TOD was crying into his Reschs with joy when he hooked up with High-Rise and Low-Rise late last year. It seemed like all his dreams of highly convenient urban living were finally coming true.
The Minns government is a friend of density at 400 metres, 800m and 1200m from heavy rail, light rail and maybe your local shops. TOD [transport oriented development]’s places should be nominated. Long overdue.
Many of the pro-density planning moves of the Minns government are catch up on statutory slippage or places already identified and not controversial. The extended permissibility in R2 zones is largely peeling back the cuts made in these places by sly local environment plan (LEP) amendments to state urban consolidation reforms of the 1980s/90s.
A lot of centres already have six-storey+ height limits and they have not been swamped with buildings over the last 10 years. The anxiety expressed by some bungalow owners that they are just about to be built out by high-rise is unlikely. They are coming but the capacity constraints in the housing industry are not just the lack of decent zonings.
What TOD found so exciting about his new friends was their promise. Maybe this time it’s real. Albo is pumping money into the housing sector (public housing and community housing) and Minns is expected to land that money somewhere nice where the hardworking mums and dads of Australia want to live. Penrith is so 2000s – flood, smog, bush fires errkk. And that big black cat!
But why is density such an untouchable issue in our cities – such a mirage? Late summer, high tide lazing on the south bank of Clovelly Bay, a Mardi Gras buzz and a school of garfish in the bay. You look for your friend, catch the eye of another, she smiles. Sydney doesn’t get much better.
But why can’t we share? Surely those three-storey walk-ups on the north side of the Bay could go six-storeys all the way to Strathfield. Just like they would in less economically vibrant world cities. Why can’t we have the urban things that other cities do?
When and if the current zoning barriers are removed, what’s stopping housing abundance in our cities?
Well TOD, there seems to be these weird cultural, political, and regulatory barriers that can stop, delay and indebt any project to its detriment in this town.
The recent article by Tone Wheeler summed up the corridor of cricket bats that any housing project must go through well.
One of the ironies of the current densification push in Sydney is it also coincides with ongoing reforms to make everything about any Class 2 building (that’s a building with dwellings above and below, low-rise and high-rise) more difficult.
There’re additional regulatory police out there. Councils and certifiers already had some of these roles. The problem wasn’t individual professionals or trades but the developer/proponent’s direction.
Checking the waterproofing behind the tiles is cruel and misdirected attention – “Sorry, can’t really tell when you rip the tiles off, just do it again and this time take a photo.”
TOD’s choice for a better regulatory fix would have been to prosecute and put the dodgy developers in jail, as Napoleon would say, “Execute one educate 1000” and focus on properly resourcing the regulatory framework we already have (because there is still enough of that to go around).
It’s not just fear of the construction police that is stifling housing. As we get the “where” right, the “how” and “by whom” just gets harder and harder.
Architects and builders need additional qualifications, many just give up, and the pool of expertise gets shallower and more expensive. NSW suffers an ongoing conflict between expertise and authority.
Regulatory authorities with lots of authority confuse that with expertise. And you can see why. Authority in NSW comes with penal colony heritage, you feel like an expert because no one says you are not.
This is the weakness of the current regulatory push to police and control Class 2 buildings, the expertise designing these buildings has no authority and the authority regulating them has narrow expertise. City building requires some trust and unreining of ambition.
And then there is the forever chestnut of local government and its purpose. Historically formed as bough organisations of landowners to provide a few services, move the local Indigenous people on, put in some roads/sewers, build the odd park etc. Still true to purpose, perhaps with the additional task of closing the door on new entries.
TOD’s deepest darkest fear is that the current housing density reforms will go the same way as the part completed Local Government reforms of the mid-2010s. Mid U-turn the reform bus is abandoned on the corner. TOD should treasure time with Low-Rise and High-Rise – it may not last forever.
If you read the press releases, the current density push is a coordinated federal and state government drive to solve the housing crisis.
The Federal Government is putting up the money and the State Government is directing where, and Local Government is the how. They are going to assess and approve all the development applications (DAs)?
TOD is still getting a frosty reception up at the local council. They are not preparing for Low-Rise and High-Rise but rather insensitively still playing their favourite game, “we support housing as an idea, but not here.”
And after their COVID sabbaticals, are Local Government DA teams match fit for the more collaborative approach required to start infilling the city with new housing? TOD reckons the pattern book will sort that out.
Once you have a housing DA, then there is the minefield of Sydney’s construction industry. You can’t get a fixed price on anything these days, it’s all cost plus.
There seems to be a lot of builders going bust. There is interest rate and regulatory uncertainty (is my site being up zoned or what?). These factors make starting a project risky when you don’t know how much the building is going to cost, should it be two or six-storeys and will your builder be there to hand over a building?
TOD’s bet is that it will be two to four years for a mildly pro-housing regulatory culture to develop and some overseas brick layers to be imported into this town, before High-Rise and Low-Rise will truly feel welcomed.
Right now, if you want some real density, probably best go home with some of our Mardi Gras tourists. Is it too late to retrain as a lawyer?
