Malcolm Price
Gentrification and the housing boom have impacted significantly on our community.
Young adults and families, older people, especially women, and people with limited incomes, have been displaced or locked into extreme housing stress.
There are virtually no stable, low-cost, affordable housing options to rent or buy.
Even the many recently created backyard ‘granny flats’ have tended to be appropriated for short-term Airbnb rental. The result is rapid destructive change in our small community, forcing people with limited financial means to move away from their social networks or live in poverty.
Social Habitat Housing Inc is proposing a community-led, not-for-profit, tiny- house ecovillage and affordable-living project that will be environmentally sustainable and genuinely low cost. The first village is proposed to be located on council-owned land adjoining the Mullumbimby Community Garden.
The heart of the housing model uses a reinvention of the ‘manufactured home estate’ to create three hamlets of approximately 50 dwellings each. Low-cost housing will be achieved by small energy- efficient modular dwellings (30–120sqm), on small lots of 100–200sqm. At the heart of each hamlet, there will be both a physical and virtual community hub including:
- An internet platform/app to help manage ‘affordable living’ community services, such as power and telecommunications;
- A village green;
- A large community shed that houses a community kitchen, workshop; up to 100kW of solar panels on the roof and rental work space;
- Streets will be planted with fruit trees; and
- The surrounding verge of each hamlet managed as food gardens, either communal or rental allotments.
The overall compactness of each hamlet site means it is relatively low cost to provide this supporting infrastructure.
The initial project will transform the degraded, council-owned cow paddock beyond and around the Mullumbimby Community Gardens.
It begins by digging out existing sedimented waterways to restore natural flows and detention on the floodplain.
The earth will be deposited to form three raised human habitat islands that sit above all future floods.
The remainder will be restored as natural wetland and Melaleuca forest for passive recreation, beauty and improved environmental function.
Our development model is based on partnerships – it is not for profit and uses a transparent accounting system.
Overall ownership of the site is maintained within a community land trust or equivalent that provides annual income to the land owner (Council), as well as rules for transfer of property that maintain long-term affordability of dwellings outside of the normal speculative property market.
A public presentation on the proposal will be held on October 25, 5–6pm at the Mullumbimby Ex-Services Club. Register your interest or do survey at www.shh.socialhabitat.com.au.
Malcolm Price is from Social Habitat.
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