Australia's Housing Crisis

Byron Shire Council has publicly pledged that the first block of land it is acquiring under its Affordable Housing Contribution Scheme (AHCS) will be used for genuinely affordable housing, and remain so in perpetuity rather than adhering to the state government’s much-maligned affordability criteria. The promise came during last week’s Council meeting, as councillors discussed a planning proposal for a low and medium-density housing development in Rankin Drive, Bangalow. Landowner, Maxwell Campbell, via his company, Instant Steel Pty Ltd, is applying to rezone the existing RU2 Rural Landscape and the RU1 Primary Production zones, to a mix of R2 Low Density Residential and R3 Medium Density Residential. According to planning documents before last week’s meeting, the rezoning would facilitate the construction of more than 40 new residential dwellings. The project is the first to come under the AHCS, a policy which requires developers in Bangalow, Mullumbimby and Byron Bay, who want their land rezoned to facilitate housing, to contribute land, money or dwellings to Council which would then use it to create affordable housing. Such government-led affordable housing policies have come in for significant criticism in the past because of the way affordability is defined. In particular, the state government currently considers housing which is rented at 20 per cent off the market rate as affordable, and only requires developers to offer this discount for 10 to 15 years. But Byron Council has declared that the block it has effectively acquired on Rankin Drive will be used to ‘facilitate the provision of affordable housing to meet the needs of low, very low- and moderate-income households’. It has also stated that the dwellings ‘will be managed so as to maintain continued use as affordable rental housing’. ‘This affordable housing is not bound by the definitions created by the state government’, Labor councillor Asren Pugh said. ‘This is not a ten-year or 15-year contribution from the developer that gets rented at 20 per cent off the market rate and then they go back into the mainstream market. ‘This is permanent affordable housing… ‘My preferred option is to look at the income of the residents of the place and look at the rent being 30 per cent of that, rather than looking at the market rate, but we’ll have those conversations at a later date.’ First regional council The meeting heard that Byron Council was the first regional council to enact such a scheme, but that doing so had required swimming through a sea of red tape courtesy of state government bureaucracy. ‘It’s taken years of committed work, particularly from Council staff,’ Greens councillor Sarah Ndiaye said. The planning proposal for 68 Rankin Drive was given a preliminary green light at the meeting, paving the way for it to proceed to the state government for gateway determination, a process that applies to all rezoning proposals. If determination is granted, the whole project will go on public exhibition....