New York has its brownstones. London, its townhouses. Singapore is busy reinventing heritage precincts after sweeping them away. And Sydney, with its beautiful bungalows in heritage conservation areas, is revving up the bulldozers.

Who can blame anyone for wanting to live in Sydney? And Premier Chris Minns is responding with an ambitious goal of creating 76,000 new homes a year for the next five years.

But for house dwellers who now enjoy good local transport options and live in heritage conservation areas, uncertainty is rising fast. Minns’ Transport-Oriented Development Program places the entire inner west in the zone for six-storey apartment blocks. Paddington, curiously, has escaped attention so far, even though it’s so close to the Sydney CBD you could walk to work. Denizens of Lindfield, Croydon and many other picturesque precincts have not been so lucky, and grassroots opposition is growing to the state government’s intentions.

”Heritage items and conservation areas are part of the weft and weave of any great metropolis,” says Sydney architect Patrick O’Carrigan.

“In Sydney, whether an area is replete with Federation, interwar, post-war or 1960s housing, the pleasing consistency of building typology and streetscape style, form and scale, shines because the areas were created over a short period of time in garden or master built suburbs.

“These estates are not the outcome of haphazard B-grade development, where you randomly find six-storey buildings here and there, according to who owns or amalgamates sites first. Yet once one thread is undone, the whole significance of an area is at grave risk of quickly unravelling.”

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We nearly lost the QVB in Sydney, and now it’s a crown jewel in the city’s commercial heart. Likewise, the “green bans” of the early 1970s saved The Rocks for generations of schoolchildren and tourists to learn about our history, attracting their delight and their dollars.

Indeed, on January 4, 1981, The Sun-Herald published an article by journalist Jonathan Dawson, which recounted the campaign to salvage the historic 1880s estate Glenleigh, near Penrith. The property, Dawson reported, was “the centre of a fierce battle for its preservation in 1972, when the Main Roads Department wanted to demolish it to make way for the proposed north-western freeway.” Luckily, it survived.