Reasons for people living outside Woollahra to make a submission opposing the rezoning proposals

A Word version of this can be downloaded here.

Looking at each in detail:

Just over 50% of the area is a Heritage Conservation Area including 240 heritage items. Although currently listed items will be retained, estimates are that up to 191 contributory items may be destroyed. It is not just listed items which create the heritage of an area but all the contributory items as well. The remaining listed buildings risk being dwarfed and overshadowed by surrounding 20 to 34 storey towers, losing their original context and diminishing their heritage contribution in a changed and unsympathetic setting.

We all will be poorer if we lose our history and heritage. This is cultural vandalism at its worst and must be strongly opposed.

2. It’s a very poor use of taxpayers’ money to subsidise the wealthy and will make housing affordability worse, not better.  The report identifies $1.3 billion of infrastructure investment required to support the increase in population. But this excludes the cost of the new station and any new schools, which, if the population increases 4-fold, will need to be built despite what the Government tries to say. That must take the true infrastructure cost towards $2 billion, much of it funded by the taxpayer.

And who will get the benefit of this massive taxpayer investment? Not those hoping for affordable housing. Over 20 years, a maximum of 160 affordable units could be delivered but, as the developers can make a financial contribution instead, realistically the number will be much lower than that. Worse still, these contributions don’t even have to be spent in Woollahra. The real beneficiaries will be the wealthy who can afford to buy the new luxury units built by developers who will have to sell a two-bedroom unit at $3, 4 or 5 million plus for to be economically feasible.

Meanwhile, all the people of more moderate means who were living in the low-rise interwar unit blocks which are a key feature of the suburb, will have had to move out for these homes as they are demolished to make way for these luxury apartments. The current price of a 2-bedoom unit in this type of block is around $1.3-1.6 million. Even allowing for a premium selling to a developer, this doesn’t come close to the price of a new apartment. This makes the impact on housing affordability worse, not better, as these current residents will then be forced out of the area altogether.

There are many other suburbs where a billion dollars or so of public money could make a real impact on people’s lives. Spending it on this rezoning proposal to gold-plate the Eastern Suburbs just doesn’t make sense.

TfNSW’s Transport and Accessibility Plan (TMAP) and its modelling is inadequate and superficial and didn’t model specific intersections. The department admits it used Google Maps to assess traffic, and they were unable to correlate traffic speed and congestion to standard performance metrics such as level of service and degree of saturation. Even so, the key observations identified existing congestion on the main arterial roads and at important intersections, including New South Head Road and Ocean Street.

Fortunately, Woollahra Council did commission a transport study for their Alternative Approach. Unsurprisingly for those who are familiar with just how crowded our roads are at the moment, the 10,000 dwellings scenario found it would cause severe congestion, not just for locals but for all the other eastern suburbs residents using the limited number of major roads.

If you need to use Old or New South Head Road or Ocean Street, you should strongly oppose quadrupling the population of Edgecliff-Woollahra without any additional investment in roads.

The knock-on effect of this is that residents in ALL surrounding LGAs will suffer a decline in the healthcare available to them - Woollahra/Edgecliff residents needing care will swamp GPs and dentists outside their suburbs; waiting times in Emergency Departments will skyrocket; ambulances will have to be diverted away from POWH/SVH to Royal Prince Alfred, Royal North Shore, St George and other hospitals.

This is not just bad planning, it is dangerous planning.

5.If the Government is allowed to do this in Woollahra, your suburb could be next. Woollahra is being used as a test case, a precedent which will shape what happens in other suburbs across Sydney. If the Government can push this proposal through despite its obvious flaws, what will follow elsewhere?

Proper urban planning includes understanding the current topography, existing infrastructure, history and heritage, transport, schools, tree canopy etc to determine what a realistic target for densification should be. The Government’s approach for Woollahra is to pick a target and then rezone to meet that target, abandoning all good planning practice and totally ignoring the wishes of local residents.

If you don’t want this to happen in your suburb, make sure you make a submission opposing the proposed rezoning now.