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NSW Planning Minister Paul Scully warns that suffocating planning restrictions are causing people to leave Sydney, and put at risk its aspirations to be a global city.
He and Premier Chris Minns are going full throttle in a push for high-density housing, worried that the harbour capital is at risk of decline as workers leave faster than they can be replaced.
NSW Planning Minister Paul Scully: “It’s about frustration, right? People are packing up and leaving Sydney – this is a crazy outcome.” Janie Barrett
About 70,000 people aged between 30 and 40 left Sydney between 2016 and 2021, while fewer than 35,000 new residents in that age bracket moved in. The net result was the city had 38,844 fewer residents in that age bracket as a result, according to recent NSW Productivity Commission data.
Mr Scully said those figures showed why the government’s rezoning reforms must go ahead, with or without the blessing of local councils, lest the exodus of the city’s residents drain Sydney of its talent.
He is the architect of an ambitious slate of planning changes. The program includes rezoning land around 31 metro and railway stations to allow apartment buildings of up to six storeys, regardless of whether the area has previously had high-density residential development. The government will also rezone land around eight priority high-growth areas and expand the areas where smaller apartment blocks, terraces and townhouses can be built.
“It’s about frustration, right? People are packing up and leaving Sydney – this is a crazy outcome,” Mr Scully told AFR Weekend. “You end up losing that great talent in that key working age demographic. How does that reconcile with our desire to be a leading global city? It doesn’t.”
Childcare workers Kaitlyn and Chris Daniel had lived in Sydney all their lives until they left four years ago, finally accepting that homeownership was not possible for them in the city.
Kaitlyn and Chris Daniel: “It became very clear that we could never afford to buy a house in Sydney, but it’s a real possibility in the Central Coast.” Peter Stoop
The Daniels had been living in the western Sydney suburb of Toongabbie – where Kaitlyn’s parents still live today – but moved to the Central Coast, led north by their hopes that homeownership and a better quality of life could be realised there.
“It became very clear that we could never afford to buy a house in Sydney, but it’s a real possibility in the Central Coast,” Ms Daniel said. “It’s a problem that everything is expensive. Even groceries are expensive, so it’s pretty hard to save for a home, especially in Sydney where prices have skyrocketed more than where we are living now.”
They now rent in Tacoma, paying $550 a week for a three-bedroom house with a backyard where their dog has enough room to run around. By comparison, a Toongabbie two-bedroom apartment costs between $550 to $650 a week. And they’re busy house hunting, with a host of affordable properties to consider.
Mr Scully said massive zoning reforms were needed to overcome the Sydney exodus. Restrictive planning regimes have choked off the supply of new homes and become a major factor in the city’s soaring housing prices. Across Sydney, 77 per cent of residential land is zoned for terraces, townhouses, one- and two-storey flat buildings, and manor houses. Yet just two of 33 local environment plans permit those types of housing.
From Mr Scully’s perspective, it’s ironic that the residents of suburbs best known for their rows of terraces, such as Paddington, have fought to protect such homes from change, while residents in other suburbs want to block such housing from going ahead, he said.
“This housing typology that was so part and parcel of Sydney’s housing past was actually not even allowed to be considered to be part of Sydney’s housing future,” Mr Scully said.
On Tuesday, The Australian Financial Review reported that some of the Sydney suburbs the NSW government has flagged for rezoning have fewer than 100 apartments awaiting approval or in development. At least six have not had a single project with more than 25 apartments completed in five years.
But several local councils run by his own party’s members, along with the Greens, have rejected the state government’s rezoning reforms.
Mr Scully appears to be giving ground to some of the opposition from local councils. He says he is open to delaying the reforms for some councils on the condition that they deliver more homes than the state government’s plans. But if councils fail to deliver on their own schemes, the state zoning reforms would then come into force afterwards, he said.
Mr Scully rejected a suggestion the state government had effectively back-tracked on its proposed reforms, maintaining that he has always said the new controls would only apply until councils put their own plans in place that met the government’s objectives.
“This is essentially a self-repealing [policy]. So it repeals when something comes over the top of it that is better in terms of the dwelling number outcomes.”
Time will tell whether the Minns government has done enough to convince councils to get on board with the density push. When asked if there were any other ways to get all levels of government working toward the same goal, Mr Scully said there was no simple fix to the city’s housing crisis – but he said local councils should recognise the reward that improved density can bring.
“With more people come more services,” he said.
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