We are gathered here in the year of our Lord 2030 to mourn the passing of Byron Bay.
It is sad to see the death of one so beautiful, especially when that death was so cruel, so pointless, so profit-driven, and Byron could have lived on for so many more years giving joy to those blessed to live here or visit.
But it had to die. Make no mistake, this was necessary.
The mayor said so.
In 2021, there were about 16,000 dwellings in Byron Shire. We could cope with this, but barely. Traffic jams were common, parking a mess and over two million tourists peed in Byron dunnies every year.
But then, in 2024, a knife was plunged into the heart of heaven with the Byron Shire Land Strategy proposing 5,300 new dwellings.
This mass population growth was compulsory, according to the mayor, ‘to house our people’, especially those living rough.
To cater for this we all must live in smaller spaces, and shed our ‘heyday’ of the last few decades.
The height limit will go up, density parameters will increase, and we will have ‘to do more with less’. So, team, tighten your boot straps, gird your loins, lie back and think of subdivisions and prepare for the tough times ahead, for King, country and the homeless.
There is an inherent falsehood at the heart of this – that by increasing the raw numbers in Byron Shire there will be lower prices. Have prices in the Gold Coast gone down? Or in Ballina? Are they suddenly affordable?
In the background, I hear the mantra ‘supply and demand, supply and demand’ echoing around the shire as developers and surrogates support the vomit that more dwellings will mean cheaper homes for our people. However, supply and demand only works if there is a limit to the demand. There is not.
Every single person in the world wants to live in Byron Shire (okay, a slight exaggeration) and so you could build five thousand or 20 thousand houses in our hood and the demand would stay the same. Well maybe there would be some drop, because it would become such a shit-hole place to live. Supply does not affect endless demand because it is, well, infinite.
The next false hope is that this increase will house ‘our people’. Says who?
There has never been a mass housing development in Australia that had a geographic prerequisite for purchasers. So, every one of those 5,300 houses will be available to the highest bidder. Unless of course they are one of the very few that actualises under Council’s affordable housing policy, (or a Brandon Saul special) and thus get a leg up. Even then, affordable housing is rarely limited to locals.
So, hardly one purchaser will be ‘our people’ unless they have the deepest pockets.
Sleeping rough
As for sympathy for those who are sleeping rough, I reckon that’s a great thing. But the vast majority would need social housing and there is simply none of that in this plan. To suggest that a spasm-produced number does anything for homeless people is cynically using their desperate existence to line pockets. If we build 5,300 new places, there will be just as many people sleeping rough as before.
As for density, I love a big house. We fill it with refugees, and family and friends and visitors. I can play banjo loudly, build kayaks, screen print NIMBY t-shirts, and yell at the television.
We provide spaces to nuns and inland folk who need a beach hit. But of course, the mayor doesn’t actually mean ‘us’. Phew.
He really means the ‘others’ who can be crammed in. Because the ‘heyday’ is not over for those who are already housed in houses. That’s a relief.
There is certainly a housing crisis, for renters and buyers. But it is not a local crisis. It is a national crisis accentuated here, driven by mass immigration, stupid taxation rules, irregulated holiday letting, and the unfettered proliferation of multiple home ownership.
Young people can’t borrow because they are burdened with debt for daring to study, job insecurity and rampant mental ill-health. We have returned to the dark ages where the key criteria for home ownership is nepotism and family money. Byron Shire is so myopic we pretend to claim the crisis as our own as if we can solve it.
So, if 5,300 homes is not good for the homeless, or for affordable housing, or the environment, or our amenity who is it good for? I guess the newly squished-in imported rich. And property developers.
And so here we are at the funeral for Byron. Brunswick Heads is now blighted by huge satellite towns, parking is impossible(r) everywhere and there is talk of a supermarket built over the water. In Ocean Shores, there is no room for children to play, and the roads are as impassable as the industrial estate.
Ye Olde Mullum hospital site is a rabbit warren of the white shoe brigade. I wanted to go to Suffolk Park the other day, but gave up after an hour in traffic. In downtown Byron Bay, the new McDonald Towers compete with the lighthouse.
And the prices, well they are as crazy as they ever were. Thank the goddess in 2030, the mayor is promising more housing to lower prices. But Byron is mort. That’s what happens when you drip feed an insatiable beast.
♦ David Heilpern is a former magistrate and is now Dean of Law at SCU.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
