The Greater Sydney Commission could deliver a step-change policy advance on affordable housing

Posted by Hal Pawson on November 2nd, 2016 · Planning reform

The latest CityWest Housing affordable rental block, Portman Street, Zetland, under construction in 2015

Make no mistake; in the ranking of Australian urban governance innovations, the founding of the Greater Sydney Commission looks set to prove a major league event. Established by the NSW Government at the start of 2016, the GSC’s role is to create a strategic framework for local planning across the entire Sydney metropolis. Judging from last week’s Sydney Morning Herald story, affordable housing looks to be one area where the GSC could have an immediate step-change impact on our city, state, and maybe even other parts of Australia.

According to the Herald, the GSC’s district plans – due out later this month – will incorporate scope for affordable housing targets for new residential developments on re-zoned land. Such projects will be required to include a quantified component of ‘affordable housing’ for low income workers to rent from community housing providers.

This kind of ‘inclusionary zoning’ intervention is already commonplace in comparable countries such as the UK and USA. Albeit of a minimal form, there are even precedents in Australia. In NSW a similar policy has existed in designated zones in the City of Sydney for more than 20 years. In the Pyrmont Ultimo and Green Square renewal projects modest developer contributions have been channelled to affordable housing projects built and managed by CityWest Housing. However, while certainly worthy these schemes have yielded only 750 affordable rental homes over more than two decades. And although other states and territories have previously claimed the introduction of so-called inclusionary zoning for affordable housing, our research has shown that these measures have tended to be relatively toothless – e.g. where developers can fulfil their obligation simply by including in their scheme a proportion of for-sale units commanding a lower price by virtue of their small size.

Some property lobby groups have cried foul in response to the reported GSC position. Arguing that such a policy could have a ‘very dangerous impact’, the Urban Development Institute of Australia contends that the cost of an affordable housing obligation will be borne by purchasers of ‘market sale’ homes. Similarly, the policy has been derided as ‘another form of taxation on housing’.

However, claims of this sort are highly questionable. In a properly-functioning land market, it is the land value not the market price of homes for sale that will be impacted by any planning requirement limiting the scope for sale of an entire development at the market price. After all, urban land values are an artificial construct, strongly influenced by the allowable uses for the site concerned. Unjustifiably, therefore, status quo arrangements enable owners of ‘up-zoned’ land to reap un-earned and untaxed super profits when, for example, planners raise a local development height limit from two stories to six stories.

And reflecting an appreciation that an affordable housing obligation will depress land acquisition costs, resistance to inclusionary zoning for affordable housing is, in fact, far from universal across the development industry. Among the strongest backers of such a policy is the Committee for Sydney, well-known as a business-supported lobby group. A recent CFS report sponsored by Payce Communities and endorsed by Lend Lease contends that affordable housing obligations would be perfectly acceptable to many developers provided these responsibilities are clearly defined before the relevant site is purchased. In this way a developer can allow for the cost of providing affordable housing in the price they are willing to pay for the land.

There will be some developers whose efforts to anticipate re-zoning designations may have led them to buy sites at prices more reflective of their expected allowable use rather than their current zoning designation. In other words, they have gambled on an administrative event delivering them a windfall. If the anticipated change of landuse decision in fact comes with inclusionary zoning strings attached they may find that projected development profit margins are squeezed. What this means is that a reformed planning regime linking inclusionary zoning with re-zoning would discourage land speculation and speculative holding. In wider public policy terms, surely no bad thing.

Meanwhile, perhaps in an attempt to overshadow the GSC proposal, the Urban Task Force has been spruiking its alternative plan for boosting affordable housing construction. Here, an affordable housing contribution would be offered by developers in return for a general relaxation of planning limitations to allow 20 per cent more height and density.

According to the UTF, its proposal could yield 40,000 affordable units within a decade. However, while this is certainly no small number, the homes concerned would be restricted for affordable rental use only for 10 years. A number of other issues are also raised by the UTF pitch. At the least, the proffered ‘bargain’ of more affordable homes for greater density and height could be seen as something of a faustian pact. Is it right that neighbouring residents whose amenity would be compromised by ‘over-large’ developments imposed through a purely mechanistic planning relaxation should ‘pay the price’ for any additional affordable homes generated as a result? To put this more strongly, this could be seen as a corruption of the planning system.

More broadly, the case made against inclusionary zoning for affordable housing often implies that, yes this might be a socially desirable aspiration, but it would come at an economic price. However, this inference has been actively contested by the respected consultancy SGS Economics and Planning. In their 2015 analysis, SGS presents evidence that, in enabling well-located affordable housing development, such measures can in fact be strongly justified on both economic and social grounds.

In all this, it can’t be emphasized too strongly that this is truly a policy where the devil is in the detail. Importantly, for example, the precise phraseology around the proposed affordable housing obligation as reported in the Herald could imply only a rather modest ‘dividend’ from the policy in many settings. Designated projects, according to the story, will be required to include ‘5-10 per cent of …extra floorspace’ as ‘affordable housing’. If the mandated affordable housing component in fact turns out to be only a twentieth of the ‘extra floorspace’ permitted by a re-zoning, that might generate a sizeable quantum only in major schemes where the change in the allowable height and/or density is substantial.

Nevertheless, with the GSC district plans perhaps yet to secure Cabinet sign off, it must be hoped that Government support for the Commission remains steadfast and that Ministerial commitment to an appreciable advance in housing policy is not blown off course by questionable claims from sectional interests.

‘Future Directions’ must address public housing work disincentives

Posted by Chris Martin on October 12th, 2016 · Uncategorized

There’s been movement on two fronts of the NSW State Government’s ‘Future Directions for Social Housing‘ agenda.

Last week the Social Housing Minister, Brad Hazzard, announced that from mid-2017 some 14 700 dwellings currently let to public housing tenants will be transferred on 20-year leases to community housing providers (CHPs), with CHPs also set to take on 3 300 dwellings to be built under separately-announced estate renewal programs. It is transferring the properties, says the State Government, because tenants get better service and support from CHPs – and because CHPs get better rent revenues from the tenants who, as non-government tenants, become eligible to receive Rent Assistance from Centrelink (worth about $1 billion over 20 years, according to the Minister). The State Government has assured affected tenants that their tenancies will be transferred automatically to the CHPs (by operation of ‘concurrent leases‘), and that FACS staff will be ‘given the opportunity to take up jobs in the expanded community housing sector’.

The other area of activity relates to improving employment opportunities for social housing tenants. The State Government has commissioned the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal to review current rent models and eligibility criteria, and ‘recommend an appropriate rent setting framework for social and affordable housing that improves incentives for workforce participation.’ And last month FACS Housing convened a consultation session with CHPs, employment service providers and other stakeholders to sound out two proposed new programs: ‘Personal Support Plans’, to case manage social housing clients towards job-related goals, and ‘Pathways to Jobs’, a specialised employment service targeting social housing estates. The stated aim is to ‘support people to avoid social housing’ and to achieve a ‘5 per cent increase in positive social housing exits’.

Building up the capacities of unemployed people is great, but FACS NSW should take care that it does not link employment support and housing assistance through unrealistic conditionality. On the one hand, it needs to be recognised that there are almost 200 000 unemployed persons in New South Wales (in all housing tenures) – and about 70 000 job vacancies. There’s just not enough jobs. No amount of ‘personal support planning’ and case management will change that.

And on the other hand, FACS Housing needs to recognise that under its current policies, public housing tenants who look like beating those odds and getting jobs are strongly discouraged from doing so, and public housing tenants who are in work are strongly discouraged from increasing their incomes beyond a low level.

Policy settings that impose costs that reduce the rewards of work so much that people will knock back work are known as work disincentives – or, more precisely, ‘unemployment traps’ (settings that discourage a person from working at all) and ‘poverty traps’ (settings that discourage a person from increasing their income through more or better work). For some time there has been concern that system of income related rents in public housing and community housing throughout Australia (by which tenants pay a rent rebated to 25 per cent of their household income) operates as a work disincentive (contributing to poverty traps, if not unemployment traps). This is particularly so when considered along with the effect of income tax and the tapering off of social security payments: straightforwardly, income-related rents add 25 percentage points to effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs).

However, against this concern we should also set:

the notion of fairness represented by income-related rents (the old-fashioned idea of ‘from each according to one’s ability, to each according to one’s need’);
the fact that income tax and social security settings have a larger effect on EMTRs; and
the research evidence that shows similar persons have higher rates of unemployment when on the waiting list than when in social housing – suggesting both that the prospect of losing eligibility under the tight income thresholds is a worse disincentive, and that the security and affordability of social housing helps some tenants get job-ready and into employment.

The particular problem in New South Wales is that public housing is beset with two additional policies with even sharper work disincentive effects.

The first is the regime of higher rent rates for ‘moderate income’ tenants, by which the usual 25 per cent rate slides up to 30 per cent for households within a certain range of income defined as ‘moderate’ by FACS Housing. Calling it a ’25-30 per cent sliding scale’ belies its work disincentive effect, because that’s not a marginal rate that applies only to additional income in the moderate range, like progressive income tax rates do – instead, the moderate income rent rate applies to all the household’s income. Expressed as a marginal rate – which better represents the way people think about the costs and rewards of increasing one’s income through more or better work – it’s 45 per cent sliding up to 55 per cent.

In other words, if a tenant increases their income into the moderate range, on average half of the increase would go to FACS Housing in rent. And that’s before income tax. The moderate income rent rate policy adds, on top of the usual 25 percentage points from income-related rents, another 20-30 percentage points to EMTRs. This makes rent the largest contributor to EMTRs for persons in the moderate income range.

For example: say you’re a single person in public housing on an income of $754 per week. This is what a mid-level 4-day per week community service worker might earn; it’s also just below the moderate income range. Under the usual rules, 25 per cent of that goes to rent. Now say you earn precisely one dollar more – just enough to put you in the moderate income range, where the rent rate starts to slide up. At just one dollar into the range, the rate rises only fractionally – by 0.026 per cent – but that rate is applied not just to that additional dollar of income, but to every other dollar of your income too. Across $754 dollars, that’s 20 cents. Add that to the 25.026 cents of rent for the additional dollar, and it’s just over 45 cents out of that additional dollar that goes in rent. From the remaining 55 cents, you have to pay income tax – 32.5 cents – leaving you with 22.5 cents from your additional dollar of income. That’s an EMTR of 77.5 per cent.

Say your income is near the top of the moderate range ($987) when you earn an additional dollar: the fractional increase in rate applies across even more dollars, resulting in 55 cents out of that additional dollar going in rent. Factoring in income tax, you’re facing an EMTR of 87.5 per cent.

This would weigh heavily on anyone’s decisions about work. For some households, the policy affects other decisions too. Say your household includes a young adult child who is entering the workforce. Because the rent rate is determined by household income, the young person’s wages can result in a higher rate of rent for all household members, including non-working parents whose income has not changed. This household is faced with decisions not just about work, but also about whether the young person can still live at home.

The second additional work disincentive comes from FACS Housing’s reviews as to continuing eligibility. Since 2005, all new public housing tenants have faced a review of their eligibility to continue in public housing every two, five or 10 years (coincident with the expiry of the fixed term of their agreement, which depends on FACS Housing’s assessment at the start of the tenancy of the tenant’s circumstances). If at review a household’s income is above the top of moderate income range, FACS Housing will proceed to terminate the tenancy.

Particularly for households in Sydney, the income thresholds at which continuing eligibility is lost are well below the incomes required to affordably rent in the private market. A single person at the top of the moderate income range ($988) will, in public housing, pay $297 per in rent (at the 30 per cent rate); in the private market, they would be looking at $470 per week (median rent for one-bedroom units across Sydney). Add to that the insecurity of private rental housing, and insecurity of employment, and it becomes rational – even wise – for a public housing tenant to knock back work in order to stay housed.

And this is what has happened. As reported by the NSW Auditor General, less than two per cent of tenants reviewed at the two-year period were found to be ineligible. The rate of exits from public housing has slowed since the introduction of these two policies 10 years ago – ironically, as part of a reform agenda aimed at moving employed tenants out of public housing.

In the UK, which followed New South Wales’ misguided lead and encouraged social housing landlords to use fixed term and reviewable tenancies, many of those landlords are now disenchanted with the policy. In New South Wales, however, the community housing sector took a critical view early on and, when moderate income rent rates and continuing eligibility reviews were being implemented in public housing, managed to persuade the State Government that the policies should not apply to community housing tenants. The 14 700 public housing households soon to be transferred should benefit from this treatment – there should be no question of these counterproductive policies being brought into community housing now. And they should be lifted from all those remaining in public housing too. The guiding principle for Future Directions should be that social housing tenants will have nothing to lose from working.

Value Capture: options for funding infrastructure

Posted by Chris Martin on October 6th, 2016 · Cities, Construction, Guest appearance, Transport, urban renewal

By Dr Nigel Stapledon and Prof Kevin Fox, Centre for Applied Economic Research, University of NSW. This article draws on the authors’ report, Value Capture Is Not a Magic Pudding: options for funding infrastructure, prepared for the Urban Taskforce.

With major new transport infrastructure being built in our major cities, the idea of value capture has been in the news as a potential source for assisting in the financing of these big capital projects. Value capture refers to a broad range of user charges linked to, or taxes on, the rise in land value.

A first broad point is that transport infrastructure (or lack thereof) is a prime influence on the value of land in cities. As cities’ populations grow, additional rail/road infrastructure is needed to accommodate the increased population. The new transport infrastructure can add significantly to the value of land in the proximity of say new stations, when it reduces commuter times and improves accessibility, so it seems reasonable that these landowners should share some of this gain with the government (broader community). However, there can also be losers. The value of land directly next to a new or widened road corridors could be adversely affected by, for example, noise and pollution with the increased traffic volumes.

The presence of both winners and losers makes a land tax an obvious candidate to capture this variation and there is substantial support for this. The Henry Tax Review (HTR, 2010) argued that the current tiered land taxes should be broadened from covering some business and investor residential property, to a land tax on all urban land, including on owner-occupier properties. The ACT is leading the way, widening its land tax base and (as recommended by the HTR) phasing out stamp duties. The ACT combines state and local government which means fewer political obstacles than the States would face but it also highlights that Local and State Government land taxes should be integrated and collected together, along the lines of the Canadian model.

The London Cross Rail has been hailed as an example to follow. The Greater London Council charges a supplementary land tax with proceeds hypothecated to funding the new Cross Rail but significantly it applies only to large business properties. The politics are clear but the exemption means that there is little value capture.

To the extent possible, direct charges on users of new infrastructure should be a default option because they provide a price signal for optimal capital spending decisions and commuter use. Tollways should be the default for major new roads. There is an economic case for subsidies for public transport but given the importance of density for profitability, it follows that new rail lines should be contingent on allowing high density in proximity to new stations.

There are other elements of value capture in the current system. Where land is owned by businesses or investors, capital gains tax will apply which will capture a portion of any gain. However, a big portion of the gain, that made by owner-occupiers is untaxed. A first best ‘value capture’ solution would have this exemption removed but the Henry Tax Review acknowledged that this was politically too difficult.

There is also an element of value capture where the (State) government owns the land. In that regard, the Hong Kong model has been touted as the way to go. However, in Hong Kong the government owns all the land. In Australia, governments do not and compulsory acquisition on a large scale would be problematic politically.

Then there are taxes on new developments. There are a raft of existing development contributions/taxes imposed by Local and State Governments, with the NSW State Government proposing a $2,000 per m² density tax for redevelopments in vicinity of the proposed Parramatta Light Rail. These taxes need to be seen in the context of current controls over the quantity of development. Restricted supply lifts prices and creates the capacity for governments to extract contributions from landowners via developers offering less. If policymakers are concerned about housing affordability, a policy regime with a combination which is less restrictive with a development tax will be more efficient and lead to more affordable housing.

The most controversial tax on developers would be a betterment tax, with the Parramatta Council proposing a 50% tax on the lift in value of the land. Betterment taxes have a history of failure leading to stalling of development and sharp rises in land prices. In design they are an indirect capital gains tax on landowners, indirect in that the liability falls on the developer to extract the gain from the landowner. The key problem is that developers need to pay a premium above land value to encourage landowners to sell. Add in measurement and other issues, and it is easy to see why the Henry Tax Review dismissed this as an option.

In short, the idea of value capture is an attractive one. It is when you dig deeper and flesh out precisely what is meant by value capture that things become harder.

Sense of place: messier than it ever was, so how do we manage this shifting world?

Posted by Edgar Liu on September 30th, 2016 · Cities, Public space, urban renewal

by Edgar Liu and Robert Freestone. Originally published at The Conversation.

Place is a crucial dimension of human meaning and relationships. It grounds us.

Our attachments with multiple places are a significant part of our individual and group identities. At one level, these attachments reflect our values and aspirations, while at another level they capture broader social, cultural and economic trends.

Place is therefore at once very personal and collective. It connotes multiple rather than singular meanings.

In 1976, Canadian geographer Ted Relph confidently divided the two ideas in his seminal book Place and Placenessness. This work influenced a growing movement for place-based research by geographers, sociologists, psychologists, environmental planners and others.

According to Relph, some places were real and authentic; others were bland and homogeneous.

The very ‘authentic’ Grand Bazaar of Istanbul. Robert Freestone

Place identities, a contested business

Things have got far messier since then. Places can clearly channel both dimensions depending on the beholder; others have evolved under neoliberalism in very different ways that were unforeseen even late last century. Place-making has emerged as a multi-million-dollar industry aimed at creating meaningful sites.

Place research has exploded in various and nuanced directions; there is no more black and white. As prominent place academic Tim Cresswell proclaims:

Place is made and remade on a daily basis.

Place is political and contested. Geographer David Sibley argues every act of inclusion is defined by an act of exclusion.

This could be as blatant as physically keeping out the unwanted (such as the Great Wall of China), a shift in the ownership of “public” spaces, or applying policies that prohibit the presence of “unwelcome” activities, whether in the name of public good or otherwise.

Such protectionist mentalities seem to be running rampant on current global political stages.

Elsewhere, much investment is made into actively changing place identity – with varying degrees of success. Regardless, branded place-making is now big business. It is part of urban renewal initiatives in transforming disused or “out of date” areas into higher-density, often boutique (and therefore premium) places.

Professional place-makers supposedly have the expertise to take downtrodden places, wave their magic wands and create new and exciting precincts for us to enjoy. But do these projects always succeed in changing urban fortunes?

The development of place-making

The concept of place-making has its origin in the 1960s, when academics and urban activists like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte promoted a more human-centred (re)design of cities to counter the anodyne steamroller of international modernism.

Since then, however, governments and private industries alike have dreamt up big ideas – and spent big dollars – in creating “memorable” places in the service of triple bottom linesustainability, though often especially the economic dimension. Paradoxically, this global phenomenon can account for an uneasy new form of placelessness as similar solutions are adapted in diverse settings.

The commercialisation of ‘place’ extends beyond urban design and even to clothing chains. Edgar Liu

Great designs help in creating a distinctive and unique sense of place, but design alone cannot solve all. As a regeneration consultant recently wrote:

Urban design is not destiny. It alone can’t create communities, can’t address racism or affect global politics through pretty place-making.

The people and place disconnect – or what Relph termed placelessness – has changed and evolved since the 1970s and so have our interpretations, perceptions and experiences of it.

The key point is that process is as important as product. Good design must have the people at heart. And to do that one must first listen to the people.

We all play critical roles in how place identities come to be. There is a great diversity of views but also wisdom in crowds.

So the turn is towards consultative and, better still, participatory exercises even in large-scale projects alongside small-scale, community-led projects and on to more DIY and guerrilla-style urbanism.

The united aim is to invest nondescript places (by almost any criterion) with new attractiveness and meaning. This frequently involves respecting individual and collective memories of the past.

Disrupting placelessness

As this is played out through private development, the catch is that return on investment becomes a critical driver. New places, reinvented places and what French philosopher Marc Augé termed non-places will all tend to blend authenticity and anonymity.

Place is messier than it ever was, and our engagements with it too. That is why we set out to see how Relph’s simple binary had been disrupted in a new collection called Place and Placelessness Revisited.

This surveys our connections to place in many different settings – civic squares, playgrounds, airports, shopping malls, even public toilets. All serendipitously point to place as a fascinating multiplicity.

We invited Relph to have the last word. He declared without nostalgia that the either/or of his original formulation was “obsolete”. In the new millennium, as discomforting as it may seem, nothing about place “can be taken for granted”.

Productivity Commission stance could hold potential for social housing gains

Posted by Hal Pawson on September 27th, 2016 · Government

By Hal Pawson, Associate Director, City Futures Research Centre. Originally published at The Conversation.

The new Productivity Commission report favouring “greater competition, contestability and user choice” in social housing has caused concern among advocates for low-income tenants. The report is an interim output from an ongoing review of the nation’s human services – including public hospitals, dental services and palliative care, as well as state-provided or regulated housing. The commission’s “pro-competition” statement, although a provisional finding, could presage a shake-up in the delivery of housing services for Australia’s most disadvantaged groups.

Critics have characterised the report as a charter for “privatisation” of public housing. While somewhat diminished, state-owned-and-managed housing still accommodates around 700,000 of our most vulnerable citizens.

This explains the fears that commission-inspired “reforms” could result in the forced sale of public housing to vulture capitalists unconstrained by enforceable obligations to provide tenant services or to maintain, upgrade and retain housing stock for its current purpose. We need only look to Germany – so often referenced as a private-renter-friendly country – for an example of how a botched divestment of social housing to for-profit companies can lead to public authorities being forced to buy back stock.

However, rather than pushing towards an entirely marketised and deregulated framework underpinned by the profit motive, the commission report’s soberly couched analysis appears focused on how to make the existing social housing system work more efficiently and effectively to deliver established obligations.

The authors, for example, contend that:

… there appears scope for improvement in the way social housing is delivered that could lead to better outcomes for tenants in the social housing system, as well as for people outside the system who are unable to access the support they need.

They rightly note that all is far from well with the status quo:

Due to … funding pressures and demographic changes, the quality of the service received by social housing tenants has deteriorated … Additional maintenance expenditure as part of the Australian Government’s 2008 stimulus package has not alleviated deteriorating quality standards in public housing.

Towards a multi-provider system

The policy aspiration for a “contestable” social housing system has, in fact, been a mainstream orthodoxy for quite a while.

Indeed, it formed the centrepiece of Tanya Plibersek’s groundbreaking 2009 speech, Room for More (photo credit: Dave Hunt/AAP). As Labor’s federal housing minister, she argued for a move away from the domination of social housing by large “monopolistic” state authorities and towards a “multi-provider” system. Under this vision, not-for-profit community housing providers would be supported to grow to a scale enabling them to both complement and compete with public housing entities.

Post-2009 developments have included some expansion of community housing. Part of this has been through the transfer of tenanted public housing properties.

Even so, community providers control only around a fifth of all social housing in 2016. They remain very much minority players in most states.

The Productivity Commission’s enthusiasm for greater contestability might result in a recommendation that state governments should consider further large-scale public housing transfers to community providers. Some contend that this amounts to damaging privatisation no less than if the recipients were for-profit companies.

For reasons fully explained elsewhere, this argument is in my view highly questionable. Instead, community housing providers might legitimately position themselves as “the reform alternative to privatisation”.

In principle, greater competition, contestability and choice could be fostered within social housing in other ways. While observing that “allowing community housing providers to manage social housing appears to have had benefits, both in Australia and elsewhere”, the commission also notes:

For-profit providers could introduce further contestability and choice.

In the absence of a new public subsidy, though, it’s debatable whether many companies needing to deliver shareholder returns would see the firmly regulated management of public housing as an attractive proposition.

Mid-1990s attempts by Queensland’s Borbidge government to outsource public housing to for-profit companies soon fell by the wayside. Similarly unsuccessful in the mid-1990s was the UK government’s effort to outsource the entire council housing service, under Housing Management Compulsory Competitive Tendering. Again, the inherently low returns from providing minimally subsidised services to poor people – as well as the complexity of social housing management – meant the UK program failed to attract the expected interest of for-profit companies.

A close reading of the commission’s report suggests anyway that the authors are at this stage more inclined towards diversifying social housing through boosting its community housing component than through a predominant role for private for-profit entities:

Transferring the management of more properties to non-government providers could deliver more options for tenants who are offered a choice of housing provider.

Such a direction would, nevertheless, “not preclude the management of properties remaining with the public provider, if they were best-placed to provide the service”.

Obstacles to accountability

However, any reforms based on deciding which provider is “best-placed to provide the service” face a serious obstacle: the available data on the cost of social housing provision and service outcomes are woefully inadequate. This is true at the aggregate level and for individual social landlords.

Our research confirms that the capacity for quantifying management expenditure in public housing has decayed over recent years.

A fundamental problem has been the states’ and territories’ failure to honour a 2009 commitment to enhance and standardise their housing service accounting procedures. The financing of public housing services remains equally opaque. Only by repeating a major research exercise last undertaken in 2007 could we quantify the relative financial (un)sustainability of each state and territory housing authorities.

In any event, diversifying social housing on a larger scale would call for Commonwealth government leadership in strengthening the regulatory framework and making it truly national. This would be needed to ensure effective monitoring and enforcement of responsibilities and obligations transferred to non-government providers. Indeed, the Productivity Commission report highlights the need for accountability:

Improving the accountability of service providers could improve a range of attributes of social housing.

This supports the case for extending the current system for regulating community housing providers to cover public housing services.

In all of this, it is vital to keep in mind that Australia’s social housing system remains grossly underfunded. Currently available resources are inadequate even to properly maintain the existing portfolio, let alone to underpin the new supply needed to keep pace with growing need.

Any efficiency gains flowing from Productivity Commission-inspired managerial reforms will make only a tiny dent here. A commitment to overcoming this problem is a prerequisite if, in line with the report’s stated aspirations, the most disadvantaged are to have any real housing choice.

All aboard for the Bankstown corridor – or just the lucky few?

Posted by Chris Martin on September 21st, 2016 · Affordability, Cities, Construction, Demographics, Government, Housing supply, Public space, Transport, urban renewal

By Professor Bill Randolph, Director, City Futures Research Centre. This is an extended version of an article published by The Conversation.

It would be easy to assume that the new Sydney Metro Rail project will create something of an urban paradise along the new Sydenham to Bankstown Urban Renewal Corridor through which it will run. New homes, peak hour Metro trains every four minutes, upgraded community facilities and green spaces and cycle paths for locals to enjoy are promised as well as new homes and jobs. The Department of Planning’s recent brochure shows a colourful mass of new density zones, with every town centre along the route in for a face-lift. In the cases of Bankstown, Campsie, Canterbury and Belmore town centres, it will be a high-rise face-lift indeed, with apartment towers rising to eight or more storeys.

While it is only a draft strategy, the Government’s intentions seem pretty clear – this area of Sydney is about to change and change dramatically. From a city-building point of view, this could be a very good thing. There will be a lot more people housed near transport links, making the daily commute into town easier. This in turn brings productivity benefits. The influx of new residents and the building activity will also create more local activity and jobs.

Given the age of housing stock in the suburbs along the route there is undoubtedly need for renewal. These suburbs were part of Sydney’s vast post-war expansion, as the city sprawled outwards to house the influx of migrants and young post-war families. But many of these detached homes, and the red-brick three storey walk-ups that followed in the 1960s and 70s, are now reaching the end of their lifecycle. Unlike in the more affluent parts of Sydney, however, this corridor offers no obvious financial bonanza for developers. Why? Because it is one of the more socially and economically disadvantaged places in the city. Gentrification, the driver for urban renewal across Sydney’s inner suburbs to the east, has not come knocking on these doors – yet.

The result is that the area, particularly between Canterbury and Bankstown, is home to a large population of ethnically-diverse families, three-quarters of whom survive on incomes below the Sydney median. These people often have insufficient income to improve their properties, if indeed they own them. Much of the apartment stock is owned by investors, largely uninterested in upgrading their property. In fact, the suburbs of Belmore, Lakemba, Wiley Park and Punchbowl form one of the largest concentrations of lower income renters in Sydney, compounded by a large population of retirees on fixed and low incomes.

Given the social issues this corridor faces, government-led renewal is therefore to be welcomed. However, there are very big questions to be answered as to what it will mean for the communities already there and as yet little evidence that the Government is even asking them.

Question One: what percentage of the intended 36,000 new apartments and other dwellings have been allocated for affordable housing? This is more than just a nice idea. It’s a very real concern for the functioning of the entire city. On current experience, we can be sure that the new apartment buildings will not be pitched at the pockets of those who currently live in these places. Without a significant affordable housing component, the essential workers who live in the area now – the mechanics, nurses, shop workers, drivers and hospitality workers – will not be able to afford to live in the costlier dwellings that the renewed town centres will, on current evidence, inevitably provide.

Big urban renewal projects in comparable overseas cities like New York and London have set aside significant proportions of the new housing as affordable units to avoid the problems that arise when people are displaced. In these cities, it’s accepted as completely reasonable that lower income working families should also benefit from new housing delivered as a result of public investment in major renewal projects. The NSW government needs to make that percentage very clear from the outset for the Sydenham to Bankstown corridor, so that developers are under no illusion about what will need to be built – and how much they need to factor into site acquisition.

Question Two: we’ve seen the zoning map, but where are the services to meet the needs of the large number of additional people who’ll be living there? In Green Square, for instance, schools weren’t considered in the haste to erect the apartment towers and at present there is one footy field for 60,000 new residents! Of course, we are promised a plan for such services for the new corridor. But with the government having already released the broad zoning map without these being indicated, land owners will rightly question any subsequent proposal that would diminish their rights to maximum value uplift from residential development by imposing a lower value land use such as a school or park. And speculators are no doubt already buying up existing land parcels in the expectation that the draft zoning map will be fully implemented.

Question Three – and leading on from two: who is going to benefit from the substantial value uplift the new Metro and the associated local amenity upgrades with generate? There is no mention in the corridor plan of how much this value uplift might be, or how some will be captured to either help pay for the Metro itself, or for the other key infrastructure investments needed to turn these new station precincts into the liveable and vibrant places depicted in the brochure. Indeed, the plan makes no mention at all of the likely outcome in terms of property prices or affordability – which is all the more odd given that the Urban Feasibility Model, which underpins all the Department’s planning proposals, will have clearly indicated the value likely to be created.

Question Four: how will those who live there now, many of whom have been there all their lives, be included in the decision-making process about the redevelopment? Will they have a say about what they want, and will it genuinely be listened to? The corridor is a massive project, but right now, the only opportunity to participate is via written feedback – presumably in English – to the draft strategy. The NSW Planning Minister has recently announced his belief that the planning process should become much more inclusive in the way new decisions are made. This means local community input at the early stages of a development as well as involvement when major planning proposals come forward, so as not to ‘surprise’ anyone about what may follow. This is both welcome and essential if local communities are to be brought along with the prospect of renewal. The corridor plan needs to be linked into such a process as soon as possible.

Question Five: And finally, once the rezoning is in place, will it be a developer-led free for all, or will the government take a stake in the process? This form of urban renewal in established town centres and communities offers a very different set of opportunities and constraints to that of the renewing derelict industrial sites or surplus public lands where ownership is already consolidated and where few people live. Here, the public sector needs to take a lead, not least to reduce redevelopment risk and prepare agreed master planned outcomes to speed action. This calls for significant innovation in public leadership. We need to develop new publically accountable approaches to implement coordinated and integrated renewal across multiple local interests and stakeholders. The key here with be inclusion – inclusive renewal will mean a real engagement with the communities involved, not the usual tokenistic, top-down and highly controlled ‘consultation’ that usually prevails.

We need something new to achieve this. There is a real opportunity to establish an arms-length non-profit renewal corporation or agency to work with local councils (with land holdings), local land owners and businesses, communities (particularly those in older strata properties), the development sector and community housing providers in consortia or joint ventures to re-plan and renew these town centres. Innovative funding for new infrastructure could come through hypothecated value capture mechanisms, both in the form of up-front levies on land and property sales, to ensure the value uplift they benefit from is appropriately shared, and longer term borrowing supported by the increased local rates that will be collected. Why not target it towards these urban renewal centres?

Importantly, such an approach should be established with the principle of subsidiarity to the fore–i.e. devolving planning decisions to the appropriate level (something that Minister Stokes also champions). The affordable housing would be the responsibility of local community housing providers working with the development industry and the new agency to ensure the best outcome from the renewal, so that those living there today will also benefit. UrbanGrowth NSW, the State Government’s current urban renewal development arm, could play such a role, of course, although its focus and structure would need significant modification for this task. But since we will eventually need such an agency in order to coordinate and manage the process of inclusive renewal, let’s start thinking about it now. It could set a precedent for more widespread town centre renewal activity.

The new Sydney Metro promises a revolution in mass transit for the city. However, the accompanying renewal of this corridor will impact one of the most socially and economically disadvantaged communities in Sydney. Perpetuating – or indeed enhancing – that disadvantage through wide-scale displacement and unaffordable apartment building would be a disastrous outcome. This new urban transit orientated paradise must not just be for those lucky enough to afford it.

Population projection release should provoke questions: is this the future we want?

Posted by Chris Martin on September 14th, 2016 · Demographics

By Alison Taylor, Demographer, City Futures Research Centre.

This week new projections for Local Government Areas in NSW were released by the Department of Planning and Environment. This release should again prompt us to urgently, but carefully, consider the type of future we want for ourselves and our children.

Unfortunately, coverage of the release by mainstream media outlets chose to dwell on the headline numbers and the pressures that will result. “Sydney population booms and the only way is up and in” suggested we must build more towers – as well as terraces and other small developments. “Population surge puts pressure on NSW” highlighted worsening traffic jams and poor housing affordability. Others commented on the differences to the previous projections released in 2014.

It’s normal that the projections change from release to release. Despite not yet having new Census data to rebase these projections on, the 2016 update reflects changed circumstances since 2013 when the last set were prepared. Let’s take how many people are moving from state to state, often seeking jobs or lifestyle opportunities, to consider why we need an update.

Back in 2013, Australia was still recovering from the impacts of the GFC and the resources boom was sucking people into Western Australia in particular. When times are tough fewer people move, reflected in lower levels of interstate movement in 2010 and 2011.

However, 2015 has again seen a slump in interstate movement with the total moving 10,500 below the average of the previous decade – including the GFC impacted years.

In NSW in 2015, the number of arrivals from interstate was above the previous decade’s average. This was also the case in Victoria (while all other states and territories recorded arrivals below the previous ten year average). In contrast, the number of interstate departures from NSW was down compared with longer term trends (as was the case in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania).

So, compared with the past decade more people on average are moving to NSW, while fewer are leaving for other states or territories. Despite this the State continues to record a net loss – roughly 86,000 arrivals balanced by 93,000 departures, leading to a net loss of 6,600 people in 2015.

This is less than half the interstate loss that was occurring when the 2014 projections were prepared. Obviously this will impact on the number of people in NSW now and in the future. It is important that current projections reflect these changes.

But, the right questions are not being asked about these trends. Who are the people that are not moving interstate? How old are the people moving to NSW, where do they move to and what do they do after they arrive? If housing is so expensive in Sydney, why are people continuing to move here and what type of housing do they choose when they arrive? There are many stories contained in these projections that have not yet been told.

Projections must reflect trends in both interstate and overseas migration, as well as births and deaths. These patterns must be carefully analysed and modelled for all areas and for all age groups. This is not an easy task and one that requires certain judgements to be made – particularly regarding how current trends will track in the future. Public sector demographers must tread a tightrope, carefully balancing professional integrity with ownership of the output by political and bureaucratic masters.

After all, the updated projections need to be publicly released so they can be used to plan the infrastructure and services required by a growing population.

If nothing changes, it is highly likely that our populations will reach something like what has been modelled by the NSW Department of Planning and Environment. Metropolitan Sydney for example, will probably add close to 1.5m extra people to reach nearly 6.5 million people in the next 20 years. At the very least we must ensure that those responsible for providing the infrastructure and services, the housing and the open spaces that this population needs, stay focused on their task and deliver.

But where is the discussion about whether we want this outcome? There are many calls for improvements to the way our cities, towns and rural areas currently function, from easing congestion and reducing commuting, to poor housing affordability, environmental degradation and worsening inequality – the list goes on.

Why aren’t we thinking about how to change the future outlined for us in the 2016 Projections? What do we want the cities of the future to look like? What would an alternative future look like and what are the steps we need to take to create that future?

These questions should be addressed as part of a national discussion about population – instead of letting our immigration policies act as a de facto population policy. Let’s hear the stories of our population, uncover the changing trends and consider how we can build a better future.

The release of the latest projections should drive us to assertively shape our future into one that we want – not sit back and passively accept whatever we get.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

Peter Drucker

Questions about our future cities and the people that live in them will be debated at the 2016 Australian Population Association conference being held 29 November to 2 December in Sydney. See www.apaconference.com.au for further details.

Open letter to the NSW Premier and Planning Minister

Posted by Chris Martin on September 6th, 2016 · Affordability, Cities, Guest appearance, Housing, Housing supply

By Wendy Hayhurst (CEO, NSW Federation of Housing Associations), Katherine McKernan (CEO, Homelessness NSW), Professor Peter Phibbs (Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney), Professor Bill Randolph (Director, City Futures, UNSW) and Dr Tim Williams (CEO, Committee for Sydney)

Dear Mr Baird and Mr Stokes

At the recent 2016 Affordable Housing Conference there was consensus from the not for profit sector, property developers and the finance industry that further innovation is required from Government to help increase the supply of affordable housing in Sydney. This problem is, as we know, no longer confined to one group. Housing stress is now being felt now not just by the very needy but also increasingly by those higher up the income scale.

We emphasise that the Government is to be commended for creating an environment in which housing starts have more or less doubled in Sydney since 2011. However, it also has to be recognised that prices have still gone up significantly in this period. We believe that while increasing supply is a vital part of the strategy, relying solely on greater supply to moderate house prices and rents is clearly not working. Current approaches will not deliver for the growing numbers of aspiring first home buyers locked out of the market and lower income renters struggling to find affordable stock.

Something new needs to be tried not least to meet the housing needs of low paid but essential workers which are not being met currently by social housing provision or the current market. The Government has a real opportunity to make a difference both to the number and mix of homes in Sydney and community wellbeing if it uses its resources and powers in partnership with community housing providers and the private sector.

We recognise and welcome recent Government initiatives in relation to increasing social housing and private for sale supply through FACS led projects in the new Communities Plus program. The fact that income from housing land sales has been ring-fenced to invest in new social housing is also welcomed, as is the formation of a Social and Affordable Housing Fund. We also understand there are moves towards an inclusionary zoning policy in the planning system which would apply only to certain precincts in those LGAS which want it – which we strongly support but which we would like to see more generally applied.

We recognise and endorse these shifts in Government approaches but believe that there is a need for further innovation in relation to four key initiatives:

1. Inclusionary zoning and affordable housing targets for privately owned development sites. Many in the private sector will support inclusionary zoning if they are involved in drawing up the rules and if there is up-front certainty about planning requirements so that these can be factored into the land purchase price.

2. Use of government land destined for housing development – rather than seeking to maximise the return to the Treasury, the Government should set an example by mandating ambitious affordable housing targets on its major land holdings slated for disposal (e.g. regeneration sites) and accepting a slightly less-than-projected gain from the escalation in land values seen over recent years.

3. Government incentives to trigger private and not for profit investment into affordable housing. This would include expanding the Social and Affordable Housing Fund through, for example, designating a fraction of stamp duty receipts again inflated by the dramatic rise in property transaction values seen since 2011.

4. Using its role on the Commonwealth’s Affordable Housing Working Group to support the creation of an Affordable Housing Financial Intermediary. This would enable community housing providers to access well-priced long-term funds from institutional investors bringing down their costs and stretching the benefit of a fixed amount of government financial support.

For Sydney to continue to be a Smart City that’s vibrant, exciting and liveable for everyone no matter how much they earn, we need a long term plan for housing affordability that provides policy certainty and a development pipeline. This is the key to unlocking the not for profit and private sectors’ expertise and entrepreneurship and attracting the large scale private investment we need to help solve this problem. We all want a city where families, nurses, childcare workers and people on ordinary incomes can live, work, eat out and shop and continue to help Sydney thrive. For the sake of those NSW households struggling to find somewhere affordable to live we need to act now.

Wendy Hayhurst (CEO, NSW Federation of Housing Associations)

Katherine McKernan (CEO, Homelessness NSW)

Professor Peter Phibbs (Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning)

Professor Bill Randolph (Director, City Futures, UNSW)

Dr Tim Williams (CEO, Committee for Sydney)

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Tags: Affordable housing·Planning·Social housing

Changes to strata management laws and home modifications

Posted by Ryan van den Nouwelant on September 5th, 2016 · Cities, Demographics, Law, Strata, Wellbeing

by Ryan van den Nouwelant and Hazel Easthope, City Futures Research Centre

The recently introduced reforms to strata scheme management have been wide-ranging. Some of the more headline grabbing changes include new by-laws about pets, parking and smoking, electronic voting and tenant participation.

One reform that has not received as much attention is the change to make minor renovations easier: like changing kitchen designs and screwing things into internal common walls. But, for many residents in strata schemes, this could have the biggest impact on their strata living experience. This is because these changes were, at least partly, framed to facilitate home modifications. ‘Home mods’ are the alterations or renovations made to accommodate a person with a disability.

While home mods can be crucial to anyone with a disability, their growing importance is mostly tethered to our ageing population. Making strata living a genuine choice for an ageing population is important to both metropolitan planning agencies and individual developers. New apartment growth and broader infill housing strategies are often linked to (a) shrinking household size and (b) a greater need for proximity to, among other things, community and health infrastructure. Both these factors are premised on the increasing proportion of empty nesters in the housing market. A lot of marketing for new apartment developments reflects this segment of the market too. And all signs suggest the influence of the seniors’ cohort on the housing market is going to grow.

New apartment buildings include a much higher degree of universal accessibility, prescribed by recent changes to building codes and access standards. However, a lot of existing strata schemes, and a lot of homes more generally, predate these requirements and so will be subject to bespoke upgrades as residents’ needs change. This is where home mods play a role. But unlike homeowners in houses or semis, residents in strata schemes need to jump through additional hurdles to adapt their units to match their capacities.

In 2012, Leichhardt council commissioned City Futures to research the process for home mods in strata buildings. The process was complicated, potentially involving engineering reports, passing motions to approve any works and even passing bylaws through owners corporation meetings. And the process – as well as responsibilities of those involved – was unclear, often resting on notions of ‘unjustifiable hardship’ or ‘discrimination’ that would have to be tested in court.

For example, one of the most common home mods is adding handrails. Previously when handrails were to be attached to shared internal walls, they required approval by the owners corporation (because the wall is owned by the whole scheme). Under the new Act they are explicitly identified as ‘cosmetic works’ and so can be installed without any approvals.

It’s still complicated in many areas. Anything that could affect waterproofing, which includes a lot of common bathroom modifications, still needs to be signed off by the body corporate. There will still be challenges in ensuring the building itself can handle the mods, with some wall construction methods and stairway designs making modifications like grab rails, ramps and stair lifts impossible. Anything involving common property outside the unit – common area stairs and building entrances, for example – will still require approvals and possibly additional costs of an engineering report and the like. Plus some strata schemes will have non-standard by-laws in place requiring a greater variety of works to be approved by committees.

The recent reforms, though, are a positive step. They recognise the problem, and will make some common home mods easier. In turn, this will increase the appeal of strata living for a greater proportion of the population.

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Tags: home modifications·NSW strata law reforms

The 30 Minute City (part 2): challenges and opportunities in Western Sydney

Posted by Chris Martin on August 29th, 2016 · Cities, Government, Guest appearance, Housing, Transport, Wellbeing

By Kerry Robinson, General Manager, Blacktown City Council. This is the second of a two-part series adapted from presentations to the Planning Institute of Australia mid-winter breakfast on the 30 minute city; see part 1 by Professor Susan Thompson, City Futures Research Centre.

Blacktown City is 20-22 km across and home to 348,000 people, 111,000 jobs and a $14.billion economy, the sixth most productive economy in New South Wales. In 20 short years Blacktown will grow to over half a million people, with 180,000 jobs and an economy of $30 billion, nearly double what it is today. Blacktown is just one City within Western Sydney. Western Sydney has a population of 1.691 million, and an economy of $95 billion which will soon have a population of more than 2 million people. By way of comparison, the Gross State Product of Tasmania is $24.5 billion and its population is about 500,000 people. The population of Canberra is less than 400,000.

The barriers to achieving an equitable city in Blacktown are enormous. For starters, a bus takes 27 minutes to travel from Willmot to either Mt Druitt or St Marys Railway Stations. It is a trip of 7 kilometres. The journey to work would take me 12 minutes by car. Let’s be more generous: let’s say I’ve just moved into Stockland’s Elara Estate in the middle of Marsden Park, in the middle of the carefully planned north west sector. My journey to work at Mount Druitt will take half an hour. What all this points to is that the 30 minute city at the moment is smaller than Blacktown.

Housing equity

Housing equity is also an extremely important component of the 30 minute city. The greatest social problem in Western Sydney is the aggregation of disadvantage in social housing estates. Blacktown has whole suburbs of social housing: Willmot and Shalvey. It also has many estates which have hundreds of homes but are somewhat smaller than a whole suburb. If we are to achieve equitable cities, social housing must be spread across the whole city. Not just across the affordable bits, but everywhere! I have absolutely no problem with the good burghers of Vaucluse and Dover Heights taking their share, notwithstanding that the cost of delivery will be higher than in Airds or Claymore.

In my role as a Director of Link Housing, it would be remiss of me not to say that the community housing sector has a huge part to play in delivering housing equity. However, it can’t just be handed the old problems. Whilst it can bring skills and opportunities, government needs to inject equity and this is a problem which exists across the whole of the country.

Housing equity also needs to address the issue of affordability. This is an issue for which there is no silver bullet. Politicians are understandably shy of addressing the root cause of affordability. It is a land valuation truth that the relative value of a new block of land at the edge of the City is inextricably linked to the value of the home which sits beside it. That home’s value relates to the value of the one beside it and so on. We cannot continue to accept platitudes which talk about fixing affordability by fixing the supply of new lots which represent in any one year less than 1% of the turnover of dwellings across the City.

Culture, arts and education

Now, returning to Blacktown. Blacktown also has huge diversity. We have a population from 184 countries with 156 languages. We have suburbs with the lowest SEIFA Index scores in Sydney. We have 11% of our housing stock as social and community housing. And yet, the newly developed suburb of The Ponds is ranked as one of the most socially advantaged in Sydney.

But Blacktown is not a 30 minute city; a city with equity; a city with work, study and recreation within 30 minutes. As with the rest of Western Sydney, Blacktown lacks the resources which successive governments have chosen to lavish on the east.

	Blacktown	Canberra	Tasmania
Population (2011 census)	303,528	356,585	495,354
University Campuses	1	3	1
Stadia	13	7	17
Symphony orchestras	0	1	1
Art galleries	1	24	53
Libraries	5	10	35

And yet, the State and the Commonwealth are happy to continue a model of arts and culture funding which sees 1% of capex and just 10% of arts and culture opex spent, not just in Blacktown, but spent across the whole of Western Sydney. It doesn’t take a grand cities strategy to fix this. It takes equitable location and policy decisions by Governments.

As an aside, at the Australian Local Government Conference in Canberra last year I suggested to the director of a major Australian performing arts company that there was absolutely no reason why its new facility couldn’t by located in Western Sydney. He simply laughed at me. It is this deeply ingrained discrimination against Western Sydney that we need to tackle as part of creating an equitable city.

State Government in Western Sydney

The State Government has about 40,000 office based public servants located in Sydney CBD and a couple of thousand in Parramatta – not in Blacktown, not in Western Sydney, in Sydney’s second CBD, Parramatta. In Blacktown there are just 800 office-based public servants since successive governments removed Sydney Water and the RTA from our city centre. For all of the import of being a Regional City, all that the State has shifted to Penrith is a few public servants. Sure there is a relatively new State Government office block, but most of the people working in it were moved from elsewhere in Penrith or in Western Sydney.

The purpose built Family Court building in Parramatta is hardly used. There is no Supreme Court sittings in Western Sydney and no superior commercial court sittings in Western Sydney. It doesn’t take a grand cities strategy to fix this. It takes equitable location and policy decisions by governments. It takes a consistent and coherent policy approach.

What do we need to do?

High value jobs in western suburban cities are delivered by the market in business parks. We can argue as to the merit of this and whether this trend will continue, but over the post-war period in Sydney this was certainly the case. Look to Macquarie Park and to Norwest Business Park and to the new Sydney Business Park in Blacktown City. Celestino is promoting Sydney Science Park as the next suburban high value job location, close to Badgerys Creek.
Meanwhile our planners continue to insist that our traditional town centres – think Gordon, Sutherland, Blacktown – all must have commercial cores where only office buildings are allowed. In Blacktown we’ve been waiting 4 decades for the market to deliver the salvation of the town centre in the form of glossy fronted office buildings and its not come!
What we need are dense mixed use suburban centres. Places that are catalysed by an equitable distribution of government jobs, cultural facilities and private investment. What we don’t need are:
- $450m poured into Sydney Modern, worsening the cultural inequity in the city;
- The State Government telling Western Sydney that it should be happy to get a version of the Powerhouse so that it can make money from an apartment development. Further, no-one should accept a building project in lieu of an equitable arts and culture strategy;
- We don’t need a rebuilt football stadium in Moore Park when the Government still hasn’t been told by the NRL where it will accept a Western Sydney stadium;
- Destination NSW focussed on “the business case for bed stays” as the sole reason for ignoring Western Sydney;
- Ongoing concentration of commercial and legal practice in the CBD.
A true 30 minute city would see:
- An investment in a high speed rail matrix: our own cross rail, with capacity for growth, in just the way that Bradfield’s rail legacy gave us 50 years of capacity;
- The relocation of the Supreme Court and all commercial courts to Parramatta;
- All future medical research concentrated in Westmead;
- All office based public servants moved from the CBD to centres like Blacktown, Mount Druitt and Penrith;
- A century of government investment in arts and cultural facilities in the west to match those of the east;
- Government policies which force universities to deliver research an equitable balance of research in Western Sydney.
An equitable city needs us to plan new business parks so they will become towns. We need planners to recognise that their plan is not an end state. And we need planners to recognise that all planning decisions are impacts on a land economy: an economy which has cycles of investment and demolition.
At the moment it seems that the Commonwealth’s proposed investment decisions are based on generating economic output and are being assessed primarily on add to the GDP. We will need much more than this to redress two centuries of investment in the east of our city. We will need strategies which truly deliver equity across the city.

City Futures Blog

News and research in housing and urban policy, from Australia’s leading urban policy research centre.