Paul Pholeros, architect who helped reduce Indigenous poverty, dies at 62

Paul Pholeros, a renowned expert on Indigenous housing and housing equality campaigner, has died aged 62.

Tributes for the award-winning Sydney architect described him as a “courageous and compassionate advocate” and “irreplaceable” for his role in improving health outcomes in Aboriginal communities across Australia.

Pholeros was the co-director of Healthabitat, a not-for-profit organisation he founded with Dr Paul Torzillo and Stephan Rainow after the trio met in 1985 and were given the task of figuring out how to stop Aboriginal people getting sick in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara lands in north-west South Australia.

They developed a model called Housing for Health, which aimed to tackle basic things, such as ensuring every house had a working shower and toilet and access to a laundry.

That work was formalised into Healthabitat in 1999 and in the past 17 years the organisation has delivered 180 Housing for Health projects. They involve working with Aboriginal communities, conducting a survey of all housing and completing urgent repairs using mainly local Indigenous contractors, and adding whatever upgrades or repairs they can afford until the money runs out. Their standard budget is $7,500 per house.

Jon Clements, the president of the Australian Institute of Architects, said Pholeros’s death was a “great loss” to architecture.

“Anyone who had the opportunity to hear him speak about his work could not help but be moved, changed in some fundamental way,” Clements said.

Friends Phil Harris and Adrian Welke, who were both mentored by Pholeros, said he would leave an “enduring legacy”.

“It is impossible to imagine his lean and taut bower and studio high on Bilgola Plateau – the platform refuge shared with his partner Sandra – without his big presence,” they said in a statement released on Tuesday. “It was here, between months on the road, surrounded by bush and a big view, he would recharge, to continue his polite but unwavering 30-year battle against the antipathy and prejudice that precludes our first Australians in sharing our society’s riches of housing, health and education.”

Speaking to Guardian Australia, Welke said Pholeros was “just an incredibly generous, special person. A giant of a man.”

Professor Michael Tawa, who worked with Pholeros in the faculty of architecture, design and planning at the University of Sydney, said he was an “inspiring and exemplary teacher” who had left an “extraordinary legacy”.

“My own world is impoverished by this irredeemable loss,” he said.

Peter Stutchbury, a fellow architect and friend, said Pholeros had a “rare commitment” to his work and the people it helped. “His work is beyond value,” Stuchbury said.

The Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, also paid tribute to Pholeros’s work improving the housing of First Australians and said he was “saddened” by his death.

The organisation has improved more than 8,000 houses – a third of Australia’s Indigenous-controlled housing stock – and with them the lives of 55,000 people. A review of its New South Wales projects by the state health department found a 40% reduction in hospital admissions for illnesses that could be attributed to a poor environment.

“People are not the problem,” Pholeros said in a 2013 TEDx talk about the project in Sydney. “We’ve never found that. The problem [is] poor living environment, poor housing and the bugs that do people harm. None of those are limited by geography, by skin colour or by religion. None of them. The common link between all the work we’ve had to do is one thing and that’s poverty.”

Pholeros later described the work as “a non-heroic role involving a lot of dirty work and hard slog”.

He was outspoken in his criticism of government policy, particularly the bureaucracy around Indigenous housing projects, saying in an interview in July last year that he had received “both help and hindrance” from governments in his 31 years working in the field.

“People live in grinding poverty, unimaginable to most Australians,” he told ArchitectureAU.com. “More frustrating is the fact that they are regularly promised large sums of money that never reach the real target or improve the living conditions and health of the people who need it most.”

In a 2011 profile in the Monthly, Pholeros said the government “hates” the program’s low-cost approach, particularly as it had been proved to work. “It’s too simple and therefore it’s too hard to worm around it.”

Pholeros was an adjunct professor of architecture at the University of Sydney, admitted to the Order of Australia in 2007 for his work in Indigenous communities and was awarded many architecture prizes, including the world habitat award from the United Nations’ Habitat and Building Social Housing Foundation in 2011.

He died in hospital on Monday after falling ill at his Sydney home last month. He is survived by his partner, Sandra.