Inaugural General Meeting
Today we held our IGM and elected a committee for 2024. Below is the text of the report delivered by our Chair on the storey so far:
What a journey. It’s barely been six months since we were three people at a pub after a community meeting about a Leichhardt upzoning, saying we should organise something. A few weeks later we were thirteen people, and resolved to incorporate. And less than four months ago we were 250 people packing out the Lady Hampshire to formally launch our group.
We now have 246 financial members who have given us both their trust and their cash to carry this mission forward. Myself and the rest of the committee are extremely grateful for that trust.
We’ve heard extended soliloquies from the Premier Chris Minns about our work attending community meetings and offering a voice of reason on housing policy. Last week Lucy Turnbull used her National Press Club address to speak glowingly about the work we’re doing to eliminate low density zoning. She even told people to follow our instagram. We never dreamed of getting this kind of cut-through in such a short space of time.
These are ideas whose time has clearly come. Spiralling rents are forcing people to reevaluate their attitudes to density. Media outlets are increasingly being run by people who can’t afford a home. There’s a large constituency out there for housing abundance, they just need to have the ideas put in front of them. A lot of them will attend council meetings to fight for it if we give them the permission and the structure to do so.
A lot of our early skirmishes have been in the Inner West, because we have a high concentration of members there. Back in June we noticed there was a motion on deck for Inner West Council to heritage list 15 electricity substations and heritage conserve 1600 homes in Marrickville and Dulwich Hill. So we wrote a blog about it and registered to speak at the meeting. The following day we got our first media mention in the SMH and the exact angle we wanted: look at all these graffiti-riddled substations that council thinks need to be protected forever.
When the meeting came around myself and another member were there, but we didn’t actually have to speak about the substations. The media attention we’d created had councillors strike that part of the motion, because it clearly was not in keeping with community expectations.
The less media interesting part of the motion remained, however, and council voted to take the heritage conservation areas to community consultation.
We letterboxed each of those areas in turn, letting them know that this would mean they wouldn’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. That consultation was won: over 60% of respondents rejected the new conservation areas.
60% of people. In the Inner West. Saying they didn’t want new heritage rules. That’s truly a sign of the times.
Despite this the local planning panel recommended this proceed to the next phase and send it to the state government. There will be a council meeting on this on Tuesday the 21 November - we need as many people as possible to turn out for that to show them that we can’t afford to be locking up thousands of unremarkable $2m bungalows in the middle of housing crisis.
We’ve been involved behind the scenes too: we were the only group outside of NIMBY groups and local business chambers involved in the Inner West’s local environment plan consultation. Myself and another member both turned up to a room with 30 other people being consulted, and I say without exaggeration we were the only people aged under 60. As a result, the report cited “a mixture of views” rather than “room united against new density”. That’s a big change when you realise how much councillors end up running on instinct when everyone they encounter is saying “no” to things.
We’ve similarly been to speak at a recent meeting about upzonings in Leichhardt, where they want to allow four storeys around a light rail stop. A lot of homeowners in the area turned up to that meeting. That’s now progressing to consultation as well, with town halls in the evening on 23, 29 and 30 November. We again need as many people as possible to attend those town halls, either to speak or make it clear there’s support in the audience for new density.
We had another early win in Bayside, where they were trying to ban townhouses and small apartment buildings on a bunch of industrial sites. We ran a campaign to get people to write in, got it covered by the Guardian and over 60% of respondents said they shouldn’t go ahead with the plan. As a result, they’ve changed that plan so the majority of identified sites will now allow townhouses or apartment buildings.
These are just early steps; we have a monumental challenge in front of us. The shortage means that 20% rent increases are becoming normalised, including for members of our committee. The number of rough sleepers continues to climb and NSW’s net interstate migration has been negative for decades. We’ve all had friends move to Brisbane or Melbourne because they just can’t afford to stay.
This breaks up families and leaves children growing up without their grandparents to take care of them, and it breaks up friendship networks whose spillovers are so important for our economic dynamism.
In my inner west suburb very few of the small business owners, let alone the employees can afford to live locally. This is absolutely shocking in an area built on the back of being the first home for new Australians, because in the 50s and 70s it had plentiful cheap housing. Across our city we see the wealthiest areas stratifying themselves between those who consume and essential workers who spend hours in their car every day commuting.
And that’s the thing about sustainable, walkable communities; they’re not actually that sustainable if the people that make them tick can’t get there without a long drive. Truly sustainable neighbourhoods are more like an organism, they need to continue to grow and change to meet the community’s needs.
So we need you to change the conversation in those communities and elsewhere. We need you to turn up to council meetings to provide a “yes” and drown out the chorus of “no”. We need you to talk to your friend who just got a rent increase and point out how much better things would be if there was enough room for everyone. We need you to talk to your parents and show them how hard it is for you to move out and why.
We can win this, but we’re going to need to do it one conversation at a time.
