Last Tuesday evening, a few dozen residents filed into the bare-bones Diamond Bay Bowling Club in Vaucluse to attend a forum on “overdevelopment in the eastern suburbs”.
Their host was Karen Freyer, the “teal” candidate for Vaucluse in next month’s state election. In this well-heeled seat, which had only ever been held by the Liberal Party or its predecessors, density, congestion and infrastructure are among voters’ most pressing concerns.
Independent candidate for Vaucluse Karen Freyer in Double Bay.Credit:Louise Kennerley
“It’s impossible to drive down New South Head Road and Old South Head Road … our high schools are full, our recreation spaces are busy,” Freyer told the assembled crowd.
“I think everyone in this room recognises that we’re more than happy to take our fair share when it comes to density. But the state government needs to ensure we have the infrastructure to support that density.”
Freyer is not alone in putting overdevelopment at the centre of her pitch. The Liberal candidate, former journalist Kellie Sloane, has said Sydney’s eastern suburbs should not be “punished” with more housing, and the topic figures prominently in teal campaigns north of the bridge, too.
These aspiring MPs, like almost every participant in the housing and development debate, claim to support development when it’s appropriate and oppose it when it’s inappropriate. Problem is, there is no consensus on what constitutes appropriate development in any given area, and no agreement on what infrastructure would elicit support for more homes.
The Sydney Fish Market is undergoing a large redevelopment. Credit:Janie Barrett
At the heart of the matter is a widespread feeling among residents and politicians that local communities aren’t adequately consulted about development in their domain. But as this Herald series will explore, a lot of consultation does take place, albeit within the slow, labyrinthine NSW planning system.
Across Sydney, these consultations are having a clear impact: reducing the size of new housing developments and lowering the supply of homes.
It happens on massive projects, such as the redevelopment of Blackwattle Bay once the Sydney Fish Market moves down the road. On a prime site a kilometre or so from Town Hall, the government has lowered the maximum height of planned towers from 45 storeys to 35 storeys, and cut the number of apartments by 20 per cent, after a campaign led by Greens MP Jamie Parker, the City of Sydney council and myriad others.
In Crows Nest on the north shore, the government has already agreed to halve the number of apartments to be built directly on top of the forthcoming metro station, as another story in this series will explore in detail.
Over in Wentworth Point, a high-density community of 13,000 people near Olympic Park and Rhodes, residents are fighting plans for another two residential towers. One may wonder: in a suburb full of apartment blocks, what’s two more? But infrastructure is again a big concern, with only one road in and out, and a much-needed new high school still two years away.
Objections are also effective on a much smaller scale. In Balmain, Parker and his successor as Greens candidate, Kobi Shetty, also organised against an “overdevelopment” on Darling Street in Balmain which would have replaced a shed with six apartments, three of them designated as affordable housing. Ultimately, the Land and Environment Court upheld the developer’s appeal, approving a revised plan for four units.
The bigger picture question is this: if no one can agree on what overdevelopment or appropriate development mean, how do we settle on what to build and where? How do we avoid endless argy-bargy over individual developments and planning proposals, and reach an understanding about future density and design that would simplify and expedite the complex planning system? Is that even possible?
Theoretically, that’s the job of local environment plans. They set the parameters around building height and other development controls; the ground rules, if you will. Proposals that comply with those rules are much simpler to deal with. It’s when developers try to exceed the parameters that things get messy (and residents get angry).
The site of the Dulwich Hill metro.Credit:Nick Moir
But making the plan is easier said than done, as the Inner West Council is discovering. Councillors, led by Labor Mayor Darcy Byrne, ordered all work on the new LEP to halt following a major backlash to a proposal to rezone parts of Marrickville, Dulwich Hill and North Ashfield for apartment blocks of six to eight storeys. Two of those suburbs will soon have metro stations.
A September meeting to discuss the plans attracted more members of the public than any other council meeting last year. Things got heated, with one resident, Peter Manning of Dulwich Hill, demanding to know which planning officer had the “audacity” to advance such a proposal.
“Many people here feel they are being bludgeoned to end their time in a community they love,” Manning said. “Would it be seen in Glebe? Would it be seen in Paddington? Would it be seen in Hunters Hill? Would it be seen in the rest of Sydney? Never.”
But these exact conversations are taking place all over the city as Sydney grapples with the twin tasks of accommodating another 85,000 people a year while trying to take some pressure off the relentless growth of housing costs. Moreover, all states are on notice from the Commonwealth to overhaul their planning and zoning systems to help build 1 million homes by 2030.
Deputy Inner West Mayor Jess D’Arienzo addresses residents of Dulwich Hill opposed to high-density residential development being promoted by the state government. Credit:James Alcock
As Byrne noted at that council meeting, the Greater Cities Commission, a NSW government agency, has worked with councils to set five-, 10- and 20-year housing targets. The GCC is now calculating the next batch of targets. Councils are obliged to find ways of accommodating these new homes, but as the Herald has reported, many are failing to meet the schedule.
In the Inner West, which is roughly meeting its target of building about 1000 new homes a year, many speakers at that meeting felt blindsided by the proposal. Byrne described the process as “less than optimal”. But in fact, citizens were consulted extensively in the making of the preceding “Our Place Inner West” strategic planning statement, which was to guide land use in the inner west for the next 20 years.
That document clearly states that the inner west would soon run out of appropriately zoned land to ensure a diverse supply of housing, and identified areas near the new metro stations at Marrickville and Dulwich Hill, and near Parramatta Road, as the best places to rezone land for higher density.
The statement was shaped by input from more than 7000 people, and the council received nearly 200 submissions about the draft during a five-week public exhibition. So, when the corresponding LEP changes were announced two years later, they should not have come as much of a surprise.
But this is a classic problem of community consultation: people only really pay attention when something is happening nearby, and when they don’t like it.
Peter Tulip, chief economist at the Centre for Independent Studies think tank, has a clear idea of what “appropriate development” means to most people: “That means housing in another suburb.”
Some may consider Tulip’s views on planning to be radical. Broadly speaking, he believes communities should have less say over what gets built near them, and planners should be disenfranchised too. The market would be the arbiter.
“We should let buyers decide,” he says. “If people want to live in Dubbo, good. If people want to live in small apartments in the middle of the city, that’s fine. We shouldn’t have planners deciding this.
“Clearly there are considerations of where you put the train lines and where you locate the schools and things, so I don’t want to say that planning is irrelevant. But the primary criterion for deciding what gets supplied and where should be what people want.”
The Overdevelopment in the Eastern Suburbs forum hosted by teal candidate for Vaucluse Karen Freyer on February 7.Credit:Michael Koziol
Freyer, the aspiring member for Vaucluse, raised this issue at last week’s development forum. She told the crowd a school of thought contended they shouldn’t have a say over planning in their own backyard because “you are selfish, and you won’t think of the greater public good”.
By contrast, Freyer believes locals should get an even greater say. “We know these areas better than independent planners and consultants. We know where the traffic is, we know where density should be increased and where density perhaps shouldn’t be increased. For density to work we need to have the community behind it.”
Tim Williams has grappled with these questions for many years. He was a special adviser to UK planning ministers in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then led the Committee for Sydney think tank for six years, and has worked in the private sector at Arup and now Grimshaw.
In Wentworth Point near Rhodes and Olympic Park, residents are fighting plans for another two residential towers.Credit:Brook Mitchell
Williams sympathises with communities who feel they are being squeezed by overdevelopment and says they ought not be dismissed as “not in my backyard” types who will never accept more density.
“Not all opposition to development is irrational,” he says. “We’re still seeing housing development without schools, without parks, without hospitals. We’re still seeing the unco-ordinated delivery of homes. We seem to have a million ‘place makers’ in our system, but we’re still creating bad places.
“Local communities are right to ask: will new development and higher development be better than what exists at the moment? Just because you can do higher density around existing locations, it doesn’t mean that you should.”
However, Williams also believes the system in Sydney is sometimes weighted towards small, vocal groups of opponents who are given an oversized platform by smaller councils. He points to the NSW Liberal government’s botched attempt to amalgamate councils such as Hunters Hill, describing it as “a monumental failure of nerve”.
“There’s a very interesting link internationally between the size of a local government area and opposition to growth. People basically say, ‘You can do it next door, in the next local authority’,” Williams says. “Five people can have a big influence over the council system. [It] puts too much power in the hands of activist individuals rather than the community at large.”
And when it comes to opposing development, not all communities are created equal. A speaker at last week’s Vaucluse forum, Atlas Urban director Paul Walter, argued one reason housing targets in the east and north shore were low was because of “the political leverage that our communities have to say to the state government … we’re already full”.
Is there a better way? Williams is drawn to a London (or indeed, Brisbane) approach where more power is invested in whole-of-metropolis planning. This is not to say all local councils should be abolished, but they need to work with other bodies, not against them. In London, he says, citywide planning is more co-operative and integrated. The Greater Cities Commission was meant to help, but Williams says there’s not much evidence that it has.
The GCC’s head of strategic planning, Stephanie Barker, says it’s a work in progress. “London took quite some time to get to where they are. We’re heading in that direction. They did get a head start on us by about a decade.”
As discussed earlier, an enduring problem is that people – fairly or unfairly – perceive a mismatch between infrastructure and density. They claim they would accept more housing near them if the roads, schools, transport and hospitals kept pace.
Freyer suggested at last week’s forum that in the same way the Greater Cities Commission binds councils to housing targets, “I would like exactly the same contract with the state government to provide the infrastructure to support that density”.
‘The primary criterion for deciding what gets supplied and where should be what people want.’
Barker sympathises with the concept but says it’s not as simple as setting infrastructure targets. Different parts of Sydney have different needs; in the eastern city, it’s about optimising existing infrastructure, while in the sprawling west, it’s more often about basic enabling infrastructure.
But the state government is at least attempting to fuse infrastructure and new housing in voters’ minds. Its Accelerated Infrastructure Fund, a grant program created in 2020, doles out cash for projects in high-growth areas where there is a demonstrable link to facilitating new homes.
The third round, announced on Friday, contained $23 million for three projects in the Blacktown LGA, $10 million for sports facilities in Bayside, about $15 million for four projects in Ryde and nearly $30 million for Parramatta, including $10 million for the new Granville Town Centre.
Each of the 36 projects funded in this round have a specific number of new dwellings they are supposed to “support”. Inherent in this is a quid pro quo: here’s your infrastructure, you better accept more housing.
But that connection lives in the bowels of a government website. Whether it exists in the minds of voters – or in the minds of those residents who might be inclined to object to the next housing development nearby – is another question. These things are, as they say, easier said than done.
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