Time for more discrimination?

This isan update of a column I wrote in May this year
Back in May (2013) I was asked to comment on radio about the A Current Affair TV exposé of an apartment building in Brisbane that doesn’t allow families with kids – or even pregnant women – to buy into it.
According to their story, the Heritage listed company title Glenfalloch building in Brisbane’s New Farm area is populated entirely by young urban professionals and retirees.There was much shock and horror on the ACA track, with lawyers saying this was discriminatory and illegal – which seems to be the case under federal Age Discrimination laws.

However, in fact, it’s very much a “small war, not many dead” and I don’t see anybody going to jail over it nor, indeed, an influx of mewling and puking infants, to misquote the Bard.

But it got me thinking.  Strata law in NSW clearly says you can’t have by-laws that ban children. Federal law says you can’t discriminate on the basis of age, sex, religion or ethnicity.

But what about some positive discrimination? What if you set up a building for young professionals that suited their lifestyles (which wouldn’t involve being woken on a two-hourly basis by next-door’s latest contribution to global overpopulation)? Isn’t our democracy strong enough for us to be able to make choices about the way we live and who we want to live next to?

We do this anyway, drifting into communities that reflect our lifestyles or cultural mores.  Ten percent of the population of the USA lives in ‘gated’ communities, many of their occupants sharing an inflated fear of crime based on a perceived threat that’s exaggerated far  beyond any actual peril outside their fences.

“Residents’ palpable satisfaction with their communities’ virtue and their evident readiness to trumpet alarm at any given “threat” create a peculiar atmosphere — an unholy alliance of smugness and insecurity. In this us-versus-them mental landscape, ‘them’ refers to new immigrants, blacks, young people, renters, non-property-owners and people perceived to be poor,” says American journalist Rich Benjamin in the New York Times article The Gated Community Mentality, written in the wake of the Trayvon Martin tragedy.  Trayvon, a black teenager, took a shortcut through a predominantly white gated community in Florida and paid with his life when a local resident felt sufficiently threatened to shoot him.

Of course, there is no whites-only exclusivity in these places … money is the only arbiter of whether or not you can join these communities, allied of course to a sense of whether or not you were comfortable with your new neighbours. There are gated communities in the USA that are predominantly black, for that very reason.

When it comes to strata blocks, more than anything else it’s about who gets in first and that has a lot to do with who the building is marketted to initially. Many of our new multi-storey blocks are being actively sold in South-East Asia and that creates a de facto ‘ghetto’ (without the pejorative implications that word carries).  We can’t say Chinese-only … but we can issue marketting material in Mandarin or Cantonese.

 

After that, word of  mouth will do the rest.  A friend of mine used to work as a social worker in an area of London where residents of  two or three adjoining council blocks were almost exclusively Bangladeshi.  This cultural clustering builds over the years as people – especially newcomers to a country – gravitate towards others who share their experiences, aspirations and values.  Historically, by the way, a couple of generations later they move to areas that reflect their social status rather than their ethnic origins.

This has been the experience of Leichhardt, Lakemba and Cabramatta, the latter once being an Italian enclave but now enjoying a rebirth as Sydney’s little Saigon.

Getting back to apartment blocks, if our developers can indulge in a little social engineering by marketting campaign, why do we shy away from saying this block is mainly for  this social group, be it ethnic or demographic.

Just to give an example, an Anglo-Lebanese woman I know moved into an apartment block in one of the newer areas of Sydney, simply because the unit was the best she could afford.  She soon discovered that most of her neighbours were from the same South-East Asian ethnic group.

They would come home from work, dump their stuff in their home, make a cup of tea and then come back out into their lift lobbies and corridors to drink it and enjoy a chat with their neighbours.  This was their culture at work and they loved the sense of community they had. The problem was they were having it in the corridors, rather than inside their homes. Our friend, however was not so keen, and ended up moving out because of the constant chatter and laughter outside her door.

Now, she wasn’t the kind of person to start making everyone else conform to her lifestyle (which she theoretically could have done, by getting orders at the CTTT). But wouldn’t it have been a lot easier on her if there had been some way of her knowing not to buy there in the first place.

Would a gay-only building be such a bad thing?  Not a ban on straights but allowing the real estate agent to say “this is not for you” without someone running off to a tabloid TV show screaming about discrimination.  How about one that was predominantly Korean or Vietnamese … or Irish … or single women?  If this only applied to new buildings and everything was open and above board right from the start, could anyone really claim they were being discriminated against? (I know they could, and some would, but what would be the point?)

Everyone would know what was involved from the get-go. You put up your development proposal and you say, for instance, this building will be for pet owners.  People without pets can buy or rent in the building if they want but a big chunk of the facilities will be pet-friendly so don’t get all antsy about living near cats and dogs.  Then you include things like pet playgrounds and cat litter recycling and pets are allowed to wander on common property. And, the important thing is, you don’t get a bunch of opportunist empty-nesters or ‘me-first’ trust fund brats moving in and changing the rules to suit their lifestyles.

I love the multicultural aspects of Australia and I enjoy the ethnic diversity of our cities.  I also think that everyone should have to opportunity to live how they please without upsetting other people or having to conform to the arbitrary standards of behavior set by their ‘squeaky wheel’ neighbours.

More discrimination, not less, I say!  And maybe somebody will build a block for grumpy old people … oh, they already do –  they are called retirement villages, children are not allowed to live there and it’s perfectly legal.

You’ll find a link to the Current Affair story HERE.  And you can read my column about the Brisbane building HERE.  May 21, 2013 (updated August 18)

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