Housing Monitoring Report

Frank Wilkie9:52

Welcome, Laura. Thank you, Laura. 7.1.2, the housing monitoring report. And we have Rowena Skinner and Anita Lakeland here to give us a summary. And Mr. Glenn Conforti, welcome.

Frank Wilkie28:30

Councillors, I'm happy to move the motion. I'm happy to second it. By Councillor Lorentson. This latest housing monitoring report does highlight a range of actions already achieved since the Housing Strategy was adopted in November 2022, but also the work that still lies ahead of us in playing our part in addressing the national housing affordability crisis. It's widely acknowledged that many factors contributing to the situation are beyond the control of local government. These include rising land values, escalating construction costs, labour shortages, high interest rates and cost of living pressures. They're all affecting the delivery of housing, not just in Noosa, but across Australia. However, we will continue to use. Every means available to increase housing choice and support for more affordable housing for local people and key workers. Encouragingly, the report shows more than 1,000 additional dwellings have been approved since 2021, placing Noosa on track to meet the housing targets set by the State of 2,200 additional dwellings by 2031. Last year's amendments to Noosa Plan 2020, plus a removal of infrastructure costs for secondary dwellings, have both encouraged the building of smaller homes and affordable rental accommodation. There's been an extra 200 secondary dwellings built in recent years, and there's been good uptake of our small dwelling incentives, with 251 additional smaller units approved. Developed. It's two and it's too early to assess the success of these amendments, ratified only late last year, but the amendments also allow tiny homes to be built on church land, affordable housing to be built on community facilities land, and they further restrict the loss of new dwellings in medium, high, rural residential and rural zones to short-term accommodation. In the meantime, the focus is on making better use of existing stock by encouraging options such as secondary dwellings, room rentals, share housing, rooming accommodation, and tiny homes. As noted, the State government has also commitments to increase social housing in Noosa. Council successfully advocated for about a 25% increase in state government investment in social housing, with an extra 103 social and public housing dwellings either approved or progressing across the Shire. And these are in addition to the newly approved 25 social housing dwellings at Lake Macdonald Drive in Cooroy, which is being developed through a partnership involving Council, community housing provider Coast2Bay, and support from both state and Federal governments. Council is also has encouraged the transfer of short-term accommodation back to principal place of residence or non-principal place of residence. Since the introduction of a local law in 2023,363 approved licensed STA properties have approvals and a further 112 approvals were not renewed but there is more work to be done. Future actions include reviewing infrastructure charges for rooming accommodation and community residences and investigating new housing models such as co-housing, communal living and multi-generational housing. The future uses of two large Council owned lots at Lake Macdonald Drive will be the subject of public consultation and feasibility studies for affordable housing on Council car parks is underway through a federally funded housing supply program. Council will continue advocating for additional social housing encouraging better use of existing housing stock and working with service providers to address homelessness and housing stress housing affordability is a complex nationwide challenge requiring collaboration between all levels of government and as this reported attests to, Noosa Council is stepping up to play its part. Any other Councillors wish to speak? Councillor Wegener.

Amelia Lorentson34:36

I'll speak. I do want to begin by thanking and acknowledging the work behind the report it's comprehensive and provides a valuable snapshot of the State of housing in Noosa I'm going to talk about housing and so we've got a monitoring report and it's all about numbers on a page but housing's about people and also about the kind of community we want Noosa to be in 10 years, 20 years and 30 years time. What stood out to me the most in this report is that it paints a very clear picture of a community becoming less accessible to the people who keep it functioning teachers, our Noosa's, our hospitality workers, our tradies, retail staff, aged care workers, our lifeguards, police, paramedics, our fireys, our SES workers. They're finding it increasing difficult to secure housing here in Noosa. The affordability figures in the report are also confronting. Entry level home ownership is now beyond the reach of many moderate income households. Many of the people who support our economy and our community can no longer afford to rent suitable accommodation close to where they work. If this trend continues, we're not simply facing a housing challenge. We're reshaping the character of our community. We risk becoming a place where people can only visit, only invest and only retire in. We risk not being able to provide a place where people can build a life, raise a family or establish a career. I don't believe that that's future that most of the residents in Noosa want for Noosa. Demographic trends reinforce. My concern that our older population continues to grow while the proportion of residents in workforce and family forming age groups continues to decline. Every local business, school, health service and aged care facility depends on having access to workers. When workers can no longer afford to live locally, the effects are felt by everyone. For me, the value of this report is not as a monitoring report, it's as Tom sort of alluded to, strategic or diagnostic tool. It helps us understand whether our policies and planning decisions are actually making a meaningful difference. While the delivery of more than 1000 net additional dwellings is positive, think the more important question and I Councillor Phillips, you alluded to this in some of your question is what type of housing is actually being created? How much is genuinely affordable? Who is it serving? And is it in fact helping the people identified in this report as being most affected by housing stress? Report also highlights the continuing role of short-term accommodation in our housing market. I acknowledge that Council has made some progress in this area, but we probably need to do more. At present, once a property holds approval for short-term accommodation, there's no mechanism requiring it to return to the long term housing pool if it is no longer being actively used for visitor accommodation. Nor do we have the ability to limit the number of nights a year that an approved property can operate a short-term accommodation. This means that a dwelling can remain approved for short-term accommodation indefinitely, even where it is largely vacant or underutilised, while housing availability for local residents remains under significant stress. At the same time, vacancy rates across parts of the Shire remain critically low. And that raises to me an important question. Have we exhausted all the available tools, or should we continue investigating additional options to improve housing availability. Where pressures are greatest? Most importantly, I see this report as a platform for action. It highlights opportunities that I think are really worth pursuing, including greater regional collaboration on workforce housing, better utilisation of underutilized, underused land. Increased housing around activity centres like Noosa Civic and the junction, housing above commercial premises, shops where appropriate, encouragement of secondary dwellings, and continued investigation of Council and community-owned land that may contribute to housing outcomes. I also want to touch on the suggestion that we should wait for census data before considering further action. While census night, I think it is tonight, and meaningful results and analysis will take time, um in the meantime what I'm suggesting is that the report, as staff have already spoken about, it already draws on current data sources, including rental vacancy rates, bond data and housing affordability analysis. So those indicators are telling us a consistent story and that story is not improving. So waiting for perfect information can sometimes be a reason for delaying difficult decisions. I think we've already got enough information to understand the direction that we need to take. Every year that passes without meaningful progress. Makes it harder for young people, workers and families to remain part of this community. I'm going to close by just referencing a column that I've just read a few days ago. It was from a financial commentator, Scott pape. He's the barefoot investor. He described the current housing market correction that we're experiencing at the moment as one Australia has needed for 20 years. He also noted in his column that prices, housing prices have increased by more than 400% since 2000, growing much faster than wages partly because our tax and investment settings have encouraged us to see housing as a better investment asset than a place to live. And I'm going to quote something he wrote in his article. He put it really he said that a house is for living. And somewhere along the way, as a country, we forgot that. For me, that goes to the heart of this report. Housing should simply not be measured by values and returns. It should be measured by whether people can afford to live in the communities they serve, whether young people like my kids can see a future for themselves here, and whether workers and families can continue to call Noosa home. Council can't solve housing affordability on its own, but neither are we powerless. We have planning tools, we've got partnerships, advocacy opportunities, and policy levers that can help influence outcomes. The challenge before us is not whether there is a housing problem, the data confirms there is. The challenge is whether we as a Council are prepared to respond with the urgency, creativity, and the persistence required so that future generations can still see Noosa as a place where they can live, work, contribute, and most importantly, belong. Councillor Lorentson. Councillor Phillips.

Jessica Phillips42:27

I'm going speak to it, thanks. In the police, we call it mission creep, where the organisation started off in a role and over years, it crept mission, they call it mission creep. And so firstly, I want to start by saying thank you for the report. So I'm going to go into a broader conversation about it. Um the I want to be really clear that social housing is, there should be no one living on the streets. So I'm never going to start entering into that conversation when we're talking about housing monitoring report. I see that as a state role and responsibility and the mission creep has started coming down to our level. Maybe it was when the Mayor, I'm glad she did that, but I also would like to say state have to do their role. In social housing, what my real passion and I'm reading this and it's sort of alluded to Councillor Lorentson and it is affordable housing is the prevention to social housing and prevention to homelessness. So if we keep families in homes, we prevent them from being on the street. So our role in local government can actually be in our planning schemes and things that we can change within our organisation to focus on affordable housing, because what we need is families to live here, we need them to work here, we need them to get into aged care and nursing and all of the industries that keep our community safe and running. I think we absolutely need a strategy agree with you Tom there um it's just for me if we don't look at the fact that there's less and families being able to afford here I just wanted to tell you my grocery bill is around three hundred and eighty dollars a week for two kids that's probably still need to go still need back to the shops today and it's Tuesday so another friend of mine her groceries is over six hundred dollars a week for two kids that's where the cost pressures are coming so when here and we look at housing and we have to look at the big picture especially when we're looking into budget and how all of these strategies actually talk to one another because on isolation we can look at it but they actually feed a much broader picture of we can start making measurable changes to make affordable housing or the families that live here it actually easier to live here because of the pressures of all the other costs of living so I think I don't want to start talking about creep into groceries and Coles and Woolworths and things like that but I think it's really important that we always look at every decision we make isn't in isolation it's plays a much broader picture I'd love to see our consensus data less than five years that would be incredible if we had that data to feed some more accurate information even when we go into the schools I'd love to know if that's capturing homeschooling as well because I know that's a trend so maybe our figures on school enrolments to be giving us a little bit more accurate data on that but yeah I think it's just always important for me to look at this and go how can we use this in a prevention role rather than using it to react and start trying to create more complicated roles for us. Yeah, that's all I've got to say.

Amelia Lorentson338:37

Castle Lorentson. Sort of a follow-up on that, and given that we had the housing monitoring report earlier today, so the 3.7% increase and acknowledging that we had waived some of our fees for secondary dwellings. Just want to understand whether- We've considered, you know, the need for affordable housing and particularly for smaller residential blocks and whether that 3.7% increase is going to have any impact.