Essential Worker Housing
Opening Statement by Emily Lockwood to Parliamentary Inquiry into Essential Worker Housing
25 October, 2024
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.
I’m Emily, a member of Sydney Yimby which is a grassroots pro housing group. I have worked in essential services, we have essential workers in our membership and we recognise that we need more homes to help those who help us.
Our communities simply do not function without essential workers. I couldn’t get here today without them. We have essential workers to bring us into the world, they are there for us in our day to day lives, they are there in some of our most vulnerable moments and they’re there for a lot of us at the end.
Yet it’s so common to hear of them not being able to live anywhere near where they work if they even have a home. I’m here because I’m sick of so many politicians at all levels kicking the can down the road about housing, blaming each other, not deciding to do good policy because you need to have some point of difference with another party. We want homes. People deserve a place to live and for that to happen you simply need to build a lot more. The best time to do that was a while ago but you can take the next best opportunity now to do so. People have forgotten or not paid attention to the human element of the housing crisis - it is not a looming crisis we are in it now. For people who think there is endless time for more discussion and endless consultations before we do something you are out of touch and you are hurting people.
I was lucky enough recently to spend 2 days at the NSW Nurses and Midwives association conference talking to nurses and midwives about their experiences with housing and it was genuinely devastating to hear what some of these people and their colleagues are going through. I have with me a number of postcards that people wrote on about their experiences and had many more conversations on those days.
Losing colleagues interstate, adult children moving back in and living in lounge rooms, the effects on mental health, people losing or having to change jobs, the long commutes people are forced into on either side of long shifts, the effect on regional areas because people who can no longer afford the city have made moves. The personal and professional impacts of housing on people. People living in cars and tents but when we have conversations about the housing crisis equal weight is given to those who think “oh apartments are ugly”. How could we possibly think any of this is okay?
Our recommendations are that DPHI should immediately review planning controls for all areas within 1.5km of hospitals, universities, shopping centres and other employment hubs.
New construction or upgrades of hospitals, infrastructure or other significant employment hubs should automatically trigger a DPHI-led review of the relevant LEP. These reviews should aim to substantially increase allowable heights and densities to ensure that workers are accommodated in new construction.
To make sure that the definition of essential workers is data driven and reflective of the community.
Inclusionary zoning requirements should not be adopted generally. If such requirements are adopted, they should only be used where there has been a significant increase in allowable density, so as to avoid impacting development feasibility.
Where planning controls are relaxed, the government should directly tax a proportion of the land value uplift and use the funds to purchase or build social or affordable housing.
We also ask that you recognise that essential workers deserve choice as much as anyone else. An increase in housing everywhere is good for everyone, it’s good for essential workers whose lives are already often defined by their job to make decisions about housing that suit them as individuals or as families.
