Inner West Planning Principles Submission Guide
Inner West Council is doing a survey to figure out where to put housing to meet their state government targets. It’s an extremely poor and biased survey in a number of ways:
Each question has 6 possible answers. 4 of them map to ‘agree’, 1 is ‘disagree’ and 1 is ‘unsure’. It is designed to elicit agreement with their plans, so they can later say “80% of the community agreed with this”.
It contains a bunch of loaded questions. For instance it asks whether “high value heritage conservation areas (HCAs) should be protected from upzoning”. There is no distinction between “high value” and “low value” HCAs in the LEP, and these areas constitute 43% of the land area in the LGA. The “high value” distinction is included to try to steer responses a certain way instead of framing them neutrally.
That said we think you should fill this out. Some points we’d like you to keep in mind while doing so:
The four train stations council proposes for highest concentration of new density are among the give lowest advantage areas in the LGA. While they objectively have high amenity relative to most places in Sydney, it’s still a pretty bad look for council that places like Stanmore and Balmain are being roped off from new development. If you agree this is a problem you should say so in the comment boxes.
Heritage conservation areas should not be protected from development. If you look at the above table most of the suburbs near the top are covered entirely by HCAs - they’re being used as a tool to insulate rich areas from development and drive young people away. Balmain’s 25-34 year old population has halved in the last 20 years.
If shop top housing is to revive dead high streets like Norton St, you’ll need Burwood or Chatswood level densities with 30 storey buildings. Leichhardt built absolutely nothing between 2001-16 and has a lot of catching up to do. Again worth adding this to the comment section.
Town centres that would benefit from high density zoning: Percival Rd Stanmore, New Canterbury Rd Petersham, Lackey St Summer Hill, Darling St Balmain.
Answer the rest of the survey how you see fit - they’re ultimately going to zone for a fixed amount of housing either way. Our goal is for them to get responses which challenge their preconception that housing in wealthiest suburbs is a bad thing.
