Wollongbar’s temporary emergency housing village for Northern Rivers 2022 disaster survivors would best be decommissioned and the pods used to house police instead, reelected Ballina Mayor Sharon Cadwallader says.
The village on Wollongbar’s sports field was the subject of council, community and state political debate last year, when around a hundred residents received official letters advising they would have to leave before the end of the year.
The Ballina Shire Council owns the land and later agreed to extend a lease to the NSW Reconstruction Authority until early next year.
At least some, if not many, of the residents are understood to be eligible for social housing and on wait lists while a declared housing crisis continues to dominate national and local conversations.
But Cr Cadwallader this week said many of the residents came from the Richmond Valley Shire and might wish to return.
‘It would be up to them whether they prefer to go back there,’ Cr Cadwallader told The Echo and Bay FM’s Community Newsroom.
‘I know there are social housing projects being rolled out right across the region,’ Cr Cadwallader said, ‘so that might be their preferred location, to go back to where they were displaced from after the floods’.
State approves social housing projects without council consultation
The mayor said she was awaiting a council staff report on new social housing projects planned for the Ballina Shire, including two in Alstonville and one in Ballina.
Details of the projects hadn’t come to the council’s attention earlier owing to their exemption from usual local government planning regulations under State Environmental Planning Provisions (SEPP), Cr Cadwallader said.
‘There is a multi-story development of one- and two-bedroom units going in in Deagon Drive in Alstonville, and another development opposite Coles in Alstonville,’ Cr Cadwallader.
‘We have another couple in Ballina,’ she said, referring to a ‘nine-unit, three-bedroom housing complex’ that was part of a First Nations housing scheme.
The former NSW coalition government introduced complying developments under SEPPs with little to no public consultation or warning, leading to expressions of concern from local government representatives at the time.
A change in the state government last year didn’t include removal of the provisions but with the construction industry undergoing a general reduction in activity across the country, not to mention delays owing to the 2022 disasters and pandemic, the changes appeared yet to have significant impacts.
NSW gov’t hunts for social housing land with $5 billion budget
The Labor state government promised in its second budget to invest what it said was a record $5 billion in social housing but is yet to specify exactly where.
NSW Minister for Housing, and Homelessness, Rose Jackson, was on the Northern Rivers in the lead-up to recent local government elections.
Ms Jackson attended a housing and homelessness roundtable discussion at the Mullumbimby Neighbourhood and District Community Centre as part of Asren Pugh’s mayoral campaign for the Byron Shire.
The minister said the government wanted to work with housing advocates and landowners on options for new social housing projects across the state and was open to suggestions.
‘Do councils, or community housing providers, have land that they’d be willing to partner with us?’ Ms Jackson asked.
‘That’s what we’re exploring now,’ the minister said, ‘we’ll have more to say about exactly where that $5 billion is being spent but the budget was only in June’.
‘So we’re still at the point of working out which house, where.’
She also said the future of the region’s eleven housing pod villages was under consideration, with the government hoping to make the most of the public investment by continuing to use the pods for housing after disaster survivors leave.
Elsewhere, Greens Ballina Shire Cr Kiri Dicker has referred to $27 million in public money spent accommodating otherwise homeless people in privately run hotels and motels throughout the Northern Rivers.
Ms Jackson said while the pod villages may not have been the best use of public funds in the aftermath of the 2022 disasters and many lessons were to be learned in hindsight, there was an opportunity for them to have ‘a more permanent role’.
The minister listed other forms of emergency accommodation, transitional housing, or housing for women and children fleeing domestic violence as possible uses.
Ballina mayor in talks with Housing NSW about pods
But this week’s newly reelected Ballina Shire mayor says she wants to see the Wollongbar housing pod village decommissioned and the site returned to its use as a sports field.
Cr Cadwallader wants the pods to be dispersed to pockets of Crown land and used to house key workers.
‘I’m talking to Housing NSW about some sort of partnership we may be able to roll out,’ she said.
‘We need more housing for key workers,’ Cr Cadwallader said, ‘it could be baristas, it could be nurses or anybody frontline service workers’.
The mayor is especially keen to have the pods allocated as housing for more police officers she says are desperately needed in the region.
‘Richmond Command policing is 40 officers short at this time,’ the mayor said, ‘if we can access those officers to help with the crime that’s happening in our shire and provide housing, well, that’s certainly a hook to get more policing’.
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