Mayor disputes home owner claims
KU-RING-GAI Mayor Jennifer Anderson has taken issue with resident claims that heritage listing could cause their property values to fall, saying there is evidence to suggest the opposite.
North Shore
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KU-RING-GAI Mayor Jennifer Anderson has taken issue with resident claims that heritage listing could cause their property values to fall, saying there is evidence to suggest the opposite.
After a year of community angst that ended with council recommending six new heritage conservation areas (HCAs) in Pymble and Turramurra, and rejecting five others, the mayor said “fear mongering” had led to misunderstandings.
“There’s plenty of evidence to say it (heritage listing) improves values because there’s a lot of certainty in those streets about the sort of development that will be suitable,” she told The North Shore Times.
“I’ve certainly had emails from residents who say, ‘I’m opposed to it’ and then they write back some weeks later and say, ‘I’ve had time to research it and I’m actually in favour of it now’.
“There is naturally concern from residents who don’t feel they know enough about what it means but I encourage them to do more research because what we have found is that the ones (homes) we had gazetted years ago … people are not coming to us every week complaining about it at all.
“Some people who are strongly opposed to it go out and say things like, ‘You can’t change a light bulb’ and ‘You can’t change a tap fitting’. It’s just not true. If they look at the facts on our website they can learn a lot more.”
She said she lived for 30 years in a heritage-listed home in Killara within a HCA that was applied, long before she became a councillor, and “there were no concerns in our street at all”.
HCAs were “very well accepted” in nearby areas such as Willoughby.
She said they were different from individual heritage listings because the emphasis was on streets as a whole.
“The real emphasis is on the heritage - what should be protected, what is special within Ku-ring-gai and has that value of a HCA. It’s not about non-development.
Most HCAs aren’t in prime multistorey development locations anyway. So really it’s not about stopping families who own properties in extending their homes in a sympathetic fashion.”
The six HCAs in Pymble and Turramurra recommended for listing will be included in a draft final planning proposal to be forwarded to the state Planning and Environment Department.
Some residents argued that not all homes in the HCAs were genuine heritage properties, and that in some cases homes on one side of a street that were included were no different from homes on the other side that were excluded.