Planning reforms to help deliver more community housing

Peak community housing and homelessness sector peak body Shelter WA has congratulated the Premier and the Minister for Planning, Lands, Housing and Homelessness on reforms announced today including those to streamline the planning process for community housing developments in WA.

“We congratulate Minister Carey on this announcement today and commend the Cook government on its commitment to solving the housing crisis,” Shelter WA Acting CEO Paula O’Leary said today.

“Today’s announcement includes a new initiative that will allow all community housing projects the ability to opt into the Development Assessment Panel (DAP) pathway regardless of the size or value of the proposal. This will give confidence to our members that they are better able to deliver streamlined high-quality, well-designed, much needed community housing across WA.”

Housing Supply Unit

We also welcome the announcement yesterday by the Cook Government to create a dedicated Housing Supply Unit in Treasury. We look forward to working alongside Treasury to provide the evidence and expertise it needs to deliver an effective housing system that enables all Western Australians to thrive.”

“We look forward to working alongside Treasury”

Our sector is looking forward to continuing to work with government as a delivery partner to get urgently needed social and affordable housing on the ground as quickly as possible, whilst providing diverse, high-quality homes and great outcomes for tenants.”

It’s imperative that housing delivered under these reforms is affordable, diverse, and high-quality, no matter the size or location.”

We commend Minister Carey for activating almost every lever available to unlock housing supply. We strongly support the State Government progressing its proposed reforms to the Short-Stay Rental Accommodation market (Airbnb’s) as the critical next step.”

There are currently around 10,000 Airbnb’s listings in WA compared with less than 3,000 private rental homes. In terms of an easy win to solve the rental crisis, this reform has our emphatic support.”

Under current estimates we will have an unmet need of 85,500 social and affordable homes in WA by 2041 and need to be delivering almost 5,000 new social and affordable homes each year to meet this. Anything that we can do to unlock barriers to support supply delivery against this target is welcome, whilst also ensuring quality, diversity and affordability is maintained,” Ms O’Leary concluded.

Fast Facts & Links

• There were 18,984 households (33,943 individuals) on the social housing waitlist at July 2023.
• There were 9,729 people were experiencing homelessness in WA in 2021, including 2,315 people sleeping rough.

Rental vacancy rates are just 0.7 per cent and Perth rents have risen 19 per cent in the past year – the highest in the country.

The CHIA/UNI NSW report released on 31 January estimated an unmet need of 85,500 WA households by 2041. To meet this demand need we’d need to increase social and affordable housing growth by up to 8.7 per cent per year or over 4,700 homes each year.