Thirteen proposals, three approvals – Woollahra & Waverley(HDA)

Eastern Suburbs planning

The fast track through Woollahra and Waverley

Thirteen major housing proposals across our two councils have now been put to the Housing Delivery Authority. Three were recommended for the state fast track, one was deferred, and nine were sent back. The pattern in those decisions is not the one most people expect.

Alan Weiss  ·  Weiss Real Estate  ·  September 2026

Since the beginning of this year the Housing Delivery Authority has considered thirteen proposals sitting inside Woollahra and Waverley. Every one of them is on the public record — the Authority publishes both a formal record of each meeting and a transcript of the discussion, and the transcripts are considerably more candid than the records.

Read together, they amount to something close to a supply map for the next five years. Three schemes have been recommended for declaration as State significant development, which places them on a state assessment pathway outside council control. One has been held over. Nine have been refused a place on that pathway — though refusal, as I will come to, is not the same thing as the site going away.

The three that got through

Bondi Junction — 179 dwellings. The largest site by street frontage, taking in numbers on Old South Head Road, Bondi Road and Ben Eden Street. Twenty-four storeys, with 3 per cent of dwellings as affordable housing in perpetuity. The Authority recommended declaration in March but attached three conditions worth noting: the applicant should consider lifting the affordable housing commitment given the scale of the uplift, should investigate absorbing the adjacent isolated site, and must withdraw the development application already lodged with Waverley Council before declaration can proceed.

Bellevue Hill — 134 dwellings. A residential flat building on Old South Head Road, recommended in July. This is the most striking of the three on paper: a proposed height of 50 metres where the current control for the site is 13.5 metres. Affordable housing is 10 per cent of the uplift floor area in perpetuity, with the floor area itself unspecified in the record.

Rose Bay — 433 dwellings. Twenty-two allotments amalgamated across Hamilton Street and Dover Road, in three buildings of 8 to 12 storeys reaching 44 metres against a 22 to 24 metre control. Recommended in August. By dwelling count it is larger than the other two combined, and it is the single biggest identified supply event in the Eastern Suburbs.

One further site, on New South Head Road at Edgecliff, was deferred rather than decided. The Authority is waiting for the Edgecliff and Woollahra precinct rezoning to go on exhibition before it forms a view — sensible, given that rezoning proposes up to 10,000 homes across roughly a fifth of the Woollahra local government area.

The pattern is not about height

The obvious reading of that list is that the Authority waves through the modest schemes and knocks back the ambitious ones. It is exactly backwards.

The two most aggressive proposals in the whole set are the two that were recommended. Bellevue Hill asks for 50 metres where 13.5 is permitted — near enough to four times the control. Rose Bay asks for 44 where 22 to 24 is permitted. Meanwhile Vaucluse at 12 storeys, Bondi Beach at 12 storeys and Paddington at 12 storeys were all sent back.

What separates them is not scale. It is whether the scheme can be assessed quickly and still stand up. Look at the yields on the refusal list: 95, 100, 101, 103, 104, 110, 124, 159. Now look at the approvals: 134, 179, 433. The Authority’s threshold is roughly 100 dwellings in metropolitan Sydney, and the phrase that recurs in the transcripts is borderline yield — a scheme that only just clears the bar will fall under it the moment a merit assessment trims anything. So it is refused before it starts.

A site that can only just reach a hundred dwellings is not a candidate. A site that can comfortably exceed it is.

The second filter is site difficulty. Flooding appears twice on New South Head Road at Rose Bay, once with dewatering attached. Environmental constraints, heritage adjacency and complex geometry account for most of the rest. The Authority is explicit that it will not take on anything it cannot finish inside its own timeframe.

The third is whether another pathway already exists. Paddington was refused because a state application is already running on the site. One Rose Bay proposal was told to use the low- and mid-rise provisions instead. Bondi Junction was recommended but told to withdraw its council application first, since the Authority will not run parallel processes.

Put those three filters together and the conclusion for our area is uncomfortable but clear. The binding constraint is not the planning controls. It is how much land you can assemble. Risk concentrates wherever twenty-odd contiguous properties can be bought quietly over time — which is why the same three roads keep appearing.

Old South Head Road is the spine

Of the thirteen proposals, five sit on Old South Head Road or its corners: Bellevue Hill, Bondi Junction, and three separate Rose Bay sites. A sixth, the largest of them all, sits one street back on Dover Road. Three more are on New South Head Road, at Rose Bay, Vaucluse and Edgecliff.

That is not coincidence. Both roads carry frequent bus services, which is what qualifies land as an accessible area under the housing provisions, and both are lined with deep older lots in single ownership that can be bought one at a time. If you want to know where the next application will come from, look for a run of unrenovated houses on a bus route with lanes behind them.

One block, two pathways

The Rose Bay approval deserves its own examination, because the paper trail behind it shows how the system is actually being used.

In March a scoping report was lodged on the Major Projects portal for 36–56 Dover Road and 27–31 Hamilton Street. Fifteen allotments, an area of 5,987.6 square metres, and a proposal for an 8-storey building of about 210 dwellings at 29.6 metres, with 15.35 per cent of floor area as affordable rental housing for at least fifteen years.

That scheme sat almost exactly inside the existing rules. The site is in a low- and mid-rise housing inner area, being within 400 metres walk of the Rose Bay town centre and zoned for medium density. The base standard is 22 metres and a floor space ratio of 2.2 to 1. Providing 15 per cent affordable housing adds 30 per cent to both, lifting the envelope to 28.6 metres and 2.86 to 1. The March proposal sat at the ceiling of what the rules allowed.

Five months later the same applicant was before the Authority with seven more allotments, twice the dwellings and half again the height.

The same block under three sets of rules. Drawn to a common height scale from the published records.

Note where the affordable housing goes. The bigger scheme carries a third of the proportion, though held permanently rather than for fifteen years. The Authority flagged exactly that, telling the applicant it expects affordable housing proportional to the uplift and that value must return to the community from any significant increase above existing controls.

The low- and mid-rise controls are not the ceiling. They are the opening position.

What council can and cannot do

This is the part most people get wrong, and the answer is unusually plain.

The Authority is a panel of three senior public servants that meets monthly and tests proposals against four published objectives. It determines nothing. It recommends, and the Minister declares by order under section 4.36(3) of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. Once declared, the applicant has nine months to lodge a development application with the Department, which is exhibited publicly and must be determined within 275 days.

From the moment of declaration the consent authority is the Minister, the Independent Planning Commission, or a delegate of either. It is not the council. Council development control plans do not apply to State significant development at all.

There is normally a safety valve. The Commission ordinarily becomes the consent authority where a council objects, where 50 or more public objections are received, or where the applicant has made a reportable political donation. That is how sustained local opposition ordinarily moves a decision to a body sitting outside the Department.

It does not apply here. Where a proposal is declared State significant by ministerial call-in — which includes every project recommended by the Housing Delivery Authority — the Commission is not the consent authority. A council objection and a thousand submissions produce the same determining body as silence.

What remains to a council is real but narrow: a submission during exhibition, negotiation on design, setbacks and contributions through the merit assessment, and judicial review on questions of legality rather than merit. Woollahra Council has said as much itself about the Edgecliff rezoning, where the Department has confirmed its role is that of a stakeholder rather than a decision-maker.

The one genuine brake on the Authority is not local power but the state’s own recent planning work. Read the transcripts and it is consistent: proposals go back where a Transport Oriented Development pathway already exists, where strategic planning has recently been finalised, or where the low- and mid-rise controls are considered to have already set the scale.

A refusal is a redirection

The most useful sentence in the whole record came at the start of the August meeting, when the Secretary of the Department interrupted proceedings to make a general point. Where the Authority recommends a proponent use an alternative pathway, that does not rule out uplift. Variation provisions remain available through the other state pathways, perhaps not at the scale proposed, but available. There is, she said, a general misunderstanding that the Authority is the only route to a variation.

For owners near any of the nine refused sites, that matters more than the refusal itself. Not one of those sites has been protected. Bondi Beach was told to work with Waverley Council. Rose Bay on New South Head Road was told to use the low- and mid-rise provisions. Paddington already has a state application running. What was refused was the fast lane, not the development.

What I take from it

Three things, and I will say plainly that these are my own reading rather than anything stated in the documents.

The first is that the low- and mid-rise reforms were widely understood to have settled the question of scale in suburbs like Rose Bay and Bellevue Hill. The record does not support that. A scheme built to the low- and mid-rise envelope was scoped in March; by August a considerably larger one on a bigger assembly was in front of the Authority and recommended. Where the numbers work, the compliant envelope is a starting position.

The second is about what this does to the local market. Three schemes totalling 746 dwellings, all within a few minutes of each other, all arriving as new apartment stock into the segment that is already the softest. New apartments sell once as new. On resale they compete as established property against a much smaller pool of buyers, and when several hundred of them settle in the same catchment within a year or two of each other, that pool is being asked to absorb a great deal at once.

The third is a point about where to direct effort. The instinct near any of these sites is to ask what council will do. That is the wrong question, because council is not the decision-maker and its controls do not apply. The leverage that exists sits in the exhibition period, in the merit assessment, and in the technical grounds the Department must weigh — overshadowing, flooding, traffic, setbacks. Those grounds have already killed several proposals in Rose Bay. They are where the argument is actually had.

If you own within a few streets of any of this, the practical implication is not alarm. It is timing, and it is knowing which of your assets is exposed. Houses and apartments in these catchments will not behave the same way over the next three years. The difference is worth understanding before you decide anything, in either direction.