Sydney sometimes seems like Los Angeles in the 1930s, a developer’s town, where politicians fete big business and nothing stands in the way of making money.

Take the sell-off of social housing in Millers Point, Dawes Point and The Rocks. These are areas in our past associated with the city’s tenements and working class, but today are sought after spaces for millionaires’ homes, hotels and apartments snapped up by rich foreign investors.

The Sirius building was once a historic housing project that both represented a utopian vision for the poor and also – sitting next to the Coathanger with the best views in town – of the inclusivity of Sydneysiders to all walks of life. This week it too went on the sale block.

Pru Goward, the minister for families, gushed at the “incredible views” from one of the flats as the last resident, blind 91-year-old Myra Demetriou, was given her marching orders.

Whether it was the views or just dollar signs that filled Goward’s vision is unclear. The NSW government wants $100 million for Sirius, which will pay for more social housing on the outskirts of Sydney.

In Millers Point, the poor have been moved out of 90 homes, mostly terrace houses, sold for $252 million. It’s claimed it will fund 1500 new social housing flats in Penrith, Jannali, Campbelltown, Northmead and a number of other areas away from the coveted views and lifestyle of Sydney’s harbour suburbs.

And I know there are plenty of people who think that’s fair enough. A better allocation of resources.

And why should the poor get a water view when anyone else has to be a multi-millionaire? Right?

Except for that nagging moral belief in an inclusive society. After all, we still like to see ourselves as the caring ‘fair go’ country. Don’t we?

The government spin is it’s ‘ending the days of concentrating disadvantage’, but what it’s actually doing is creating rich enclaves where no one ever has to be bothered by someone down on their luck.

It is often through familiarity that we understand other people, other ways of life and of thinking. Remove that and you’re living in a bubble.

It’s a fake argument to say demolishing and selling off a building like Sirius is justified to build more social housing flats. You can apply that argument to practically anywhere (Sell off the prime Macquarie Street real estate of Parliament House and move it to Campbelltown).

The Sirius building represents more than the disappearing architectural heritage of this city. It was originally built to rehouse displaced residents of The Rocks as the area was redeveloped.

This week Goward held out the faint hope that Sirius (in structure at least) might remain, by giving developers the option to either renovate the existing building (like the Barbican or Isokon in London) or knock it down and build a lower structure beneath the deck of the Harbour Bridge.

The reality is the Modernist block, which has a Vegemite-like love it or hate it quality, will be razed by any buyer and replaced with featureless contemporary glass and steel apartments with multi-million-dollar price tags.

But the real tragedy of the Sirius is that even in the not too-distant late 1970s, when it was constructed, Sydney was still a city that valued the place of all people – rich, poor and in-between.

Not any more.

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph)