A collaborative effort to help establish an affordable housing complex in the Shoalhaven could be used as a blueprint for other parts of the region.
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The Property Council has been working with Shoalhaven City Council on an affordable housing project.
“We wanted to assist a council with an affordable housing project, because we felt that we needed one in the region to kick things off and inspire other councils to do the same,” Jennifer Macquarie, deputy chair of the Illawarra Chapter of the Property Council said.
She said they approached a number of local councils to help with a project, and Shoalhaven was the “most progressed and had already identified some sites”.
Therefore, the Property Council recently hosted two full-day sessions at Bomaderry.
The first meeting was with current community housing tenants who could potentially reside in a proposed affordable housing complex.
This entailed mapping out how they might use the building, ideas for common facilities and what the building could look like.
The proposed site is council-owned land near Bomaderry railway station that has been identified as having the potential for affordable housing.
This led to the second session, featuring planners, architects, designers, quantity surveyors and others donating their time to work to create a 36-unit design.
On the day, council planners reviewed the design and supplied feedback according to council’s planning policies. “We deliberately wanted to do the design exercise on a site where it has a really good chance of actually being constructed,” Ms Macquarie said.
“It’s now up to council to take it to the next phase internally… And make a decision of how they progress this, how they take it off the plans and turn it into an actual building.
“This is not council’s core business, they’re not developers. But they realise that affordable housing isn’t something the private sector can really do, because the private sector has to make profit.
“They (council) feel they have a role in providing affordable housing, and they’ll probably be partnering with community housing to actually make it happen.”
Ms Macquarie said this example could demonstrate to other councils how such a project could be undertaken.
“A lot of the talk in the media is focused on what state and federal governments can do, and local councils haven’t had a lot to say on it.
“Or often they think mistakenly that it’s something the state and federal governments have to fix. But I think there is definitely a role for local governments, in particular where they've got land that they’re not using.”