Hurlstone Park Association and the Weaponising of Heritage

Marie Healy, former Greens councillor for Canterbury and constant heritage campaigner for Hurlstone Park, wrote about us last week.

She opens with a pointless attempt to muddy the waters:

People in my area are suspicious when a pro-development lobby group pops up claiming to be a grass-roots. When the multiple community groups opposed the Bankstown line metro conversion, “Locals for Metro Southwest” emerged. Andrew Constance and Berejiklian loved them; it transpired they were formed by developers and a registered lobbyist.

Developers had no part in our founding, developers have no part in our present. We are an incorporated association whose only source of income are our membership fees, the quantum of which can be found here. Nothing we do is particularly expensive.

Our activism has been the result of hard work of volunteers attending council meetings and writing submissions. I personally have been on this beat for a long time.

There’s a certain group of people who are so far removed from concerns about housing affordability that the only reason they could imagine somebody would think differently is a vested interest. It is unfortunate that this bubbles up into accusations of bad faith rather than empathy with people who are getting 20% rent increases.

Skipping over the multiple paragraphs of Healy’s unnecessary personal attacks and onto the substantive claims:

Sydney YIMBY fake news 1: “Restrictions on housing supply, through planning controls like zoning or heritage, mean that we are paying an estimated 40% more for housing then we have to.” Actually, migration, the patterns of urban development in Australia, housing supply, interest rates and inflation, tax incentives for investors and first-home-buyers grants are all contributory.

The number is from research by the RBA, and means they would be 40% lower than a counterfactual where all those other factors are still occurring. There’s a key reason why housing fluctuates wildly in response to inputs like migration and interest rates: it is not very elastic. Planning controls are a huge contributor to that inelasticity.

It speaks to the shakiness of the heritage-at-all-costs position that it cannot be sustained without rejecting the vast literature that says supply, and upzoning specifically, reduce housing costs. This is classic motivated reasoning on their part.

Sydney YIMBY fake news 2: “we can’t afford to be locking up thousands of unremarkable $2m bungalows in the middle of a housing crisis.” Heritage listings are assessed by experts, not arbitrarily applied.

Sydney is objectively locking up thousands of such bungalows, Inner West Council is 43% heritage conserved. If heritage assessments are accurately made against criteria which give such a coverage then they are too broad. There is little incentive for the industry to tighten these criteria because every new heritage property is more work for heritage consultants, be they with councils or in private practice.

An interesting example comes from the Inner West’s most recent attempt to heritage conserve 1600 homes in Marrickville, Dulwich Hill and Lilyfield. A Marrickville resident has shown us that the reports mention multiple landmarks which don’t actually exist.

Which begs the question: is the Council locking up over a thousand homes that consultants have never even bothered to see in person?

Sydney YIMBY Fake news 3: living in a Heritage Conservation Area (HCA) “would mean they won’t be able to build extensions visible from the street, install solar panels on the front of their homes or even paint their fence without engaging expensive heritage consultants.” Most home owners don’t install solar panels at the front of their homes and most house extensions are rear ones regardless of heritage concerns.

Note this does not actually address the substance that these things would not be allowed, just says these changes are uncommon.

It also seems to have fabricated a quote about heritage consultants, which we can’t find anywhere. For reference here’s what we’ve said about heritage consultants on our website, and here’s the pamphlet we letterboxed about this matter.

Sydney YIMBY fake news 4: heritage-listing electricity substations will “protect them forever.” In fact, these structures have been incorporated into multi-dwelling housing, such as in Probert St Newtown. Adaptive reuse adds interest to a development while retaining a heritage aesthetic.

This was possible with a particularly large substation because they were able to set apartments on it back from the street. This would not have been possible with the substations proposed as they were all quite small. Nonetheless it significantly increases the cost of developing the site and reduces the potential floorspace.

I was instrumental in getting heritage protections in my suburb... This involved community engagement, research and honest argument.

We’d like to draw readers’ attention to the Hurlstone Park upzoning that our interlocutor formed her residents’ group to campaign against:

A few mid-rise buildings around the station, some shop top housing, with the vast majority of the suburb staying reserved for single dwelling housing. To us this seems like a pretty modest imposition to get a new kind of train that runs every four minutes (Healy and the Hurlstone Park Association oppose the Metro upgrade as well).

Compare to how our campaign against HCAs determined from ‘desktop analysis’ is described:

It appears that the misinformation being peddled to Inner West residents by Sydney YIMBY appealed to the self-interest of home owners, concerned about where to place solar panels; apparently 60% rejected the idea of new HCAs after a letter boxing campaign.

Housing abundance includes the ability to modify your home to add extra bedrooms, and it takes broad coalitions to make change.

What we have here is not “honest” campaigning from Healy and “misinformation” from Sydney YIMBY: we simply have a different set of values.

We think that if heritage is impacting affordability and pushing people out to the urban fringe we ought to reconsider some of it, especially in areas where many identical examples are preserved and where the absence of new residents is causing rapid demographic decay. Balmain is one example of this, with the whole suburb subject to heritage conservation and the number of 25-34 year olds halving over the last 20 years.

Healy starts from the assumption that heritage, properly applied, could either never impact affordability or is worth that cost. This is consistent with survey data taken from Hurlstone Park during the Sydenham-Bankstown upzoning consultation that showed housing affordability did not crack the top 6 priorities for their area.

Justin Simon is Chair of Sydney YIMBY