Much of the housing stock across the former Marrickville Local Government Area (LGA) is from the Victorian, Federation and Inter–war periods (fig1). It is these historic buildings, with their character and embodied energy that The Greens want to protect, preserve and improve.
But The Greens don’t want just to make rules that unnecessarily restrict providing more accommodation in the Inner West. Our increasing population needs homes to live in and Marrickville is a great place for them. We want to give people incentives to improve their property and create housing diversity while retaining their historic houses.
Recently, the state government enacted the Low-Rise Housing Diversity Code. This overrides council’s policies and encourages the demolition of Marrickville’s built heritage. The Greens want to stop this demolition.
By giving ‘mum and dad’ homeowners an incentive to build secondary dwellings on their property we think we can increase Marrickville’s housing stock without destroying the existing historic houses.
Another great reason to preserve our historic houses is preserving their embodied energy. Demolition results in a loss of embodied energy. Construction consumes about 15% of a building’s life-cycle energy requirements. Preserving embodied energy will help achieve zero emissions.
The Greens love the character of our area. We want to find creative solutions to help deliver increased density and diversity, preserve our historic housing stock, retain embodied energy and make it financially possible for regular homeowners to do so.
The Greens will work to protect our historic housing stock and make it easier to provide more affordable and diverse accommodation options.
Where Victorian, Federation and Interwar houses are preserved we’ll investigate:
- Increasing permissible floor space
- Changing subdivision rules
- Increasing “granny-flat” sizes
- Encouraging strata titles
- Easing two storey secondary dwellings rules for laneways