High risk of flooding puts hole in Natalie Taylor’s granny flat budget
When Natalie Taylor and her husband Jake bought a rural block in Logan Village in Brisbane’s south, they had big plans to turn it into a haven for their children, three of whom are disabled.
They had built a granny flat so their children would never have to go into subsidized housing when they were older; This was something the parents were vehemently opposed to.
However, Natalie and Jake settled on the property in March 2025 and the couple found these plans increasingly difficult to realize.
Logan City Council has updated its flood maps and the property is now assessed as being at high risk of flooding.
“We were reading all of it and it actually put really strict planning restrictions on the property,” he said.
Flood maps and their impact on property owners have become the biggest political issue for the city government in Logan, where Facebook groups discuss the issue ad nauseam.
earlier this month A former mayor and a former MP accused the council of illegally uploading maps. Mayor Jon Raven said he thought about the issue “from the moment I woke up until I went to bed.”
Maps have been updated twice since 2023; Both used temporary local planning instruments (TLPIs), which allow the municipality to make rapid changes while making permanent changes to the city plan.
When Taylor realized how many people were in the same boat, he formed a flood mapping action group that is now affiliated with disgruntled former mayor John Freeman and the Logan Ratepayers Association.
“We were getting letters in the mail and there were a lot of people who were really stressed,” he said.
He said many people only realize their property rights have changed when they receive their insurance bills, some of which have increased by thousands of dollars a year or their insurance has been canceled entirely.
Since the update the council has been desperate to calm residents. The maps, which have already been reviewed twice by the companies involved in the process, are now being re-examined by the Restore Blue consultancy service.
Flood engineer Martin Roushani-Zarmehri, who owns private consultancy StormFlood, has worked extensively in Logan and said the new maps are much more risk-averse, which isn’t a bad thing.
But they put financial pressure on landowners hoping to develop their land.
“Flood maps achieve their purpose by providing flood risk awareness to the public, which is the primary goal of floodplain managers,” he said.
“On the other hand, these flood maps have become quite prohibitive for development and construction works in flood-prone lands.
“How flood mapping is currently implemented in terms of planning is in some cases really inflexible, and in other times it can even be unreasonable.”
He said the municipality’s flood modeling could cost up to $5,000 on top of already expensive engineering work to meet the municipality’s needs.
“The price of detailed, site-specific advice can easily reach thousands of dollars, which most residential landowners don’t have much money for,” Roushani-Zarmehri said.
Those costs are eclipsing the Taylors’ dream of building a tiny house for at least one of their sons, who therapists say will likely need to live in assisted living at some stage.
“I don’t see how we can afford this; it’s unrealistic for families,” Taylor said.
Roushani-Zarmehri said flood mapping is an ever-changing field as governments must take into account the effects of climate change and the larger, faster floods that may occur in the future.
“Looking back, if we had the same flood pattern data today as we did then, we wouldn’t have seen some of these properties, particularly residential properties, zoned the way they were,” he said.
A spokesperson said Logan City Council is working to ease the burden of small developments on landowners affected by flood maps.
The council said the Restore Blue investigation, which began in February, would last around three months.
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