Saying No to House Resumption
Earlier this month 15 000 Brisbane residents received a letter from the LNP City Council informing them their properties could be resumed. Together with sitting Labor Council members Jared Cassidy and Lucy Collier and Labor Mayoral Candidate Tracey Price I called out this behaviour and spoke to concerned residents. Watch my speech below.
15 000 is a huge number. That’s how many people have received letters saying their house could be resumed and behind each of those numbers is a human story, like the ones that I have heard from the residents of The Gabba Ward. These are community members who have been beside themselves with anxiety about losing their homes that their families have grown up in. Community members who could lose their home that have just moved into to start their family for Council to build a park. Houses of great heritage significance bulldozed during a housing crisis.
Silvia and Bill from Gloucester Rd received a letter about their house being resumed.
To compound the stress, if any of these residents followed the procedure laid out in the letter, they received no answers about what the letter meant and were just passed on from council’s planning to parks to infrastructure departments.
I am all for parks and density done well. And there are many great alternatives. There are houses on the flood plain in West End that can’t be insured who I am sure would appreciate a conversation about resumption. There are also blocks of land peppered through the Gabba Ward sitting dormant.
But beyond these letters is the bigger story of an LNP council desperate, who don’t have any adequate housing policy in the middle of a housing crisis. The brutal Temporary Local Planning Instrument that I am against which can force up to 90 stories into the peninsular is not a plan. Likewise, resuming family homes with no warning is not a plan, it’s a disaster.
What we want BCC to do is to remove the confirmed park status from the properties and instead, work with the local community to provide much needed public space in currently available vacant lots.
Felicity Meakin a West End resident whose house is marked for resumption by 2026.