The recent 2022 Demographia report of housing affordability across 92 cities listed Sydney as the second least affordable city after Hong Kong. The report measures how many years of average income are needed to purchase an average home with anything over five years as being severely unaffordable. Sydney sits the second worse at 15.3 years with London at eight years and New York at 7.1 years.
Housing supply in Sydney is down and clearly something needs to be done to get more homes built. A recent Grattan Institute report titled The Great Australian Nightmare by Brendan Coates says: “The key problem is that many states and local governments restrict medium and high-density developments to appease local residents.”
Coates refers to major initiatives in New Zealand where the city of Auckland (11.2 on the Demographia scale) “re-zoned about three-quarters of its suburban areas to promote the construction of more dense housing”, and this led to a doubling of the city’s rate of new housing supply.
In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 17 September titled “Crowded houses: NZ planning rejig could be key to solving crisis” Michael Koziol also outlined the NZ approach.
“First came the National Policy Statement on Urban Development which required council’s such as Auckland to automatically permit apartment buildings of six storeys within walking distance of the city centre, railway stations and rapid bus corridors.”
In the often heated debates where local communities see anything over three stories as being “high rise” it seems to me that the planning system should advocate for a middle path between suburban houses and high rise towers (15 floors and above) by championing the scale of housing that Australian tourists love to visit in European cities like Cerdà’s Barcelona, Haussmann’s Paris and Belgravia in London.
Most of these urban environments allow street edges of 20 metre high buildings that match the street width that is also 20 metres.
When I was chief executive officer of the Urban Taskforce I produced a publication promoting mid-rise apartments with a two page code and a 30 day approval for complying proposals.
On leaving the Taskforce I set about writing a book titled Mid-rise Urban Living for a London publisher that looked at examples from around the world.
The strongest advocacy came from the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community, set up by the now King Charles III of England. The foundation produced a report in 2014 titled Housing London: A Mid-rise Solution which stated“mid-rise developments present the city with the opportunity to achieve both a range of housing choices for London’s increasingly diverse population, as well as offering a liveable urban street scape which is currently neglected by so many new residential developments.”
The mid-rise being championed by King Charles’s foundation is the six storey scale of Belgravia or the housing that encloses squares like Bedford Square in inner London.
A few years ago the NSW government promoted the “missing middle” as townhouses and terrace houses up to two storeys; but homes sell for similar prices to detached houses.
Apartments, however, are on average around $400,000 cheaper that the average house so if we want to tackle affordability we should focus on apartments that have a human scale, that include greenery, and are well located in relation to public transport and jobs.
Increasingly apartment buildings of this scale are attracting families particularly if child care is included in the development.
My research on mid-rise found that around the world new approaches to communities living in six or so storey apartment buildings are incorporating greenery like WOHA’s amazing development called Kampung Admiralty in Singapore where the whole top and mid levels are covered in extensive gardens.
In Rotterdam Dutch architects MVRDV wrapped apartments over a market place creating both new affordable housing and a public amenity. One of their new designs, at La Serre in Paris, demonstrates how communal housing may evolve around atrium spaces that are shared by residents.
In Australia designs by Breathe Architecture for Nightingale Housing carry similar characteristics of humanising the architecture and their collaboration on the DKO Architecture-led project in Sydney for affordable housing at Alexandria called Arcadia is another good example.
But our incredibly slow planning system in Sydney doesn’t encourage the development of a mid-rise approach. Councils seem to mainly reflect the views of existing residents who do not want any change and the new communities are not represented in the planning system.
Previous Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens undertook a study for Premier Berejiklian in 2018 and he found that the governance system related to planning did not represent future residents and was dominated by councillors elected by existing residents who generally did not want change.
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The housing crisis that the Demographia Report raises and that the Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates says is a nightmare needs some major policy intervention to get more housing built in Sydney that can be affordable and well located. The NSW government and the newly elected Australian government should look to the initiatives across the ditch in New Zealand as a way to drive appropriate housing supply. Or maybe we need some royal intervention from King Charles through the report of his foundation on how to house London’s growth in mid-rise housing and London’s housing affordability level is half that of Sydney’s.
