Have Your Say on Housing in Lake Macquarie

Lake Macquarie City Council is asking residents to share their thoughts on how and where future homes should be built, and your voice matters.

Two important consultations are now open. The short Housing Strategy survey (closing 30 November 2025) invites ideas on how to provide more housing choices that suit our growing and changing community.

You can take part at shape.lakemac.com.au/housingstrategy.

The Housing Diversity Development Control Plan (DCP) review (submissions close 24 November 2025) focuses on the design standards that guide new housing types, such as dual occupancies and medium-density homes. 

Details are at   shape.lakemac.com.au/housingdiversitydcp.


Council decisions on housing shape the future of every neighbourhood. Please take a few minutes to share your views, thoughtful local input now will help keep our area liveable, inclusive and sustainable.

Housing Diversity plan on pause for pondering

Council’s Housing Diversity Planning Proposal, a major planning document which has the potential to reshape residential zones across the City, was presented to the new Councillor cohort in December 2024. 

Thankfully the new councillors were concerned enough about the lack of genuine community consultation and city-wide impacts of this controversial issue to not support the proposal, request more information, have more options considered, and have several internal workshops to better understand the issues, options and implications. 

To address the housing crisis the State Government has already directed local governments to permit increasing housing density within 400m of designated train stations (Fassifern is not a ‘designated’ train station) and local business centres, including Toronto. 

In addition the State government is aiming “to permit three to six storey flat residential buildings in the R3 Medium Density Residential Zone within 800m proximity of town centres and train stations. It also aims to permit multi-dwelling housing, attached housing and two-storey residential flat buildings in the R2 Low Density Residential zone within 800m proximity of town centres and train stations” (p12 LMCC’s Recommendations to the Development and Planning Standing Committee Meeting - Monday 2nd December 2024)

Council is, however, proposing to allow for potential density increase in every R2 and R3 zoned block across the entire city, subject to their suitability. It will also allow suitable blocks to be subdivided down to 200sqm. 

From a local perspective where our community is dominated by large, often bushland, blocks in a R2 zone (low density, the proposed changes have the potential to see a land use change that would decimate our bushland corridor as building footprints are increased at the expense of our biodiverse assets. Council states the planning proposal applies to residential zoned land and will not increase risk to critical habitat or threatened species, populations or ecological communities, or their habitats. Within our community threatened species, such as Squirrel Gliders, Powerful Owls and Tetratheca juncea, do exist, fragmentation of vegetated corridors is a key driver of local extinctions and in a biodiversity crisis this should be acknowledged. Indeed,  Council’s own species management plans recognise this. 

Additionally, as many would be aware, our existing infrastructure is inadequate for the current population  let alone the projected increase. Footpaths are almost non-existent locally and Council has repeatedly advised that new ones will not be constructed due to geography and low population; increasing density in a geographically constrained area will still not result in more footpaths. Local roads are already too narrow in places hampering parking and access during construction projects. Public space per capita for the Toronto area has already been identified as not meeting the needs of the projected population increase.

Genuine community consultation is required to better understand the Council’s proposal and its impact. Only 20 submissions were received during the public consultation period. The question has to be raised, is this a representative sample of the residential population that will be impacted by the city-wide Housing Diversity Plan?

Our local councillors are keen to ensure that the community is aware of the very real impacts this proposal would deliver. 

Take a chance to read the Housing Diversity plan and communicate with your councillors. https://shape.lakemac.com.au/housing-diversity 

Cr Anthony Swinsburg is actively seeking community feedback. 

All Councillors have a workshop on the Housing Diversity proposal in early February. 

Our West Award Councillors are; 
Anthony Swinsburg (Ind) - aswinsburg@lakemac.nsw.gov.au 
Madeline Bishop (ALP) - mbishop@lakemac.nsw.gov.au 
Kate Warner (LI) - kwarner@lakemac.nsw.gov.au
Jason Pauling (Lib) - jpauling@lakemac.nsw.gov.au 

How dense can we be?

On exhibition at present is Council’s Planning Proposal for Housing Diversity and it’s well worth a look and even a comment or two. There is no denying that the housing crisis is real. The majority of housing stock in Lake Mac is detached dwellings (84%), and there is a need for more varied and affordable housing types.

Council’s Housing Diversity Planning Proposal states “The basis of the existing policy is to prevent higher intensity infill in the R2 zone and restrict lower intensity infill in the R3 zone, however given the subtle difference between the residential development types, this approach is unnecessarily restrictive. The intensity and character of development can be managed through other controls including maximum building heights, zone objectives and development controls.”

Unfortunately, Council’s track record of utilising “building heights, zone objectives and development controls” to manage the character of a development has often been exceedingly poor and therefore taken an extraordinary amount of community vigilance to ensure that community character is retained, often with outcomes that only exhausted the community members involved. It’s a tough cause when pitted against cashed up developers and professionals. Even when proposing their multi-storey complex on Bath Street at Toronto’s foreshore Council ignored their own planning instruments.

On exhibition until October 14, you can read the whole proposal and make a submission at https://shape.lakemac.com.au/housing-diversity

In the table above, extracted from the Housing Diversity Planning Proposal, the R2 zone, which is the majority of low density residential zoning in our community, is proposed to also be able to accommodate, multi-dwelling housing, residential flat buildings, dual occupancy and semi-detached dwellings. as is the case in the R3, medium density zoned areas.

Blink and you’ll miss it- Biodiversity on the brink

Biodiversity month just finished…did you notice? Held in September each year to focus on the variety of all living things it was a blink in the calendar of life. You can make the memory last though. The CPPA has started an iNaturalist project, https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/projects/coal-point-landcare to collect and share images of the wonderful wildlife that surrounds us. Inaturalist is easy to use. You can download the app and when you see something you know or don’t know, take a picture and the team of specialist behind the scenes will assist in identifying your discovery. 

We can’t protect what we can’t see, love it or lose it. Recently the Department of Environment and Heritage produced the NSW Biodiversity Outlook Report 2024.

There were several key findings in the report:

• only 50% of threatened species are expected to survive the next 100 years
• only 29% of the capacity of habitat to support native species remains
• past habitat loss and future climate change will significantly reduce the capacity of landscapes to retain biodiversity over the next 50 years
• for the first time, land permanently secured for conservation has exceeded 10% of the state, increasing from 8.6% in 2007 to 11.2% in 2023.

It’s no secret the CPPA’s focus over the past few decades has been on protecting and preserving the local environment. Long-term locals can recall a time when little birds, like pardalotes, use to flit through the abundant bushland understorey, the chorus of frogs resonated after rain, blue-tongue lizards were about, the foreshore didn’t need fortification and big trees provided hollow-homes for parrots, possums, squirrel gliders, sugar gliders and microbats.  

More recently locals have been witnessing the fragmentation of our biodiverse bushland through sub-division and larger building footprints, the loss of small birds and ground dwelling animals as uncontrolled cats and the odd fox roam at night and kill, the smothering of the relatively fragile native flora as robust exotic plants and grasses are dumped into local reserves, the incursion of possums into roof spaces as their hollow bearing trees are felled, and the disappearance of canopy connectivity that allows the local wildlife to navigate space but also provides shade, shelter and the backdrop of our bigger bushland backyard.

We know a fair bit about our local biodiversity. From 2012 to 2018 the CPPA completed a $1million project, Threatened Species Last Stand (TSLS), on the Coal Point peninsula. There were many great outcomes from that project. There was a successful environmental burn, which you can read about as part of the journal Ecological Management & Restoration .The Landcare activity around our 12 local reserves trebled and allowed the landcare team to get the upper hand on many of the long-term weed incursions. There was a shift in the recovery trajectory of the reserves and in the capacity of the landcarers from despair to hope. Flora and bird surveys were regularly undertaken and for the first time threatened species were formally identified; the very cute Squirrel Glider, the ever graceful plant, Tetratheca juncea, and the majestic Powerful Owl. During this period Council undertook plans of management for these three threatened species and noted both their presence and the tenuous nature of their existence on the Coal Point peninsula due to the isolated nature of the populations in an increasingly fragmented bushland.

Another major finding from the TSLS project was that, because of the mosaic of public-private land along the bush-dominated ridge tops and the dearth of public land along the foreshore mid-slopes, unless private landholders also do their bit to support the local wildlife and the bushland it depends upon, our public reserves run the risk of becoming little more than silent islands of isolation and uniformity. In addition, options for wildlife dispersal on a peninsula are somewhat constrained by being surrounded by water.

Retaining our local biodiversity requires a multi-pronged approach involving boosting the options that are available for wildlife and their habitat on public and private land, whilst ensuring that future housing models do not further fragment and destroy the basic integrity and connectivity of the bushland that remains.