Wyndham Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy
Planning for greater housing diversity and choice
The Challenge
Wyndham City Council has a housing diversity challenge. Currently, more than 91% of homes across Wyndham’s established residential and growth areas are single detached dwellings with 3 or more bedrooms. Population projections and demographic trends indicate that there are changing housing preferences, with a demand for smaller and better-designed housing typologies. With more than 40% of residential land yet to be developed across the LGA, there was a significant opportunity to update the existing Housing Strategy to provide a more robust housing framework that advocates for greater housing diversity, improved design outcomes and more housing choice.
Building on the work undertaken as part of an initial peer review, CoFutures worked with Council to undertake a full refresh of its Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy.
What We Did
- Developed a set of housing principles to inform the location and preferred type of new housing.
- Updated the housing framework plan, including refining boundaries of substantial change areas for greater housing diversity.
- Embedded policy initiatives to achieve greater housing design, such as advocating for and supporting the Future Homes project.
- Designed and delivering a comprehensive community consultation process to test the proposed housing principles and to better understand community housing priorities.
- Engaged with a deliberative community panel around housing preferences, challenges and opportunities.
- Modelled future residential capacity scenarios to test and confirm Wyndham’s future housing needs.
- Assessed Wyndham’s theoretical housing capacity against updated demographic projections.
- Undertook a complete refresh of the 2018 Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy including refining a new set of actions to increase housing diversity, improve design outcomes and implement new planning zones.
Outcomes
In December 2023 the Final Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy was unanimously adopted by Council. The document will provide clear guidance on the locations for future growth, strategies to improve residential design and actions to diversify Wyndham’s housing stock. CoFutures continues to work with Council to implement the Strategy into the Wyndham Planning Scheme.
