Minns’ big WFH order exposes how Sydney could be on the wrong track to a high-tech future

Driving public servants back into the city puts Sydney on the other side of a divide that will see more of us demanding to live and work in high amenity suburbs.

Apologies to any public servants who might be reading, but there is something deeply satisfying about Premier Chris Minns’ back to work order for state bureaucrats.

After all, it was the state’s public servants who, during the pandemic, cheered on the Covid lockdowns.

Once the panic ended, it was the public servants who seemed to want them to go on forever so they could keep enjoying their leisurely lives tending the sourdough starter and walking the spoodle, logging on to the occasional diversity-themed online morning tea “organized by the department” to break things up.

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But also, perhaps not a huge one.

That said, let’s not get too excited.

Who would want to give this up?

Yes, it’s great that NSW’s 400,000 public servants – one in 20 of us, a shockingly high number – will be forced to dust off their lanyards, recharge their Opal cards and head back into work at least three days a week.

Transport boffins will be glad of the extra ridership when the $21 billion Sydney Metro opens this month (perhaps).

Everyone from battling café owners to the somewhat less sympathetic commercial property lobby are already cheering the move.

During the pandemic, public servants seemed to be most keen on keeping restrictions going. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

And plenty of studies show that mentoring, productivity, and all the things that make work work can fall off a cliff when teams don’t get together in person.

But one has to ask, looking around the world, is NSW making the latest in a long string of bad bets about Sydney that badly miscalculate the future of what cities look like?

There is a growing body of evidence that the answer is yes.

Rather than going in and out of or even living in downtowns, be they the Sydney CBD or second cities like Parramatta, research suggests that at least in the US workers who can work remotely increasingly are demanding to do so.

What’s more, they are demanding and creating new and vibrant suburbs that allow them to live “hybrid” lifestyles without going into a traditional CBD.

This notion is backed in by American geographer, author, and urban studies professor Joel Kotkin, who believes that “downtowns matter less and less.”

Writing in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, Kotkin suggests that the Australia’s historically high commercial office vacancy rates are the way of the future for high-tech economies where people can work anywhere.

High density towers near trains and Metro stops as proposed by Chris Minns ignores the desire for high-tech suburban living

Following on from that, Kotkin says that peoples’ preference will be not for high or even medium density – as hoped for by Labor’s Transport Oriented Development plan.

Instead, the demand will be for “large scale (suburban) developments” that Kotkin describes as “environmentally sustainable ‘garden cities’ with their own or nearby offices, recreational facilities, and cultural amenities.”

Kotkin says that in Silicon Valley, the old preference for dense downtown living backed by YIMBY-supporting tech oligarchs is “breaking” in favour of a “preference for lower-density, safe areas with good schools”.

Outside the tech sector, “educated millennials” who he calls “the key to past urban growth” are “migrating increasingly from the larger coastal metros to the suburb-dominated Sunbelt.”

Once there, these workers choose to live not in dense downtowns but in suburbs, but ones which are designed to “accommodate their preferences for such things as walking, cultural activities, and recreation.

“As we look to develop our transportation policy, our focus should be not on downtown and its dependent suburban workforce, but on connecting whole regions through roads and telecommunications,” he writes.

These areas thus become “cities of knowledge” that “may have suburban features such as housing tracts, strip malls, and access by car, but … still fulfil many of the traditional functions of the urban core, from recreation and culture to accommodating elite business sectors.”

This would suggest that major projects like the previous Liberal government’s Metro, which was conceived before the pandemic to whisk workers into the city and back home again in record time, could be out of date sooner than we think.

The same goes for big road projects: “Focusing on freeways to downtown is a bit like buying horse futures around the time of the Model T,” he writes.

And, if Kotkin is right, then Labor’s TOD scheme which seeks to jam more people into ever higher and ever denser developments, will create a housing model unattractive to the sort of knowledge workers Sydney presumably wants to attract.

Now, Kotkin could have this all wrong, and comparisons don’t necessarily hold from American cities with their higher levels of crime and dysfunction to Australian ones.

But as we look at the politics of Minns’ push to get public servants back to work and back into the cities, it’s worth looking at what the future of our cities could look like and whether in a global market for talent, the right people and interest groups are making those calls.