On Pittwater Road in North Manly, there’s a community health centre building being repurposed to provide tangible support to women at risk.
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By the end of 2026, this former community health centre in Manly will become 37 new social homes. The homes will be prioritised for seniors over 55 and women at risk of homelessness, and they will be owned and managed by the not-for-profit community housing provider, Link Wentworth.
The real story isn’t just that 37 homes are being delivered. It’s that the system and its participants – a community housing provider, local council and the Commonwealth and NSW governments – worked together. Land, funding, political will and long-term vision lined up a single outcome to deliver homes on a real timeline. Cooperation like this is the delivery mechanism to build more homes.
I’ve recently stepped into the role as the Chief Executive Officer for the Community Housing Industry Association NSW. In my first weeks, the pattern is already clear; we are asking people to be patient inside a system already bursting at the seams.
People like to think of homelessness as something that happens to other people. But in Sydney, housing insecurity doesn’t require a personal failing. It requires one bad month and no buffer.
The target group for the North Manly site matters because older women are among the fastest growing cohorts experiencing homelessness. That’s a reflection of structural realities – lower lifetime earnings, limited superannuation, interrupted work histories due to caring responsibilities, rising living costs and the specific risks of financial abuse and coercive control.
It matters because Manly, like much of the Northern Beaches, is too often treated as affluent and therefore insulated from the housing crisis. But these issues don’t magically stop at the Spit Bridge.
While this project is worth the wait, let’s not forget that the project was proposed in 2010 and is due for completion this year.
Delay has a cost. You don’t just see it on a balance sheet. You see it in overcrowding, women sleeping in cars, people staying in violent or controlling homes because there’s nowhere else to go.
The other reason the site matters is that it shows how to defeat inertia. Too often, housing is trapped in a loop, one tier of government controls the land, another controls planning settings, and the other controls parts of the funding.
Collaboration between different tiers of government, and community housing providers showing leadership and resilience to actualise a worthy mission.
At the North Manly, cooperation turned inertia into homes. The project is being delivered under Round One of the Australian government’s Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), with $6.5 million in NSW government funding and a strong contribution from Link Wentworth.
A long-vacant public building soon becomes 37 permanent social homes, not a pilot, not a short-term crisis response, but stable and high-quality housing that will keep serving the community for decades.
So what should we take from this, beyond a well-deserved local win?
The lesson should be that this becomes routine.
We need a transparent, time bound pipeline of dormant public assets suitable for social housing, so projects stop arriving as surprises. We need clear and pre-agreed planning pathways for adaptive reuse, so proposals that minimise environmental impact do not face needless red tape and administrative burden.
Community housing providers need to be at the table from the outset – because long term ownership and management are not afterthoughts, they are what make projects buildable, financeable and sustainable. And funding must be structured to survive political cycles, so good projects aren’t forced to restart every time a program is renamed.
If we can turn a vacant building in Manly into 37 permanent social homes, the question is not whether it can be done again. It’s why alignment is still treated as remarkable, when it should be the minimum standard.