We need a serious talk about development on floodplains with more creativity and sophistication. The recent discussion about development or no development in southern Mullumbimby has a lot of emotion and an assumed common understanding but there are no underlying principles to guide it, except maybe ‘don’t build on floodplains’. This is a flawed principle, because it assumes we can only build in one way and all floodplains are the same. In fact if you go looking, almost nowhere in public documents are there guiding principles for development in flood zones articulated. What are we trying to achieve and what is our order of priority within these principles to achieve it?
Here are three?
1) Safe building principle: Where people live, habitable space, should be safe where possible therefore, built to float, built high or be mobile enough to leave and never built in high-velocity floodways. All development controls including adjustments to height and building height plane should reflect this immediately.
2) Safe haven principle: a) all people; b) all non-human animals; c) non-fixed mobile assets and infrastructure, such as vehicles, should have access to safe passage and sufficient area of safe haven on higher ground, whether natural or constructed as a right.
3) Infrastructure design principle: All flood mitigation, detention and defence infrastructure should be: a) practical for at least three purposes. For example a levy bank could be a protective barrier, a raised street with housing and a safe haven; b) biophilic, therefore designed to enhance, imitate or regenerate natural systems, including hydrologic flow and detention and biodiversity. For example this might involve no net import of fill or nutrients, thus features like safe havens are created by excavation of natural sediments that also create, recreate billabongs/detention basins.
So here is where I get controversial. South of the dangerous flood barrier of the Brunswick River/Left Bank Road creek system within Mullumbimby there are only two relatively high places that could conceivably be safe haven/high places once substantial flooding occurs, both are in the potential southern Mullumbimby development area, Wes Arthur’s house and John Thompson’s land behind Ann Street. I leave to readers to draw conclusions. Is this even part of the discussion in contemplating our residential strategy?
Another serious post-disaster issue that was handled badly post the 2022 floods was the awful transitional housing arrangements which have no solution in sight.
The sad thing is that 20 years ago, going back 50 years, we had close to the best stop-gap transitional housing in the state. It was our beach and riverside caravan parks, which through an act of bastardry became zoned for only visitor accommodation and were taken or effectively stolen by the state government to make money. Meanwhile there have been no new caravan parks, manufactured home estates, or suitable designations for clustered tiny houses created since the 1980s.
Byron Council’s planning department shows no interest in including or promoting this type of housing, it is a blind spot, or a sort of perverse colonial prejudice – I know councillors and the mayor support these types of solutions.
In relation to solutions, currently Council-owned land like Vallances Road could accommodate a 200-small-lot site on less than one tenth of the land, or rural properties could create ten 20-lot primitive camping sites, that within a disaster response could be reconfigured as 20-lot house villages. Noting just this quantity would address much of the itinerant car-as-home dwellers and rough campers we currently have, at little cost with a degree of dignity, and run as low-profit making Council business. Finally, the answer why they say this can’t be done, is the difficulty to change planning instruments, but it’s bullshit, they could go through the NRRC (now NSW Reconstruction Authority), like the expensive pod villages.
I am happy to talk more if anyone is interested.
