Rob Doolan, The Nimbin GoodTimes

In the beginning of the 1980s, I had escaped the Queensland Bjelke-Petersen regime and moved to the Northern Rivers desiring some rural land to build my home and live differently. In 1983 we were building the first roads on the property at Whian Whian where we planned to have a small Multiple Occupancy (MO).

I worked as a strategic planner at Byron Shire Council starting to put together the planning direction for the next few decades in Byron. I had a consultancy with like-minded individuals called Sustainable Settlement Planners who were hired by the Land Commission of New South Wales – Frank Walker, the Minister for Housing, who had the idea of the state government sponsoring and building multiple occupancies for people for affordable housing.

We did the feasibility study and showed how it could happen in the Shire. Also, in 1983 I attended the 10-year anniversary of the Aquarius Festival. Sustainable Settlement Planners were also commissioned with the University of Sydney and others to prepare a Manual to guide Councils and would-be communities on how to establish a multiple occupancy.

Col James was a dynamo at the University of Sydney, also known for the Low-cost Country Home-building Book, which many of us relied upon to build our homes. Meanwhile, in Byron Shire, I liaised on behalf of Council with some of the first multiple occupancies at Main Arm, working towards ways of making them legal.

Because of resistance from local councils, the NSW government (Minister Paul Landa) introduced an enabling state planning policy for MOs in 1988, overruling local councils. In 1988, State Environmental Planning Policy 15 was introduced by Bob Carr. In Byron Shire, the 1998 Rural Settlement Strategy was ground-breaking in that new rural settlements had to be either Multiple Occupancy or Community Title, which turned out to be a two-edged sword.

Community title

From the strategy came the concept of MO to CT, whereby existing MOs could convert to Community Title. There were pros and cons of this process for individual MO shareholders, the MO community itself, the wider community, and Councils. In Byron, the community lobby and policy group for MOs that wanted to convert to Community Title was the Rural Land-Sharing Community Association (RLCA), with me providing planning guidance, to convert 18 of some 36 multiple occupancies.

Lismore Council in recent years amended their LEP to allow for existing MOs to convert to Community Title. Only a couple have done so for a variety of reasons. Although there was some controversy about using the Community Title legislation for intentional communities, such legislation solves some of the biggest challenges that MOs experience, such as being able to borrow funds to buy a share or build a house, and also aspects of enforcing community rules.

Watching the experience of using Community Titles in Byron, one can imagine ways that would result in more legitimate community-based models that benefit from the advantage of using Community Title legislation. In today’s housing crisis in our region, it is worthwhile to reflect on the significant contribution, at very little public cost, that intentional communities people, mainly multiple occupancies, have made to housing with, say, 150 to 200 such communities in the region, equating to some 1,500 or 2,000 homes.

This community movement in the Northern Rivers, with its five decades of lived experience, has much to offer.

Future of intentional communities

Established local communities could form a combined lobby group with a role similar to PANCOM and RLCA in earlier years. Important issues could be succession plans and community renewal. Many communities are decades old, with a turnover of shareholders occurring as original members age. This process offers great opportunities, but also can be perceived as creating threats. It raises issues such as tax implications, having up-to-date documentation, and maintaining the founding values of the community.

Building greater resilience for natural disaster threats

Many long-established communities in the Northern Rivers, especially around Nimbin, are located on forested, steeper land, and hence more prone to the consequences of increasing natural disaster threats, like bushfire, slips, access issues, and flooding.

There are some great examples of communities, both intentional and wider locality communities, self-organising and self-actioning to managing these challenges. Many long-established communities face issues with compliance with contemporary environmental, building, and bushfire regulations that did not exist in their current form in early years. Also, unaffordable insurance!

You may have heard of a recent case in Main Arm where the whole community received demolition orders. Good collaboration between communities, state government, and Council may be able to make a more practical and affordable approach to these challenging issues. The New South Wales Ombudsman guidelines provide a good approach to how responsive, practical, and fair discretion can be utilised.

On the matter of home insurance, I do not have any answers.

New communities

For starting new communities, I want to suggest two themes to explore. One is about replicating the MO model, or at least a version of it, to other parts of NSW. Throughout NSW, countless rural towns and villages could benefit from a modern version of the MO model.

At present, MOs are not permissible in most parts of NSW, as the state environmental planning policy I mentioned before, only applies now to a certain number of local government areas. The other suggestion for new communities is a new closer-to-town model, creating housing hubs which could especially cater for older residents with less mobility.

I envisage small villages with walkable neighbourhoods on a wide variety of housing types, both in tenure, in size, and in affordability, all with high environmental performance. The villages would have associated local food growing and village centres for work, play and services.

The lived experience of 50 years of intentional communities within the region brings valuable insights into alternative ownership and management models. The new closer-to-town model could be a hybrid model combining the positive aspects of MOs with the housing opportunities within, for example, updated manufactured home park legislation.

As a housing delivery vehicle, manufactured home legislation offers great advantages in relation to less planning approvals, timing, costs and overcoming construction-phase challenges.

With upgrades to the legislation, such as for management structures and application of more contemporary design, manufactured home estates are well-placed to become a more widely used model.

Principles

Principles that may be the foundation for a new model could include not being developer-led. There are examples of how that can be enforced. Another principle could be any uplift in value is retained or partly retained by the housing equity remaining in the village.

Another principle, recognising the cost of home living is not just the capital cost of the build, but also the on-going energy, transport, food, services and other costs. And these on-going costs of living should be addressed in the model.

Lastly, using alternative property ownership and management models, like rental co-ops, Multiple Occupancy and Community Title, can create places that are more affordable and less insular, allowing for a more diverse range of people to live in a community.

Ministerial interest

Finally, we should see if Lismore MP Janelle Saffin, Minister for Recovery could interest Rose Jackson, Minister for Housing, in creating a small taskforce comprising experts from government, experienced MO locals, university specialists who have the skills and interest, to explore new models, just like in the ‘80s when Frank Walker was Minister for Housing, and delivered that mission to us.

This article is the text of a talk given at the Aquarian Talks in Nimbin Hall on 24th May.

This article appeared in The Nimbin GoodTimes, August 2025.