Inner West Council will push the state government to urgently rezone former WestConnex sites on Parramatta Road for high-density apartments, but Greens and Labor councillors disagree over how much should comprise public housing.
Years after being cleared for construction of the WestConnex tunnel’s initial stages, large blocks of land on Parramatta Road remain locked up with no use. Last month, the state government announced one, in Camperdown, would be transformed into 500 units, including 200 for essential workers.
The former dive sites for the WestConnex on Parramatta Road will eventually be turned into housing.Credit: Nick Moir
The other sites, in Ashfield and Haberfield, have been identified for potential new housing as part of the state government’s land audit, but no announcements have so far been made about their future.
Labor councillor Phillipa Scott successfully moved a motion at the council’s Tuesday meeting, calling on the government to prioritise rezoning the areas for high-density housing.
She said the sites should be rezoned for “mixed-use and mixed-market residential development”, including a “significant portion of government-owned affordable and low-income rental housing” to be built by the government’s developer, Landcom.
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Greens councillors voted against the motion, arguing the only appropriate use for the sites was 100 per cent public housing.
Greens councillor Izabella Antoniou, who has represented the party on council since October, moved an amendment for Inner West Council to call for the developments to be exclusively public housing, saying “the mixed-market element is a huge concern”.
“We have so few examples in the inner west of publicly owned land that we can actually put a solid amount of public housing on, and we need to be using these opportunities,” she said. “We need to be pushing the NSW state government [for] 100 per cent public homes [on] public land – not just waving through their agenda. Otherwise, what’s the point of us?”
