Increase in Floor Space above Council proposal and
Planning Proposal misrepresentation
REDWatch welcomes Council’s draft submission especially in
that it highlights the increase in floor space and number of units above the
Council proposal.
In REDWatch’s view the planning proposal has been
constructed in such a way to make it almost impossible for non-planners to
understand the proposal and its implications.
In particular all the key maps and information are not
contained in the planning proposal document meaning that to understand the
proposal tenants need to work out what is and is not relevant from studies.
This is very difficult, and as the Council submission points
out, the information in the studies is contradictory or does not directly
relate to the modified proposal on exhibition. On top of this the information
headlined by DPE does not reflect the likely outcome of the planning proposal.
REDWatch is particularly concerned that the proposal shows
no solar analysis of the planning proposal’s impact on parks, streets and
courtyards as the only material supplied is for assessing the Council’s
proposal and not the exhibited proposal.
REDWatch does
however have concerns about the Council submission.
Floor Space should be 30% of Residential Gross Floor
Spacer not dwellings
These relate to the Council submission not separately
dealing with the need for floor space to be allocated on the basis of
Residential Gross Floor Area (as done for 600 Elizabeth Street) rather than by
unit / front door numbers in the DPE PPA proposal.
REDWatch feels that this point gets lost alongside the
restatement of Council’s original tenure ask. Clearly if floor space were
allocated on the basis of a percentage of GFA rather than of front doors, the
proposal will deliver more social and affordable units than would be the case
if the same percentage is applied to the number of units. This is because the
unit sizes proposed for social and affordable housing are smaller.
Council Officers Response:
The exhibited planning proposal, in Section 4 – Explanation of Provisions,
explains what will be required in the local environmental plan (LEP). It says
that 26.5% of residential gross floor area be for social housing and 7% of
residential gross floor area be for affordable housing.
While the development
outcomes express this as dwellings, it is the LEP requirement that ensures that
the final social and affordable housing outcome is based on residential gross
floor area.
At Section 2.1 of the
City’s submission a recommendation is included to ensure in the Explanation of
Provisions, for absolute certainty, that the minimum % requirement for social
and affordable housing applies to all residential floor space in Waterloo
Estate (South), including any design excellence floor space.
REDWatch Response: Noted re GFA being the
proposal basis for the planning controls as opposed to the higher dwelling
numbers being used by DPE in the exhibition.
OUTCOME – COUNCIL RESOLVED TO RECOMMENDED IN ITS
SUBMISSION (IN PART): At a minimum, restore the requirement in the publicly
exhibited planning proposal that at least 30% of gross residential floor space
on LAHC owned land be for social housing and at least 20% be for affordable
housing.
Separate Social and Affordable Housing arguments
It should be clear that the minimum social housing ask is
for 30% of GFA. The restatement of Council’s request for a higher percentage of
social housing should be a separate point.
Council Officers Response:
The City’s submission, at Section 2.1, includes a recommendation that 30% of
gross residential floor space on LAHC owned land be for social housing.
REDWatch Response: We did not say it was
not there. We recommended that it be separated from Council’s affordable
housing ask of 20%. Our concern is that by bundling the two, as is done in the
submission, there is a risk that the argument for a 30% minimum for social
housing gets subsumed by the affordable housing ask. There are different
arguments for each. 30% is in line with Communities Plus Policy of 30:70 and
should not even be an issue in this development. The 20% affordable housing ask
is twice what the IAG suggested and needs to be argued separately. Two fights
we thing are best separated because the arguments are different hence the
suggestion.
OUTCOME – Council is restating the importance of both
Social and Affordable housing to the Minister and in their submission.
Response to misleading exhibition
Given the Council submission’s repeated argument that the
proposal misrepresents the proposal to the community REDWatch proposes
that the Council submission should request that given this representation the
proposal should be withdrawn, modified and re-exhibited. Further Council
should insist that if the 10% on top of the Council original proposal is
pursued, such a change is substantially different to that which has been
exhibited or described (explained) to the community and that the proposal
should be re-exhibited before being submitted back to Gateway for approval and
legislative drafting.
Council Officers Response:
The City’s submission, at Section 1.2, includes recommendations that the
density be reduced to maximum proposed by the City’s planning proposal.
Irrespective of
whether the City’s recommendation is accepted by the Department or not, the
submission recommends an addendum to the Urban Design Review (Hassell, 2022) be
published by the Department to reconcile errors and inconsistencies in the
various publicly exhibited materials to ensure planning proposal is clearly
described to the community and amenity is not reduced.
REDWatch response: The Council submission does
highlight errors and inconsistencies. The Council submission also raises the
question of it the community has been misled during the exhibition. This is
specifically in relation to McEvoy Street (p8 & p38), the impact of the 4th
building on Waterloo Park (p9) and in relation to floor area where the
submission says on p12 “it is the City’s view the publicly exhibited planning
proposal and draft design guide misleads the community in what will be built at
Waterloo Estate (South).”
From the community side there are concerns
about the Planning Proposal document not having all necessary information in
one spot for easy access for those trying to understand the proposal. Also the
lack of any solar assessment of the exhibited proposal on parks, street and
courtyards is a major oversight. The community has had great difficulty in
understanding the proposal and the likely density. The DPE presentations and
distributed material have not painted an accurate picture of the likely outcome
from the proposal. One month into the DPE exhibition it is still not
volunteering that the density was higher than Council’s in presentations.
All of this goes to the quality and truthfulness
of the exhibition and the community’s ability to understand what is being
proposed and to make an informed response. REDWatch is arguing that if the PPA
recommends a final proposal is 10% larger than the council’s proposal, then it should
be regarded as substantially different to what the community has been lead to
believe and therefore should be fixed up and re-exhibited so that the community
can respond to the final proposal rather than the proposal going directly to
gateway.
Council officers are asking for the
proposal to be fixed up and made public, REDWatch is asking what should happen
about the misleading of the people that live in Waterloo South.
OUTCOME – COUNCIL RESOLVED TO ADVOCATE (IN PART): that
the City write to the Department of Planning and Environment seeking an
extension of time for community to respond to the Waterloo Estate (South)
Planning Proposal & Design Guide and to make available a clear visual
representation of the proposal, noting that this is not readily available or
easily accessible to the community in current documents.
Lack of design Excellence tenure spread clarity
It is not clear to REDWatch, nor mentioned in the Council
submission, how a design excellence provision that maintains the proportion of
social and affordable housing will work in a LAHC proposal where there will be
different buildings for different tenures. REDWatch is of the view this needs
to be clarified at this stage given that some DAs are likely to assessed by DPE
and others by Council.
For example a private tower development block might undergo
a design excellence process and get 10% floor increase, but under the proposal
only 66.5% of that increase is likely to go into that building and 7% into an
affordable housing building and 26.5% into a social housing building elsewhere
which may not have gone through a design excellence process. If a social
housing building has achieved design excellence that 66.5% of its uplift will
go into a private building elsewhere. How this process works in a staged block
by block development seems to be unstated and is not covered in the Council submission. REDWatch
recommends this issue be considered in the Council submission.
Council Officers Response:
This matter can be managed in the current design guide provisions that require
a Stage 1 development application.
The location of the
social and affordable housing is not known at this stage of the planning
process. However, the Stage 1 application is required to set out how floor
space for social and affordable housing is allocated across the site.
None of this derogates
from the requirement in the planning proposal (future LEP) about the minimum
proportions of floor space that must be social or affordable housing.
REDWatch response: As long as this is clear
at this stage rather than a grey area with wriggle room between DPE and Council
potentially assessing different sites at DA stage. REDWatch has requested
further clarification from Council Officers on how a stage one DA will interact
with design excellence provisions for different tenure buildings in potentially
different DAs.
Human Services
REDWatch welcomes the inclusion of the Human Services plan
work in the Council submission. This work however is currently only focused on
addressing current human service delivery issues in Waterloo Public Housing.
Phases of the plan dealing relocations and with increased human service need
arising from relocations, as well as how the human service system will work
post development with a mix of NGO, DCJ and CHSP service provision, is yet to
be agreed or undertaken.
REDWatch urges Council to include in its submission the
need for a robust human services plan covering current, relocation and post
development human service delivery to be created and delivered to meet the
needs of the social housing tenants it will house.
Council Officers Response:
The City continues to support the community in its advocacy for a robust human
services plan.
Staff from the City
are participating in the development of the human services plan, which has six
priority areas: safety, health and wellbeing, communication and consultation
and community participation, customer service, service integration and service
accessibility for all service users, and responses to systemic issues (and
accountability) on an ongoing basis.
The Department of
Communities and Justice is responsible for the endorsement, publication and
delivery of the plan. The City may have a lead or supporting role in carrying
out actions under the plan.
A recommendation has
been added at Section 2.1 of the City’s submission to ensure the Department of
Communities and Justice develops and implements the Human Services Plan
including the delivery of services to existing residents, during the relocation
of residents and all future residents.
REDWatch Response: REDWatch’s
Co-spokesperson Geoff Turnbull is a co-chair of one of the two coordination
Groups implementing the current draft human services plan. The areas of the
human services plan outlined above only deal with the issues facing current
tenants. There is no human service plan yet dealing with relocations or what
the human services might look like after the redevelopment. REDWatch welcome
the Council involvement in the human service Collaborative and we also welcome
Council pushing for a Waterloo Human Services Plan that deals with relocations
and the redevelopment.
There is currently no firm plan for a
broader plan, hence our request for Council to join with REDWatch to push for a
human services plan that will also cover the redevelopment.
OUTCOME – COUNCIL RESOLVED TO RECOMMEND IN ITS SUBMISSION
TO: Ensure the Department of Communities and Justice develops and implements
the Human Services Plan including the delivery of services to existing
residents, during the relocation of residents and all future residents of the
site
No study on if the density will work for the future
social housing cohort
REDWatch keep being told that people issues, such as if the
density is too high for those coming into inner city public housing, is not
something that the planning proposal can deal with. REDWatch is of the view
that Council needs to push back on this aspect being excluded from the
strategic planning discussion.
A planning proposal is all about if a particular land use
and its controls are appropriate for the land being rezoned. The assessment
cannot take a tenure blind approach to acceptable density at the same time as
saying the planning proposal will specify around 30% social housing. To specify
social housing as a significant use requires assessment of the suitability for
that use.
Nowhere in the studies has LAHC or Council asked the
question whether the density proposed will be suitable for the approximately
30% proposed social housing tenants who will live there. This question must be
addressed.
If the current or higher density is delivered under the
planning proposal, Council also needs to at least name what will be needed to
make this density work for the social housing tenants who will live in the
development in 10 – 30 years’ time.
Currently in Waterloo almost all allocations are from the
priority list. By the time the redevelopment happens the make-up of social
housing will be very different to what it is at moment, in the same way that it
is different now from when in 2005 the government changed length of leases and
made public housing the option of last resort.
Public housing tenants already complain about the way in
which allocations impact on longer term public housing tenants. The human
services plan proposes to look at wicked problems around anti-social behaviour,
people who are in contact with the justice system and people whose tenancies
are at risk. Other work is being undertaken to try and improve work with people
suffering drug and alcohol issues, mental health issues and trauma. With
continued priority allocations the size of the problems the human service plan
is seeking to address are expected to increase. The human service plan aims to
improve supports but it will not address many of the issues that will arise from
the governments allocations into public and social housing.
REDWatch is of the view that Council and DPE must ask the
question, at planning proposal stage, if the proposed density is suitable for
the 30% of people who will include a much higher proportion of people who have
higher and more complex needs than in the incoming community in the private
units within the same development.
Council Officers Response:
The City and the Independent Advisory Group both recognise the very high
densities proposed in such a large project at the Waterloo Estate (South) and
acknowledge the heightened importance of providing high quality public space,
and access to community facilities and services for all people living in the
precinct. This is provided in the proposal.
With regards to the
needs of people living in the precinct with high and complex needs, the
importance of the Human Services Plan is paramount, as advocated in the added
recommendation described above.
REDWatch Response: REDWatch does not accept
that a human services plan, that does not currently exist, will increase
services sufficiently for allocations with high and complex needs to have
successful tenancies in a redevelopment at the density proposed. There is no
indication that either the Social Sustainability Report or the IAG had access
to the information necessary to assess if the densities were appropriate for
those with high and complex needs. As an example many people are currently
housed in low rise or lower levels of buildings due to concerns about the risk
of suicide. The suitability of the proposal needs to be assessed for the
cohorts being given priority allocations and REDWatch is proposing this should
be done preferably in a Social Impact Assessment independent of LAHC.
OUTCOME: See as part of below section
Need for an independent Social Impact Assessment
The existence of the Social Sustainability report in the
studies highlights the fact that the impact on people should be taken into
account. It is a concern that there is no further reference in these reports
except other than to use them as a basis for determining the need for community
facilities. Even in assessing community facilities the report assumes the needs
of social housing tenants is already met and that facilities are needed for the
new community. This does not recognise the shift in public / social housing
allocations.
REDWatch has major concerns about the Social Sustainability
report and is aware of rumours that the report was watered down at the request
of LAHC. Early requests both for a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) and for a
Health Impact Assessment (HIA) were rebuffed by UrbanGrowth and LAHC and the
Social Sustainability report was in their place.
The Social Sustainability report does not assess the impact
of the changing social housing make up other than in terms of unit size
requirements.
The report does say that certain activities such as place
making and community development will be crucial to the success of the
development but does not seek to condition them but merely notes that this will
be up to LAHC to do when it lets contracts. Planning experts like Tim Williams
have told REDWatch that without a commitment to ongoing investment in making
this level of density work the project is likely to fail. There is no
suggestion that such ongoing investment will be required for this project to
work at the proposed densities and while conditionality is applied to physical
infrastructure there is no conditionality for social infrastructure.
In the same way that Council has referenced the human
service plan work which would be crucial to the success or otherwise of the
development for public and social housing tenants, Council also needs to take
up the issue of the suitability of the development for social housing tenants.
At DA stage there will be a requirement for Social Impact
Assessments (SIA) and hopefully Social Impact Management Plans (SIMP). We would
also like Sydney Local Health District to undertake a full Health Impact
Assessment (HIA). The problem is that many of the impacts are already happening
and relocation issues and developer contracts will predate the DA SIAs.
Given the inadequacies in the Social Sustainability Study
to assess if the density level was appropriate for the future social housing
land use given government allocation policies, REDWatch wants DPE to commission
an independent Social Impact Assessment to assess if the density proposed is
appropriate for this land use.
REDWatch also requests that that SIA look at what should
be included in a SIMP to ensure that everything necessary to deliver a
successful project at the density determined is independently established.
REDWatch propose that the SIA recommend a draft SIMP that
could form the basis for what will be required at DA stage and also with the
recommendation that LAHC should implement the SIMP with immediate effect. Such
a document would probably have no official standing but would provide an
independent SIA and SIMP recommendation that were in the public domain rather
than left to the proponent behind closed doors with their preferred developer.
REDWatch recommends Council consider including such a
recommendation, or a proposal similarly addressing these areas in its Waterloo
South submission.
Council Officers Response:
The planning proposal material includes a Social Baseline Study and Social
Sustainability Study. While this is not the Social Impact Management Plan
described by REDWatch, together these documents make recommendations about the
delivery of infrastructure and services, and about working with the community
throughout the redevelopment process (beyond this planning process).
The Human Services
Plan that is being developed in consultation with the community and the City,
is to ensure the delivery of the necessary services to support all future
residents of Waterloo Estate (South).
The City is working
directly with the Land and Housing Corporation to ensure the delivery of other
public infrastructure, including the parks, roads and a community facility.
There is also requirement in the planning proposal for other community
facilities floor space, including medical facilities and childcare.
REDWatch Response: LAHC resisted the
inclusion of a Social Impact Assessment and a Health Impact Assessment in the
Study documents. The Social Sustainability study does not do what an SIA would
do. It leaves responses to issues raised totally to LAHC at the contract stage.
Council, when it became the planning authority, decided to accept the Social
Sustainability report that had already been done rather than request a new
study.
A Social Impact Assessment and a resultant
Social impact Management Plan covers much more that what a human services plan
might contribute, even if it was to deal with the redevelopment and much more
than the delivery of public infrastructure. It deals with identifying the
impacts from the redevelopment and then putting in place ways to mitigate that
impact.
Given the inadequacies in the Social
Sustainability Report REDWatch would like a Social Impact Assessment undertaken
by DPE as part of their assessment of the planning proposal. REDWatch would
like Council to support that request. Council should have an interest in
ensuring that the Waterloo South redevelopment has a special focus on the most
vulnerable and that their interests are protected as far as possible. A SIA
independent of LAHC is one way to do that.
OUTCOME – COUNCIL RESOLVED TO RECOMMEND IN ITS SUBMISSION:
Prioritise development of an independent Social Impact Assessment and Social
Impact Management Plan to identify and mitigate impacts on communities from the
redevelopment of the Waterloo Estate (South).
Thank you
REDWatch thanks Councillors and Council staff for their work
on the Waterloo South and on this submission. REDWatch thanks Council for making their analysis and submission
available to assist the community understand and respond to the proposal on
exhibition. We also thank Council for funding support of Counterpoint to undertake capacity building and community development around the exhibition and subsequent processes.
Papers for 4th April Council Committee: https://meetings.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=137&MId=3954
Papers for the 11 April Council Meeting: https://meetings.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=133&MId=3964
The full Council resolution on the Waterloo South exhibition can be found with the Council meeting papers.
As both Council Committee and full Council meetings are streamed the discussion by both Council meetings can be viewed through the webcast link on the above links.
Geoffrey Turnbull REDWatch Co-Spokesperson 12 April 2022