Calls For Floodplain Building To End
Following the devastation of recent flooding, experts are urging government intervention to drive the cessation of building in areas at risk.
Following the devastation of recent flooding, experts are urging government intervention to drive the cessation of building in areas at risk.
Despite the watery devastation that has recently plagued much of Australia’s east coast and specifically the Northern Rivers region of NSW, state planning minister, Anthony Roberts, scrapped a requirement to consider the risks of floods and fire before building new homes.
The move by Mr Roberts came just two weeks after the decree came into effect – at the same time the town of Lismore was continuing to clean-up from a first round of flooding that decimated much of the northern NSW town.
Despite bearing direct witness to what played out in Lismore, Mr Roberts revoked the ministerial directive of his predecessor Robert Stokes and which outlined nine principles for sustainable development, including the necessary management of risk pertaining to climate change.
Less than a week on from the decision, Byron Bay and Lismore were inundated with rains (in excess of 400mm in just 25 hours) and further flooding. It also led to the evacuation of more than 2800 people from the region.
A spokesman for Mr Roberts claimed the minister was working to a set of desired principles brought by Premier Dominic Perrottet, “a clear set of priorities to deliver a pipeline of new housing supply and [to] act on housing affordability.”
While affordability is a growing issue for the NSW housing market, is the safety and viability of housing in floodplains mutually exclusive from notions of affordability?
Dr Karl Mallon, CEO of Climate Valuation – a climate change risk analysis provider producing reports for financial institutions and home buyers — believes that continued building on flood (and fire) prone areas must cease, calling out repeated government inaction on the matter.
“It’s in everyone’s interests to avoid building on flood plains — long term it’s better for house values, banks, developers but the state government and council set the planning rules,” Dr Mallon told Kanebridge News. “With homes built in flood zones, like they are in Lismore, soon it’s going to become possible to insure them. And if they are impossible to insure, then they are impossible to mortgage and impossible to sell.”
Dr Mallon suggests a strong disconnect — between levels of government and councils, banks, developers and insurers — is ultimately failing homeowners.
“There’s a lot of blind-eye compliance with the government not checking to see if [buildings] are safe and viable, and going forward – especially with the planning requirements scrapped — we’re still building [on] flood plains.
“The bit that’s dangerous is that the developer can build, sell and not be responsible.”
Professor Jamie Pittock from the Australian National University in the Fenner School of Environment and Society agreed, arguing that current reactionary cycle of flooding, clean up and rebuild is harming the livelihoods of Australians.
“Where homes are repeatedly flooded, essentially we are creating poverty traps,” said Professor Pittock.
For Professor Pittock, the solution is simple – stop construction on floodplains and rehome those already living in affected areas.
“It’s critical to help those on the most flood prone lands to relocate. Not only because it keeps people safe but also it is more cost effective than rescuing people on the fly and all the public and private investment in rebuilding,” said Professor Pittock.
“Clearly this is a case where the financial interests of property developers, targeting cheap flat, flood plain land has impacted the political process and approvals that should not have proceeded — where governments have been too spineless to say ‘no.’”
While there’s been no direct federal or state government response to calls for rezoning, Premier Perrottet has just announced a new $112 million ‘Back Home’ grants for Lismore. The scheme provides up to $20,000 to residents whose homes have been declared damaged or destroyed and who are unable to claim insurance or utilise the natural disaster relief fund.
The program is not limited to Lismore, extending to other flood prone areas such as the Hawkesbury, Ballina, Byron, Clarence Valley, Kyogle, Richmond Valley and Tweed local government areas.
For Professor Pittock, prevention is the only effective option — especially in the Hawkesbury Valley where the NSW government has currently paused new developments while it revises its flood strategy.
“In the past year, in the Nepean and Hawkesbury Valley, an area of 600 homes that has been flooded twice in a year and those houses just simply shouldn’t be there,” said Professor Pittock. “There’s a little bit of an upfront public and private cost to help these people relocate, but the long term benefits in terms of safety, lower costs, socioeconomic development really make that worthwhile.”
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The Republican nominee says it would help bring down home prices, though these buyers account for a fraction of U.S. home sales
Former President Donald Trump said he would ban undocumented immigrants from obtaining home mortgages, a move he indicated would help ease home prices even though these buyers account for a tiny fraction of U.S. home sales.
Home loans to undocumented people living in the U.S. are legal but they aren’t especially common. Between 5,000 and 6,000 mortgages of this kind were issued last year, according to estimates from researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington.
Overall, lenders issued more than 3.4 million mortgages to all home purchasers in 2023, federal government data show.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, made his comments Thursday during a policy speech to the Economic Club of New York in Manhattan.
Housing remains a top economic issue for voters during this presidential election. Rent and home prices grew at historic rates during the pandemic and mortgage rates climbed to levels not seen in more than two decades. A July Wall Street Journal poll showed that voters rank housing as their second-biggest inflation concern after groceries.
Both major candidates for the 2024 presidential election have made appeals to voters on housing during recent campaign stops, though the issue has so far featured more prominently in Vice President Kamala Harris ’s campaign.
Trump has blamed immigrants for many of the nation’s woes, including crime and unemployment. Now, he is pointing to immigrants as a cause of the nation’s housing-affordability crisis. Yet some affordable-housing advocates and real-estate professionals said Trump’s mortgage proposal would fail to bring relief to priced-out home buyers.
“It’s unfortunate that given the significant housing affordability crisis that is widely acknowledged across most partisan lines, we are arguing about a minuscule segment of the market,” said David Dworkin, president of the National Housing Conference, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, a trade organization, said, “It’s just another effort to vilify immigrants and to continue to scapegoat them for any issues that we have here in the United States.”
A Trump campaign spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. can obtain an obscure type of mortgage designed for taxpayers without Social Security numbers, most of whom are Hispanic. The passage of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 allowed banks to use identification numbers from the Internal Revenue Service as an alternative to Social Security, extending a number of financial services to people without legal status for the first time.
Mortgage loans for undocumented immigrants are typically higher interest and borrowers include legal residents who have undocumented spouses, Acosta said. Lenders include regional credit unions and community-development financial institutions.
In his speech, Trump said that “the flood” of undocumented immigrants is driving up housing costs. “That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens,” he said.
Trump didn’t elaborate on how he would enact a ban on such loans.
Though mortgages for undocumented people living in the U.S. are relatively rare, residential real-estate purchases by foreign nationals are big business , especially in expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles. These sales have declined in recent years, however.
Close to half of foreign purchases are made by people residing abroad, while the other half are made by recent immigrants or residents on nonimmigrant visas, according to an annual survey by the National Association of Realtors. Many affluent foreigners buy U.S. homes with cash instead of obtaining mortgage financing.
In his Thursday speech, which focused mostly on other economic matters such as energy and taxation, Trump proposed other measures to bring down housing costs, including cutting regulations for builders and allowing more building on federal land. Similar ideas appeared in the housing policy outline Harris released in August .
The former president has spoken on housing-related issues in speeches at other recent campaign stops, including in Michigan last month, where he touted his administration’s 2020 overturn of a policy that had encouraged cities to reduce racial segregation .
“I keep the suburbs safe,” Trump said. “I stopped low-income towers from rising right alongside of their house. And I’m keeping the illegal aliens away from the suburbs.”
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