Inner West Heritage Consultation
Inner West Council has plans to add 1300 properties to their Heritage Conservation Areas (HCAs), mostly in Marrickville and Dulwich Hill and are undertaking a consultation about it.
These HCAs will effectively prohibit any new density in the affected areas, meaning not just no new apartments or townhouses, but no visible extensions to existing houses either.
This is the last thing we need in a housing crisis, so we need you to make a submission against these changes!
Some points you might want to include:
Heritage conservation areas under the Marrickville DCP do not permit extensions visible from the street. Lots cannot be subdivided if it’s not in the pattern of the existing cadastre, nor can they be amalgamated. This is effectively a ban on all new density.
By preventing new housing construction we drive up property prices, which locks low and middle income people out of the community. This is especially true when the type of housing being conserved is $2m houses.
When new housing can’t be built we lose an injection of young people and migrants to the area as they are often the first occupants of these new apartments. We end up in a situation where the population grows older and older and there’s nobody in the community starting businesses, or staffing them.
These older houses are generally poorly insulated and more prone to mould and rising damp. This means they have much worse energy efficiency than modern dwellings, are more expensive to maintain.
A lot of these houses are a short walking distance from new metro stations, where trains will run every four minutes. Preserving these large houses on huge lots would be a disaster both in terms of building affordable housing close to these stations and creating walkable precincts.
They introduce new hurdles to installing solar panels on the front of your property, which means some people won’t bother, and this is bad for the planet.
California bungalows (which represent the bulk of houses in the areas) are an extremely common housing form not just in the Inner West, but all over the world. We have thousands of such properties already under conservation in Sydney, and this is a classic example of overlisting.
With 30-40% of the council already covered by conservation areas, how much is too much? We should step back, figure out an appropriate heritage conservation area percentage for the council as a whole, and stick to it.
If you cannot extend your property that means people need to leave the area to find room to fit extra children, or house older family members, which undermines community cohesion.
Many of these homes have steep stairs and are not very accessible. Retrofitting without impacting the heritage streetscape is difficult or impossible, and in any case will require expensive heritage consultants every step of the way. This both locks people with a disability out of these areas, and means that as the current population ages they may find their homes are no longer suitable, but there is nothing they can do about it.
New apartments are going to have lifts, and where they have stairs they will be configured to modern accessibility standards.The justifications for these conservation areas are all very similar: they represent an intact subdivision of some person or another’s farm that occurred around the turn of the 20th century. We would not spend millions of dollars erecting a museum to any of these people, and if we did very few would visit it. So why are we locking up over $1b in land in their memory?
Marrickville’s DCP specifies that “Colour schemes must be appropriate to the architectural style and period of the house and based on historical evidence if available”. This means that houses in those areas with yellow doors or mauve rendered walls will be banned, because they’re out of step with the time period. It also makes it difficult for a property owner to determine which colours are appropriate without employing a heritage consultant, because there is no guide provided.
