The Cairns Regional Council's draft Local Housing Strategy, tabled in June and currently open for public submissions until July 18, has drawn a sharp response from residents across the city's southern suburbs — people who say they were never part of the conversation when the plan was being written.
The timing matters. Nationally, property prices are softening in major capitals, but that correction has barely touched Far North Queensland. Cairns median weekly rents for three-bedroom houses pushed past $550 in the March 2026 quarter, according to the Real Estate Institute of Queensland's most recent data — up 18 percent over two years. For low-income households, including the large Pacific Islander and First Nations communities concentrated in suburbs like Manunda, Mooroobool and Manoora, that figure is not an abstraction. It is a crisis measured in doubled-up families and late-night calls to housing services.
Waitlists, Demolitions and a Suburban Squeeze
Cairns Community Housing Ltd, which manages more than 1,400 social housing properties across the local government area, confirmed this week that its general waitlist currently stands at 2,340 households — the highest figure recorded since the organisation began publishing quarterly data in 2019. Average wait time for a three-bedroom property in the Cairns North area is now 67 months. Sixty-seven months.
Residents around Manoora have watched the situation deteriorate for years. A cluster of older Queensland Housing Commission duplexes on Minnie Street was quietly delisted for maintenance funding in late 2024, with two units vacated and boarded up since February this year. Community members say they were given no explanation and no timeline for redevelopment. The Cairns office of Tenants Queensland confirmed it has fielded complaints about the properties but said it was not in a position to comment on individual government housing stock decisions.
In Woree, closer to the Bruce Highway industrial corridor, a proposed medium-density rezoning of land near Mulgrave Road has split the neighbourhood. Long-term residents are worried about parking, stormwater drainage and what one submission to council's planning committee described as the destruction of what little suburban green space remains south of the Cairns CBD. Younger renters and first-home hopefuls have argued the opposite — that blocking new density locks them out entirely.
The Draft Strategy's Blind Spots
The draft Local Housing Strategy includes targets for 3,500 new dwellings across the Cairns urban footprint by 2031, with an emphasis on infill development in established suburbs rather than fringe expansion. Planners cite the cost of extending water and sewer infrastructure toward the Tablelands as one reason for that approach. The strategy also flags Portsmith and the Cairns CBD fringe as priority precincts for higher-density residential conversion.
What the document does not include, critics note, is any binding affordable housing quota for new private developments. The Queensland Government's state planning policy allows councils to encourage affordable housing contributions but does not mandate them. The Cairns Community Legal Centre, based on Sheridan Street, has written to council urging it to adopt a voluntary planning agreement framework — similar to one used in Brisbane's inner north — that would require developers of projects over 20 units to include at least 10 percent affordable stock. Council officers have not publicly responded to that proposal.
The Northern Peninsula Area and Torres Strait Islander communities housed in the city, many of them in private rentals in Manunda and Bungalow, face additional complications. Several families have told community workers they are unable to access federal HomeBuilder-style grants because the grants require home ownership that is simply out of reach at current prices — a policy gap that advocacy groups say needs urgent attention from both Canberra and the state government in Brisbane.
Public submissions on the draft Local Housing Strategy close July 18. Residents can lodge responses through the Cairns Regional Council's Your Say platform or in person at the council chambers on Spence Street. A community information session is scheduled for July 10 at Cairns City Library on Abbott Street, where council planners will be available to answer questions. Housing advocates are urging anyone affected to show up.
