The Sydney housing solution that’s hiding in plain sight

Community anger rises and trust crashes when governments seem to be doing dumb things – such as increasing density to provide much-needed housing without thinking of the basic amenities that go with more people. Where will the schools go? Will there be parks and public spaces? Will the bus take people where they want to go?

One of my more memorable evenings when in local government at the City of Sydney was at a Pyrmont community forum circa 2001. The newly arrived locals, many of them downsizers, had moved into their new waterfront apartments and wanted a bus service to take them to the local shopping centre on Broadway where there was a supermarket. So did the old-timers, many of whom lived in public housing.

Waterloo Metro Station: great transport hub, shame about the lack of commuters living nearby.Credit: Steven Siewert

The representative from the bus service was convinced that the free casino bus running from the Star casino to the city centre would do just fine for them. But he wasn’t hearing what the locals had to say. That bus might be free, but it wasn’t taking them where they wanted to go. It took a lot of time for bus services to start crossing the city centre, not just going in and out of the CBD. Gladys Berejiklian, as the former transport minister, deserves a lot of the credit for rerouting buses to achieve that.

Lining up new housing with infrastructure should be done with the highest impact and lowest cost to government (so they can afford to do more of it) and given the greatest possible community benefit. That involves planning enjoyable places to live and work with the services people need.

In inner Sydney, there are two examples of good brownfield high-density development: at Central Park, on the edge of Chippendale/Broadway, and at Green Square.

On the other hand, in between Central Park and Green Square there is a big chunk of publicly owned land at Redfern-Waterloo and Surry Hills. It includes land at North Eveleigh to the east of Carriageworks. Despite all the words, all the work, urban studies and many media announcements by the many ministers of the day, precious little has been renewed and rebuilt. The vast hectares of land are still occupied by end-of-life, run-down public housing. This is a bipartisan systems failure.

There is a huge opportunity to renew that land for social housing, affordable rental housing and market-priced housing. As a former board member of the Redfern-Waterloo Authority, it amazes me how little there is to show after 20 years of hard work master-planning, deliberating, commissioning urban studies and political announcements. All this accumulation of human capital and corporate memory is washed away and forgotten.

Now there is a sensational new metro with a station at Waterloo (whose passenger numbers are way lower than predicted, unlike the others) and a sparkly renewed Redfern Station which feels much better and safer to walk through. Happily, there has been much new housing delivered by the private sector. The whole nearby area of the inner city has transformed and improved – except for the government-owned land.

In Redfern-Waterloo we have an abundance of new transport infrastructure and not enough new housing. This has to stop. Hopefully, the new Housing Delivery Authority will prioritise this without selling everything off, as has happened at The Rocks and Millers Point, without much social dividend. We need a model for public-private partnerships where publicly owned land is not completely divested. There has to be a smart blend of publicly and privately owned housing.

About 20 kilometres west, the members of the Australian Turf Club will soon vote on whether to sell their land at Rosehill for a reported $5 billion to the state government for some 25,000 homes. Presumably the state government is considering buying it. This $5 billion cost is just the beginning of the expenditure for taxpayers. It does not include the cost of any new infrastructure needed to build a community of around 50,000 people. The government will be on the hook for all of this.

An important general question is how and where should new housing be located? What new housing can be delivered at least cost to government so it can afford to deliver more of it? There is not enough consideration given to this, and the public needs to be able to understand the nature of the problem too.

Often large-scale redevelopment is led by developers, for whom the cost of infrastructure to be paid for by the public sector or others is not a priority. That is why it is so important for government to have a clear understanding of the economics.

In 2023, NSW Productivity Commissioner Peter Achterstraat published a report that gave us some helpful and hard facts about what the relative cost of delivering infill inner-city housing compared with greenfield suburban fringe development. Every new home on the suburban fringe costs the government up to $75,000 more in infrastructure costs such as road building, water connection, schools and transport, and congestion costs. The cost of providing the infrastructure in the inner city is about $39,000 per dwelling compared with $114,000 in Baulkham Hills.

Here is an easy weekend challenge for you, reader. Take the Northwest Metro to its last stop at Tallawong, get out and have a look around. There is an almost complete disconnection with land use and transport planning. The density is very low and what housing there is does not take advantage of the amazing location on the metro line. This has been obvious for at least eight years. It is a perfect case study in how not to do things. We have to get better at this. It is the opposite case of the Pyrmont downsizers wanting a bus: plenty of housing but inadequate transport. In Tallawong, we have brilliant transport, but very little housing choice or transit-oriented density.

We have to learn the lessons from Green Square and Central Park: high-density can and does work well for communities; both have become lively and well-loved places.

Before the state government spends billions of dollars buying other people’s land, it should commit to building more housing on land it already owns. Not only is that good planning, it takes advantage of all the new services and transport and social infrastructure already built, ready for thousands more people to move in to help solve the housing crisis.

Lucy Hughes Turnbull is an urbanist and businesswoman. She is a former lord mayor of the City of Sydney and chief commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission. She was a member of the Redfern-Waterloo Authority (2005-2011) and is an adjunct professor at the University of NSW Faculty of the Built Environment.