Salvation at Hand: Why Ex-MP is Championing Faith-Based Land Development

Australia is sitting on thousands of prime housing sites—and they’re hiding in plain sight. In the Sydney metro region alone there is the potential to build more than 20,000 homes on 747 sites, all within 800m of a train station. The land in question belongs to a variety of faith-based organisations and, according to former NSW planning minister Rob Stokes, the potential is “extraordinary”. There are more than 2500 places of worship in Australia. Stokes, a NSW parliamentarian from 2007 until 2023 as the Member for Pittwater who held multiple portfolios during his career, is now the chair of Faith Housing Australia and says we can learn from the experience of a UK church. “In Australia the scale of resources is extraordinary, and it’s sitting right under our noses ... people walk past it every day, and often they’re underused,” Stokes says. “The Church of England in the UK went through the same process a couple years ago. “They found that in England, a place much smaller than Australia, they came up with more than 60,000ha of land and it’s not just the land, it’s the people connected to it.” The people in question, and the faith-based charities they work with, could be the foundation for social housing, providing support for residents and indeed creating partnership with developers to put forward projects that stacks up. ▲ Church of England housing development at St Aldate’s, Gloucester, that used the proceeds of the project to refurbish the church into a community facility. These communities can provide wraparound services for counselling, financial assistance, domestic violence support, aged or child care and companionship in new developments, just as they have been for hundreds of years. “People in need of social and affordable housing, not always but often, have a lot else going on in their lives and there’s a need for other support,” Stokes says. “Faith groups are motivated to provide those sorts of things, so it’s sort of a match made in heaven. “It’s good land, it’s well located with existing capacity in the city and they are motivated people. “Our case to governments is if you’re going to be putting subsidies into providing social, affordable housing, you’re going to get a lot more bang for your buck if you partner with faith groups because they’re already interested in doing it anyway.” ▲ Rendering of the St Paul ’ s Anglican Church and Community Centre with a residential tower above it planned for Bankstown on church-owned land. The major hurdle, however, is rezoning land but it ’ s been in the too-hard basket for too long, Stokes says. “We’ve got this crazy situation where places of worship [fall under the same] zoning as a water tower or a sewer treatment plant—it just doesn’t make any sense,” he says. “The housing crisis is so pressing now we don’t have space for a too-hard basket. We have to take things out of there, dust them off and see what we can do with them.” Stokes says that ultimately all land in a city needs to be utilised efficiently and we are running out of “fields” to develop. “In the 1970s and 80s, where everything was greenfields, we kept spreading outwards,” he says. “From the 1990s on we went to brownfields—we thought, hang on, we’ve got to look at former industrial sites to be deindustrialised and more land opened up within the cities. “Then we went to greyfields, shopping and transport lands, we started looking at those places. “We’ve run out of fields, we now need to look at yards—church yards, graveyards and rail yards—that’s the next iteration.” ▲ Rendering of Aura Holdings’ retirement living proposal for the Anglican Church of Southern Queensland site at Milton, Brisbane, that was filed in May. So what’s the hold-up? Stokes says it’s the government, community and congregations but they need to see they all have a common cause. “We’ve got resources that are lazy, they aren’t being used efficiently and aren’t needed for a particular purpose at the moment,” he says. “It stands to reason that we should use them to fulfil our mission, regardless of different faith traditions. “That’s the common cause, public welfare and concern for those less fortunate.” Stokes says heritage can be respected and, ultimately, faith groups are charities caring for the less fortunate and not pocketing the money. “We’re not actually proposing for the place of worship to go. It would stay but instead you can mix the use on the site,” Stokes says. “I think concerns about the old halfway houses or boarding houses or those sorts of products is; the developer comes, makes money and leaves the community with all sorts of social challenges. “The difference here is that the place of worship would be staying put and so those people would have services at their doorstep. “So it’s as much building a community more than just building a housing development.” How it works Stokes says there are opportunities for developers, particularly if they don’t have experience with community housing, and for faith communities, who don’t have experience developing. “A good example is property developer Traders in Purple. They partner with churches and other faith groups frequently, and they get amazing results,” he says. ▲ Traders in Purple ’ s Lane Cove Anglican Church plans include an eight-storey development and a 400-seat auditorium opposite The Canopy shopping centre. “You’ll find that faith groups have got great land, but that’s all they’ve got. They’ve got very few other resources, so they need to partner. “My encouragement to development communities is to contact us if you see a great site and you want to partner ... often there might be sites around a place of worship. “Or to landowners who might be thinking, oh, look we can’t really use this because of the place of worship next door. “You may find that there’s opportunity for a joint venture that can make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. “You could not just build discrete housing, but you can actually put a community together.” Stokes says there are a few ways these types of projects can stack up for affordable and social housing, which is why now they are focusing their advocacy on rezoning the land. “Either we can get a rezoning for residential use, sell some or rent some at market prices to subsidise the provision of social and affordable housing,” he says, “Or if we get an external subsidy, we can actually put 100 per cent affordable housing units on the site. “But if the government doesn’t want to provide an additional subsidy, well, we can subsidise it ourselves using the value from the land and that’s something that no private sector developer can do by themselves.”

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