Macarthur Pde Heritage Listings
The Inner West are taking public consultation on heritage listing four properties which take up 4000sqm on Macarthur Pde in Dulwich Hill. We think such listings are a bad idea because the buildings themselves are unremarkable and the combined site is so large that there’s a significant opportunity cost to the listing.
We want you to make a submission against these proposals (some talking points included below).
Here are some points you might like to include:
The homes are 1000sqm each, which means that combined they form a large site that could facilitate 40+ apartments. This means that heritage listing presents a big opportunity cost in terms of delivering more affordable housing.
Currently one of the homes has six bedrooms and is being occupied by two people. This is an extremely inefficient use of housing.
Owners have tried subdividing to create a dual occupancy in their 500sqm backyard and been knocked back because of the pending heritage order and the need to “preserve the cadastre” (which means preserve the existing subdivision). This is a tremendous amount of wasted space.
The homes are typical Californian bungalows, of which there are thousands in the Inner West, many of them under heritage conservation. Heritage listing should be used to preserve something unique.
The homes cost $3m which is unaffordable to any family earning less than $700K/yr or without significant inherited wealth, and they are only going to get more expensive over the coming years. This detracts from housing choice in the area.
11 Macarthur Pde has been completely gutted internally, all the ceilings have been replaced and one of the bay windows has been removed.
7 Macarthur Pde had its facade completely changed in the 1930s, so is not original.
The homes are 600m from Dulwich Grove light rail, and 700m from Dulwich Hill train station which will shortly have trains running every 4 minutes. Locking in extreme low density like this hurts public transport uptake, which contributes to climate change through more car emissions.
A better plan would be to upzone the lots to R4 High Density Residential to facilitate their amalgamation into a 5-6 storey apartment development with landscaping.
