News / Planning
Brunswick family in new battle to keep the sun shining
Project seen as a test of new state planning laws
Mark Phillips
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A Brunswick family is gearing up for a second fight in three years against a multi-level apartment building next door to their house.
Elisa Hill and Philippe Yardin won a high-profile case in 2023 when Merri-bek Council refused to grant a planning permit for an apartment building adjacent to their Dods Street house on human rights grounds. That decision was later partly upheld at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
This time, a different developer wants to build a seven-level complex on the other side of the single-storey weatherboard house which has been their family home for almost two decades. If they successfully gain a planning permit, it would leave Hill and Yardin’s house sandwiched between two buildings more than 20 metres in height.
Hill and Yardin have lodged an objection against the new development on the grounds that it would impact on the human rights of their 22-year-old son Jai, who has profound autism and intellectual disability that makes it difficult for him to leave the family home.
They say shadows cast by both buildings would shroud their backyard in darkness, effectively making Jai a prisoner inside their house.
The couple are frustrated that having spent so much energy fighting the previous development, they face having to go through the same thing again.
A Coburg-based company known as 24 Dods St Pty Ltd is proposing to build a seven-level building with 66 units for student accommodation on the site. At 23.6 metres tall, it would be about 3.6 metres above the recommended building heights for the area, but the developers say this would mitigated by a step back that would reduce its perceived mass.
The project would cost $3 million, according to documents lodged with the council. The current owners bought the land for about $2.5 million in 2016. They knocked down the existing red brick building earlier this year.
The developers say the building would contribute towards meeting the demand for quality student accommodation in Brunswick. 
Hill and Yardin said they had been in discussions with the developer’s representatives for several years over a few different iterations of the project before the most recent plans for the seven-storey design were lodged with Merri-bek Council 12 months ago.
Hill said there were some differences between the two developments on either side of her house, but the impact on her son would be the same.
She said Jai was unable to engage with the outside world without constant adult supervision, so use of the family’s backyard was crucial to providing him with some measure of quality of life.
“This proposal will result in a maximum of two hours sunlight per day in our backyard, quite literally leaving our son Jai in the dark for the rest of his life,” the family’s objection against the proposal says.
“The impact of the proposal will dramatically reduce quality of life for Jai … who is minimally verbal and has great difficulty in entering into the community.
“Jai therefore relies heavily on the backyard environment for access to sunlight and the outdoor environment.
“This proposal will impact the human rights of our family … and our ability to care for Jai, a valued member of the Dods Street community.”
At a meeting arranged by the council with the developers last week, Hill said she and other objectors were presented with revised plans which would increase the height of the building and the number of apartments.
She said she had felt “ambushed” because there had been no opportunity to review the new plans before the meeting.
A spokesperson for the developer did not rule out further changes to the building design.
“We are aware of the concerns raised by neighbouring residents,” they said.
“These matters will be carefully considered on their planning merits through Merri-bek Council’s formal process.
“The applicant will continue to engage constructively with Council and consider whether and how concerns can appropriately be addressed through design, professional management measures and, where relevant, planning conditions.
“Our objective is to achieve an appropriate outcome that provides additional student housing while properly managing impacts on neighbouring properties and the surrounding neighbourhood.”
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Other local residents are also objecting to the development with concerns that include the impact on local traffic and on-street parking of dozens of new residents in the street without any on-site parking and of its builk and height on local neighbourhood character.
Ed McDonnell, who is chair of the owners’ corporation of a small apartment block on the other side of the development site, said approving the project would be a failure of Victoria’s planning system.
In a lengthy open letter he sent to former Premier Jacinta Allan and Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny last week, McDonnell described the Dods Street development as a “stress test” of the state government’s planning reforms to encourage more housing in the inner city.
“If a seven-storey, approximately 65-studio building on about 405 square metres beside a single-storey family home becomes the kind of proposal Victoria’s new system protects or accelerates, the reforms will have supplied a licence for overreach, not a solution to housing scarcity,” he wrote.
“The government is entitled, and obliged, to address housing supply. It is not entitled to treat that obligation as a warrant for indiscriminate yield. More homes are necessary. Bad development is not.”
In the previous case in 2023, Merri-bek Council refused a planning permit for the building on the western side of Hill and Yardin’s house after accepting their argument that it would infringe on their human rights under the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act.
The developer, Bespoke Developments Pty Ltd, appealed to VCAT to have the human rights considerations struck out. VCAT granted a permit but ruled that although the family’s human rights had not been breached, changes should be made to the design to protect their rights to sunlight and privacy.
The case was considered significant because it established human rights as a factor that authorities including local government must consider when deciding on applications for a planning permit.
However, three years later the only progress has been the demolition of the previous house on the site with the rest of the block standing vacant with overgrown grass behind a temporary metal fence.
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