PUBLIC WORKSHOP BOWDEN VILLAGE DPA

"A community initiated and run workshop on the Bowden Urban Village Development Plan Amendement (DPA) will be held at 1pm on Saturday, 24 March 2012 at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel. The workshop will allow the community to discuss their concerns, but will also provide residents with advice on the process and how to prepare submissions. On behalf of the workshops organisers Council has invited representatives of both the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure who have prepared the DPA and the newly formed Urban Renewal Authority (URA) to attend."

COMPARISON: EXISTING and PROPSED VISUAL PRIVACY POLICIES, Bowden Village DPA

The Ministers’ proposed changes to Council Development Policies are outlined below – the existing policies are highlighted green.

The Ministerial changes in  this Council wide change are self evidently designed to remove safeguards against unreasonable overlooking which the residents present (at least in theory) enjoy.

DPA POPOSED AMENDMENT

(in “Design & Appearance  General  Section”)

Visual Privacy

10 Development should minimise direct overlooking of the main internal living areas and private open spaces of dwellings through measures such as:

(a) off-setting the location of balconies and windows of habitable rooms with those of other buildings so that views are oblique rather than direct

(b) building setbacks from boundaries (including building boundary to boundary where appropriate) that interrupt views or that provide a spatial separation between balconies or windows of habitable rooms

(c) screening devices (including fencing, obscure glazing, screens, external ventilation blinds, window hoods and shutters) that are integrated into the building design and have minimal negative effect on residents’ or neighbours’ amenity.

11 Permanently fixed external screening devices should be designed and coloured to complement the associated building’s external materials and finishes.

CHARLES STURT DPA – CURRENT VERSION

(in “Residential Dev. General Sec.)

Visual Privacy

32 Direct overlooking into habitable room windows and onto the useable private open spaces of other dwellings from windows, especially from upper-level habitable rooms and external balconies, terraces and decks, should be minimised through the adoption of one or more of the following:

(a) building layout

(b) location and design of windows and balconies

(c) screening devices

(d) landscaping

(e) adequate separation.

33 Permanently fixed external screening devices should be designed and coloured to blend with the associated building’s external material and finishes.

DPA POPOSED AMENDMENT

Visual Privacy

(GENERAL  SECTION, Medium or Highrise Developments, 3 or more storeys):

4 The visual privacy of ground floor dwellings within multi-storey buildings should be protected through the use of design features such as the elevation of ground floors above street level, setbacks from the street and the location of verandas, windows, porticos or the like.

Visual Privacy

(GENERAL  SECTION, Residential Development.)

22 Except for buildings of 3 or more storeys, upper level windows, balconies, terraces and decks that overlook habitable room windows or private open space of dwellings should maximise visual privacy through the use of measures such as sill heights of not less than 1.5 metres or permanent screens having a height of 1.5 metres above finished floor level.

CHARLES STURT DPA – CURRENT VERSION

(Charles Sturt Council   Table Section
Table ChSt/1- Conditions for Complying Development)

Visual Privacy

15 Windows of habitable rooms at or above the second storey and which face side or rear site boundaries have:

(a) permanently fixed translucent glazing in any part of the window below 1.7 metres above floor level; or

(b) sill heights of at least 1.7 metres above floor level.

16 Dwellings have no balconies, terraces or decks at or above the second storey.

NB: Table Reference “ChSt/1 above is to the whole council area. This condition was inserted as a special policy by the Charles  Sturt Council and is not a metropolitan wide policy

Internet down in Pickering Street

A truck delivering building material took out four overhead telephone lines as well as one fiber cable during Federal Parliament Question time today in Pickering Street. The driver was stopped by local residents at the Second Street intersection and persuaded to lower the boom crane which had done the damage. A resident told HI that the fiber cable break sounded like an explosion.

 Building workers on the apartment block next to the Brompton Park Hotel told HI that the driver had earlier seemed to be under pressure to complete the unloading quickly.

Notes on the Bowden Urban Village and Environs Development Plan

Notes on the Bowden Urban Village and Environs Development Plan

Amendment

The Plan seeks to facilitate private-sector infill-housing development in the Charles Sturt Council area.

It is open ended with regards both volume and timing of land supply, since the major development industry players require government assurance on the availability of development opportunities

compatible with their 15 year project development cycles.

For this reason, the Plan foreshadows, and in some aspects, preempts,

principles and objectives for infill development which are City wide in their application.(“As much as it takes, when we need it”)

PRIVATE SECTOR HOUSING DEVELOPMENT.

It is generally accepted by the industry that there is considerable difficulty in predicting and efficiently matching housing supply and demand in any straight forward way. Reasons for this are easy enough to guess at – the variable availability and cost of finance being one, and in the case of the Australian experience, the long term government and social preference for home ownership as the predominant form of tenure being another important factor.

The Bowden and Environs DPA put forward by the Minister, because it aims to implement the SA Governments goal of providing target volumes for housing production from existing urban locations, adds another layer (or “Overlay”) of uncertainty to the fundamental problems the housing industry has in meeting demand. Not only because (in comparison to greenfields development) the meeting of targets via urban infill is far less predictable, but also because infill housing involves -potentially at least- a transfer of value between pre-existing housing users and new-housing developers. This transfer can take the form of the appropriation of public space – the St Clair development is the prime example of this - but as well necessitates relaxed development controls on overlooking, site areas, car parking, rubbish collection and other aspects of housing sustainability - as for example in the Brompton City Edge infill project, which shows fine grained examples of the problems.

The level of expropriation of value depends upon the relative use-value of the existing development and the infill which is inserted into it. In the case of the Bowden Village site, this is largely a positive transfer,flowing from the developer to the surrounding area since the site is presently vacant and contaminated. At the other end of the spectrum, negative transfers of value can be significant.

The crucial factor here is the conflict between the economy wide incentives for housing production, which are primarily not location specific, and the Governments proposed Development Plan Amendments, which are highly locational in their effect.

It has been reported that the various subsidies for home ownership are of the order of $65 billion Australia-wide per year.* These take the form of first home owner grants, negative gearing and capital gains provisions, and exemptions from GST payments. They are available independently of the geographical location of the housing produced with this assistance. (Hence the experience of recent years of housing production being roughly comprised of 30% “second” homes – holiday houses and speculative investments. The 2006 Census for example reports that 10% of housing in South Australia, at any one time, is unoccupied. These houses in aggregate could be regarded as a “Ghost City” in that their economic reality is divorced from any actual human inhabitation.)

China now has an estimated inventory of 64 million vacant homes. It is building up to 20 new ghost cities a year on the country’s “vast swathes of free land.”

What effect will these changes have? While the economic incentives for higher density housing construction are 'in step' with and re-enforce the property value increases of recent years, the resultant expropriations of amenity could be presented as a win win situation, at least for those able to take advantage of Commonwealth Government subsidies to home owners. This seems to be the position of the State MP Mr Atkinson, who is on record as encouraging people to sell their homes to the developers and trade up to a new home on the St Clair site – outside of his electorate.

Should the unthinkable happen, and the $65 billion subsidy is not sufficient to maintain the housing asset bubble, then with the new development controls in place, the housing industry will require more and more density, and less and less amenity, in order to go ahead at all. In short, there are no funds available for Keynesian 'counter cyclical' stimulation of demand.

The Plan establishes a category of infill development (“Affordable Housing”) which is exempt from all or most conditions of development control. The Plan points to Brompton policy area 20 - and the exemptions established by precedent in that area bordering the Bowden site - as an example which should be emulated elsewhere in relation to “affordable” housing.

By resident “d”

* Reply to criticism: The figure of $65b results from an attempt to update the figures presented in the 2009 AHURI Yates Report. I include an estimation of the present day value of superannuation fund housing investment which attracts taxation benefits (contrary to all economic orthodoxy, but in line with the pro cyclical impact this has on the existing housing market)