Homelessness, Social Housing and Housing Affordability Policy 2022-2025

I urge CoA to ensure more social housing is prioritised. Council's role may be to be a strong advocate and create opportunities for that to be developed in the city. Affordable housing is too expensive for many and it appears no checks are consistently made to ensure that the affordable housing options are taken up in the city. The focus needs to ensure eligible people can access it rather than developers have a way to get some benefits from ostensibly including it as required.

Submitted on behalf of Leon Ferrante (email response 3 Feb 2022)

Hi,

I have read some of the details on the Draft Homelessness, Social & Affordable Housing Policy and have the following feedback:

I think any plan like this should be a long term vision of integrated housing that includes looking at diverse types of dwelling in style and size and also consider living near work and being able to get to work by walking or public transport. This is important for any city dwellings for homeless or otherwise. Often plans can be short term and expire quickly or be terminated by successive governments.
One example is NRAS and I read in your draft that:
NRAS has ended so what now?

"There is no proposed replacement for this program that offers subsidised rentals through the private market, despite rental stress increasing, and Covid-19 creating further stress on low income households"

So I think what we need is long terms sensible visions that cater for the needs of all strata of our society and build a city that runs like a living organism and is both beautiful and efficient.

Also, consciously planned spaces and plantings should be implemented to enhance the lives of residents. The city has many spaces, but often they are not well designed for purpose to cater for the needs of people that inhabit or visit the city. We have many spaces that are perfect to be planted with various food plants and spaces should allow people to sit, play and interact and have functional areas including plant shade canopies for clean air and protection from sun.

For the poor or homeless there needs to be functional housing that is individually suited and affordable or subsidised and not just built to provide private developers with a way of using building incentives. Will the building be done by govt or by private developers? Who gets to input in overall design of dwellings spaces and plantings? It would be good if planning could be done to consider the real needs of the residents and give them a voice in the planning.

Also there needs to be consideration of existing infrastructure and amenities and shops for the intended residents. Often we build apartments with a cafe on the ground floor, but what other amenities do the residents need? I'm sure residents would have a long list.

Another thing that is important is the way the plans and details are presented for input and feedback. Sometimes these documents are very wordy and contain specialized terms. I think plans should be simple in overall detail and present the major principles in an easy to understand format with visual representations so that they are easy for all to understand and comment on.
It is easy to use terms like "liveable city", but you need to clearly define what that means and for who.

In my opinion a liveable city would be one that has convenient and cheap public transport that is quick and efficient. It should also have safe walking and biking tracks and less cars and trucks.
It should have public seating readily accessible for people walking to be able to sit and rest. The city should have a large set of plantings of tress and other plants to keep the city cool and clean the air. It should be a safe city with ample lighting and so on. I also think the planting of trees like plane trees contributes to the allergy problem so plant selection is vital and there should be community gardens and food plants all over. But I must admit I rarely see these things in draft plans and they just seem to be done ad lib after plan implementation. The city should not have cars, just public transport and axis. The cars could be parked outside the city square and people could walk, ride or bus to the centre. Imagine how much cleaner the air would be in this liveable city.
I think planning a liveable city is not just about the housing, but what supports and goes around the housing and makes the city liveable of course.

I have many ideas about how I would expect our city to be more liveable and I'm sure others do too, but how do we get our ideas implemented? That is the key.

Cheers
Leon Ferrante