Surplus Property Disposal - 39 Jennings Street, Zillmere
E&C Committee Clause A
Speech to Council Chambers, delivered by Councillor Seal Chong Wah on 26th May 2026
I rise to speak on the E&C Committee report clause A, regarding the surplus property disposal at 39 Jennings Street, Zillmere.
It’s good to see this Council administration supporting a community housing project, by selling the land at its commercial valuation. This land is going to have 16 homes built on it for emergency housing. It’s desperately needed. And I’ll be voting yes to this clause.
But we have to be clear-eyed. This is 16 social housing dwellings for a city that needs over 6 thousand. Let me be clear about the problem.
Within the Brisbane City Council area, there are almost 11,500 on the social housing waitlist, who need roughly 7,000 new public or community housing dwellings.But this doesn’t show us how many people are barely scraping by. While this council administration sells some 3,000 square meters of unneeded land for social housing, the average renting household in Brisbane City Council is in rental stress, paying a third of their income in rent.
The average pensioner couple pays over half their pension in rent. Tens of thousands of people are just one or two rent rises away from the social housing waitlist.The State government isn’t building enough public or community housing, like the kind being built at this site being discussed in this motion, to keep up with population growth.
Selling 3,000 square meters of land at market rate for 16 social homes, raising height limits, and giving developers handouts isn’t bringing down the cost of housing. Over the last few years, Brisbane has overtaken Melbourne and Canberra to have the second-highest house and unit prices on this continent.
So, in regard to Clause A, being the sale of land at market rates. This price explosion of Brisbane’s land is why so many more public and community homes are needed, in many more places than just this site. This price explosion occurred at the same time that this LNP administration gave big developers a tax cut, and raised height limits to up to 90 storeys in the Kurilpa TLPI. Developer handouts don’t stop the prices rising, they just give developers bigger profits.
Many of these developers, and I am of course not referring to ‘Housing for Change’, are still landbanking and speculating, and trickling new luxury units onto the market, because there’s no penalty for speculation without building any homes. To build thousands of public and community homes that can be managed by groups like Housing 4 Change (the intended buyer of this council land), the Department of Housing, or this Council’s own Brisbane Housing Company, this Council needs mandatory inclusionary zoning.
This Council should condition every new multiple-dwelling development in Brisbane with 10 or more dwellings on providing 25% of the dwellings to the Department of Housing, or a Community Housing Provider. Mandating inclusionary zoning would ensure that there will be hundreds of new dwellings like these ones in Zillmere, for people of all different circumstances.
It would give homelessness support groups like Micah Projects the dwellings to support people out of homelessness through housing-first programs. And it would ensure genuinely affordable homes for the thousands of people on the social housing waitlist, or who are struggling to make rent.
Housing 4 Change is doing a really good thing on this site in Zillmere. New emergency housing, close to parks, public transport, a school, and the local library, is a great thing to see. But this Council needs to be honest with itself: 16 homes isn’t enough. This Council needs to require public and community housing in every new build in this city. It’s clear that a for-profit housing market is failing ordinary people.
We need to build homes for people, not for profit.