Heritage Substation Madness
Inner West Council is proposing to heritage list 15 electricity substations at their meeting next Tuesday, 20 June. Here are a few examples:
Not only are they eyesores, but these kinds of listings are terrible for housing affordability. In Brunswick in Melbourne recently we saw a development be delayed for 7 years and subject to thousands in legal costs because it would have demolished a graffiti covered substation much like the one above. Ultimately the developer had to scale back plans from 333 apartments to 168 and replace the childcare centre with a commercial space. They also had to keep the substation intact and put it in the foyer.
In the same motion they are also proposing a massive expansion to the council’s suite of Heritage Conservation Areas (HCA), as the map here shows. An HCA is an area where you cannot add new density that is visible from the street, the council tells you what colour you can paint your house and you can’t even install solar panels on the front of your house.
They are frequently used not only to prevent development within the HCA, but outside of it using the handwavy justification of “context”, as we saw recently when Randwick Council objected to a tower in Zetland (which is in another council area!) because it was visible from the West Kensington HCA.
HCAs already cover a huge percentage of the Inner West. The entirety of Haberfield and Annandale and the whole Balmain peninsula are HCAs, for instance. The question becomes: if we heritage conserve everything, where are people going to live?
Particularly if we want widespread medium density and low-rise across our suburbs instead of pure high-rise in a few ex-industrial sites, we need to have the suburbs to spread that density over. Changes like this fly in the face of that.
If you scroll through the report justifying the new HCAs you’ll see a bunch of pictures of bungalows, federation houses and Victorian terraces which could exist in any part of Sydney. They are not notable, they are not unique, the only thing going for them is that they were built at a similar time and somebody is able to draw on a narrative that William Augustus Starkey subdivided his 9 acres into 40 lots and this means nothing can ever change.
Unremarkable bungalows
Unremarkable terraces
Finally there is another separate motion to heritage list 4 bungalows on Macarthur Pde, Dulwich Hill which collectively cover 4000sqm of land a short walk from the light rail station. The opportunity cost here is staggering because one of the most difficult parts of developments in the inner city is having to perform lot amalgamations 200sqm at a time. By listing these $3m houses, council guarantees that the only people who will ever be able to live in them are the obscenely wealthy, whereas otherwise they could be replaced by a 30 unit low rise development with nice gardens and good local amenity.
Macarthur Pde bungalows
What you can do
First, if you live in the Inner West you can write to your councillor.
For the electricity substations and HCAs cite C0623(1) Item 15 Inner West Heritage Program.
For the Macarthur Pde bungalows cite C0623(1) Item 5 Planning Proposal - Macarthur Parade Heritage Listing.
Their contact details and ward maps are available here, figure out which ones are applicable to you or contact us on the form below and we can point you in the right direction.
Secondly, you can become a member of Sydney YIMBY. We’ll be organising a group of people to attend the council meeting and speak against these motions.
