Today’s Confront the Crisis in the Illawarra Shoalhaven Summit, organised by the Illawarra Housing Trust and Business Illawarra, brought together not-for-profits, various levels of government, developers, bankers and community organisations to talk about the housing crisis.

Michelle Adair, CEO of the Housing Trust and recently appointed Chair of Homes Tasmania, said, “This reality [housing stress] is affecting people right now. What we need to do is stop talking, we need action now.”

Adam Zarth of Business Illawarra, said his organisation was continuing its research, and shared that in the Illawarra Shoalhaven 40% of income is going to rent, compared to 30% nationally.

22,700 households are under housing stress in the region, and 78% of that total are renters.

“The aim is to unlock more housing so people can live close to where they work,” he said, particularly people who cannot work from home such as care, hospitality and other service providers.

“We want to encourage government away from being a regulator to being a facilitator in this area.

“This is an economic crisis as well as a social crisis.”

Draft recommendations from Business Illawarra include innovative funding models, fast tracking affordable housing developments, utilising available government land and providing temporary housing facilities for projects (such as the construction of Shellharbour Hospital).

Steve Turner of property developer Colony 6, which is advising BlueScope on options for its spare 200ha at Port Kembla (and another 200ha at Kembla Grange), took another tack and said that housing is the limiting factor for future opportunities in the region, that have the potential to shape it for the next 100 years.

While a masterplan is not expected to be completed by the end of the year, Mr Turner spoke of the potential for attracting high economic value and employment dense industry, such as movie studios, that would create 30,000 new jobs.

“The opportunity is in front of us to create a new engine room for the region,” he said, with the economic potential of that parcel of Blue Scope land exceeding the economic contribution Blue Scope currently makes to the State.

“If you don’t provide housing, we’ll be holding ourselves back.”

Mark Degotardi, the CEO of the Community Housing Industry NSW – the organisation behind the Confront the Crisis campaign – said that while community housing providers have been doing a great job, they can’t do it alone anymore.

“Let’s not pretend we can solve this problem without investment,” he said.

Speaking to politicians, he said, “If you provide the investment, watch the innovation. We can’t pretend any more – this is the time for the State and Federal governments to invest more in social and affordable housing.”

All speakers were extremely heartened by Lend Lease’s support for mandating the amount of social and affordable housing that has to be included in a development be 30 per cent. Ms Adair commented that it might be best to have a staged implementation, and that the waiving of some fees or contributions might be necessary to make projects stack up, and that many places overseas have had these mandates for years.