Our community knows that housing affordability, availability and diversity is a real challenge across our growing city and region.
Consultation for our Local Housing Strategy identified affordability and diversity as the highest priority areas, ensuring there is access to an appropriate mix of housing types, in a market of a changing community demographic, low vacancies and rising costs.
Last week we met with the NSW Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC) and Crown Lands to sign a landmark Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to support exploring opportunities for more housing for our community.
Mayor Kylie King and I joined Minister for Planning and Homes the Hon. Anthony Roberts MP, Member for Albury Justin Clancy MP, Executive Director Delivery South Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC) Peter Brackenreg, and Executive Director Crown Lands Matthew West to complete the signing of the MOU at our Albury Works Depot.
The MOU agrees to explore the opportunity of repurposing our Albury and Lavington Works Depot sites, currently located on crown land, for mixed-use redevelopment, including housing, commercial and office space, and public open space, and relocating our depots to a single consolidated site, better located to service a growing city.
This is just the first step in investigations, however if it can be achieved it will be game changing for our community. These sites have been identified as prime mixed-use locations in our CBD Master Plans with their close proximity to our CBD’s, essential goods and services, education, medical services, transport, public open space and more.
The signing of this MOU supports the recent Collaboration Agreement we signed with LAHC last year to deliver an estimated 540 new social and affordable homes and 700 homes for the private market.
I’m pleased we are able to continue to build on this important partnership with the NSW Government to support more diverse, affordable, and well-positioned housing in our growing city.
Frank Zaknich
AlburyCity CEO