf as students and workers, indirectly engages our accrued savings with domestic and international financial markets. Our selection of superfunds and the portfolios which our superannuations diversify into, is an opportunity to directly engage in divestment. Beyond divestment in land development firms which induce gentrification, the adoption of an economically critical financial strategy of divestment from fossil fuel energy firms, and weapons manufacturers for instance, attempts to devalue those industries.
Alongside immediate, practical actions and distributions which confront gentrification, the understanding of land acquisition as directed by the interests of capital means financial markets must not escape activist strategy. Of course capital will not save us from capitalism. But the financial markets which direct the movements of capital itself must not escape the logic of anti-gentrification, and further, movements towards post-capitalist development.
