The majority says selling community land will help fix Shoalhaven's housing crisis.

'To Build Houses We Need to Sell Land.' Then Where Are the Houses? At 6.00pm on Tuesday 25 August, Will Clark had just finished five minutes at the lectern asking Shoalhaven City Council to rescind the sale of the land under Safe Shelter, the Nowra youth centre and Werninck Craft Cottage. Cr Denise Kemp, attending remotely, had the first question. 'Just a question, are you aware of the housing crisis?' Then: 'By selling land, isn't that sort of an opportunity for more houses to be built for these people?' And, when he asked how those people would afford the houses: 'So what are you suggesting? That we don't build any more houses? That we don't free land up for the purpose of making houses and affordable houses? … Can I just ask that to build houses we need to sell land? So we do have to take that into consideration.' Two hours later the rescission motion tied six votes to six and was lost on Acting Mayor Peter Wilkins' casting vote. The land under a twelve-bed homeless shelter is back on the path tosale, and the argument that carried the room — not the only argument, but the one put directly to the man who had just spoken for the shelter — was that selling it is how the housing crisis gets addressed. That claim is testable. This council has been in office for almost two years. It has adopted a housing strategy, formed two housing committees, abolished a third, rezoned a site on a promise of affordable housing, watched a Commonwealth funding round open with councils specifically invited in, and voted twice to sell community land. If selling land produces houses, the record of this term should show how. It does not. What it shows is thereverse. Start with the document, because Cr Kemp's question implies something the resolutiondoes not contain. CL26.157, carried 7–6 on 28 July and now unfrozen, does two things. For six parcels of operational land it appoints a selling agent and delegates the Chief Executive Officer to negotiate and accept offers. For five parcels of community land — including 134 and 136 Kinghorne Street, 102 Plunkett Street and 158 Green Street, Ulladulla — it commences planning proposals to reclassify them so that theycanbe sold. On the published record,nothingin those eleven paragraphs conditions any sale on housing. No parcel is earmarked for a community housing provider. No proceeds are directed to the Affordable Housing Strategy. The money has a destination, and the CEO named it on the night: a$14.4 millionland-sales line in the adopted budget, with roughly $6 million expected this year 'depending on what the market does,'against debthe put at about $56 million. That is a debt-and-cash decision. It may be a defensible one — this masthead has said repeatedly that Council's finances are genuinely bad and that IPART agrees. But it is not a housing decision, and the resolution does not pretend to be one. The person who bought 134 Kinghorne Street at the end of this process could build apartments on it, or a car park, or nothing. Nothing Council resolved on 28 July would stop them, and nothing would oblige them to build a single affordable dwelling. So when a councillor tells a resident that selling this land'frees it up for the purpose of making houses and affordable houses,'the honest reply is: not under this resolution, it doesn't. Council knows how land becomes affordable housing, because it has done it once, and it won an award for it three weeks ago. At Coomea Street, Bomaderry, Council did not sell. Itgave. On 9 June 2020, on a motion moved by Cr Findley and seconded by Cr Patricia White, Council resolved to transfer 44–50 Coomea Street to Southern Cross Housingfor one dollar— a contribution it valued at $1.75 million — bound in perpetuity to affordable housing, with any change of use requiring Council's approval. Cr Proudfoot seconded the 2017 resolution that named the site and the 2019 reclassification that made the transfer possible. The NSW Government put in $4.8 million. Thirty-nine households moved in this February. At the opening, Mayor White said: 'Local government can play a significant role in helping to address the housing crisis being felt right across the country.' And on 14 August, reporting the Local Government NSW award, Acting Mayor Wilkins wrote that it 'shows the excellent outcomes that can be achieved when organisations work together.' Both are right. Note what the model was. Council identified surplus land, reclassified it, and then — this is the step — transferred it to a registered housing provider at nominal value with a housing covenant attached. The reclassification is the same mechanism now being applied to Kinghorne Street. The destination is the opposite. Amanda Smith, who stood for the Shoalhaven Independents Group in Ward 1 in 2024 and spoke against the rescission on 25 August, put the housing case more carefully than any councillor did: 'Partnerships with community housing providers could potentially deliver accommodation for far more people than currently benefiting from the existing use of the land.' That is precisely Coomea Street. It is also precisely what CL26.157does not do. A partnership with a community housing provider is a resolution to transfer or lease land to one. A resolution to appoint a selling agent and accept the best offer is a different thing, andthe difference is the whole argument. Here is the part that turns a rhetorical problem into an accountability one. On30 January 2026, Housing Australia opened Round 3 of the Housing Australia Future Fund — the largest round to date, 21,350 social and affordable homes nationally, assessed on a rolling basis with no closing date until the allocation is exhausted. One of its four streams, Housing Diversity, is built for regional areas: 3,750 dwellings, half social and half affordable, with a minimum application size of just50 dwellingsoutside the cities. Councils cannot apply directly. That is not a barrier; it is the design. The funding goes to a community housing provider, and the council's role is to bring what only it has — land, planning support, a partner. The Australian Local Government Association ran a webinar for councils on 13 March. Housing Australia published a guide for local councils on delivering affordable housing in November. The model they describe is, again, Coomea Street: council land, a Tier 1 provider such as Southern Cross Housing, Commonwealth availability payments for twenty-five years. This masthead has looked for any evidence that Shoalhaven City Council has engaged with Round 3 in any way — a resolution, a report, a notice of motion, a media release, a line in a Mayor's Message, a mention by any councillor in any debate. There is none. The 27 January business paper, six days before the round opened, carried one housing item: the resolution to form another working group. Neither housing committee's published papers refer to it. Not one of the seven councillors who voted to sell community land on 28 July, nor the six who voted to keep selling it on 25 August, has said the words'Housing Australia'on the public record. Nothing under the Fund has come to Council. The Commonwealth money that has reached the Shoalhaven this year — $10.2 million for fifteen transitional homes near Nowra for women and children escaping violence, and $4.6 million for six SAHSSI units in the Illawarra — went straight to the service providers, with no council land and no council role. So the position on 25 August was this. A Commonwealth fund with an open door for exactly the kind of council-land partnership Shoalhaven has already proved it can run. A council strategy, adopted August 2024, whose Action 1.1 is to audit council land for that purpose and whose Action 3.1 is to dedicate it. And a chamber selling the land instead, while telling a resident that the sale is how the houses get built. Set out in one place, this is what the majority's two years on housing look like. Every entry is from Council's own minutes and papers. The current council's housing ledger, September 2024 to August 2026. Graphic supplied separately as shoalhaven-housing-ledger-this-term-3sep2026.png. Two things stand out. The first is that on every occasion this term where a housing outcome depended on holding, dedicating or conditioning land, the majority chose the option that released the land and left the outcome to someone else. Ulladulla: rezone now, secure the affordable housing later —and later never came.Kinghorne Street: sell now, and the buyer decides. The second is that on every occasion where a housing outcome depended on a committee, the majority formed the committee. The Taskforce took eleven months to meet. The working group has not met. The one committee that had actual homeless people on it was abolished. None of the three has produced a house. Four things belong on the other side. Council's finances are real.Four sustainability ratios are failing, the debt is around $56 million, and IPART said in May 2025 that Council remains unsustainable even with a 12 per cent rate rise. Cr Proudfoot's warning on 25 August that the alternative 'could be 20 per cent a year for four years' is not a figure anyone has put in a report, but the pressure behind it is not invented. Cr Kemp's point that pensioners cannot carry another rate rise is a legitimate one and this masthead does not dismiss it. The State's record is not clean either.NSW recommissioned homelessness services from 1 July with, in its own words,'no increase in funding.'Rough sleeping in this district went from 27 people counted in 2020 to 213 in 2026. Cr Steele's argument that higher governments cost-shift onto councils is, in part, correct. The majority did vote for a workshop.On 25 August, ten of eleven councillors present — includingCrs Steele, Casmiri, Clancy and Wilkins— rescinded the new land disposal policy so it could go to a public workshop first. Cr Kemp was the sole vote against. That is a concession, and it should be recorded as one. The CEO has moved on the tenants.He told the chamber that NOAHs' lease at Green Street has been extended three years with two further option years, that'there is no way that we are looking to move any of our tenants any time soon,'and that the process for the community-land parcels will run through public inquiry over perhaps three years. Those are the most specific assurances anyone from Council has given, and they are on the record now. None of that touches the point. A rate rise is a reason to sell land. It is not a reason to say that selling itbuilds houses. Council's own Affordable Housing Strategy records more than 4,100 Shoalhaven households in housing stress and 700 people homeless or marginally housed. Those are the people Cr Kemp invoked. On the record of this term, the thing most likely to help them is the thing Council has already done once and won an award for: put council land into a housing provider's hands with a covenant on it, and let the Commonwealth and the State fund the building. The door to that is open right now, at a 50-dwelling minimum, on a rolling basis, andnobody on the majority side of the chamber has walked through it. Instead, the land under a homeless shelter goes to market with no housing condition attached, and the resident who objected was asked whether he was aware of the housing crisis. He is. He volunteered at the shelter. 1.To the CEO:Has Council, or any community housing provider with Council's support, lodged an expression of interest under HAFF Round 3 in any stream? If not, has the option been assessed, and where is that assessment recorded? 2.To the CEO:Were any of the eleven parcels in CL26.157 — in particular 134 and 136 Kinghorne Street and 102 Plunkett Street — tested against the Action 1.1 land audit or offered to a housing provider before being listed for sale? 3.To the CEO:Does any paragraph of MIN26.240 condition any sale, or the application of any proceeds, on a housing outcome? If so, which? 4.To Cr Kemp:You told a deputation on 25 August that 'to build houses we need to sell land.' Which of the parcels in CL26.157 do you expect to produce houses, under what mechanism, and what in the resolution secures it? 5.To Cr Steele:You said on 25 August that Council 'will actively partner with these groups.' Does that partnership extend to community housing providers, and will you move that any Kinghorne Street parcel be offered to one before it goes to market? 6.To Acting Mayor Wilkins:Coomea Street worked because Council transferred land for one dollar with a housing covenant. Will Council apply that model to any site in the Action 1.1 audit before the Taskforce's authority lapses this month? 7.To the Low-Cost Rental Initiative Working Group, when it meets:Is the Housing Australia Future Fund on the agenda? No adverse finding has been made against any councillor, officer or community member named here, and none is implied. Council's decision at Coomea Street is recorded above as a genuine achievement. Every councillor named is invited to answer on the record, and the answers will be published in full. Sources: Webcast, Ordinary Meeting 25 August 2026 (CL26.187, CL26.189; deputations at 0:23:59–0:42:37; debate at 2:04:37–2:44:00); Minutes, Ordinary Meeting 28 July 2026 (CL26.157 / MIN26.240); Minutes, Ordinary Meetings 28 October 2024 (CL24.284, CL24.289), 27 May 2025 (CL25.158, CL25.159), 23 September 2025 (CL25.303, CL25.327), 27 January 2026 (CL26.1 / MIN26.6); Strategy & Assets Committee 9 June 2020 (SA20.100) and 12 November 2019 (SA19.184); Affordable Housing Action Taskforce agenda 15 June 2026; Shoalhaven Affordable Housing Strategy 2024 (D24/450460); Mayor's Message 14 August 2026; NSW Government ministerial release, Coomea Street; Housing Australia, HAFF Round 3 (opened 30 January 2026) and Housing Diversity stream fact sheet; NSW Government, Housing Australia Future Fund page; Australian Local Government Association, Round 3 briefing; Region Illawarra, 27 March 2026; Alison Byrnes MP, CTAP release; IPART, Shoalhaven SV determination, 16 May 2025; NSW Street Count; and prior reporting at steveprothero.substack.com. 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