NSW Government Architect reveals her own housing pain

The woman charged with changing the face of Sydney and turning it into an affordable, liveable city has personal insight into just how difficult it is to buy a home.

The woman spearheading a world-first approval process to fast-track more housing into NSW has first-hand experience of just how difficult it is to buy a home in Sydney.

Abbie Galvin is the first female NSW Government Architect and is driving Premier Chris Minns’ vision for Paris-style low and mid-rise developments that will increase housing across the city.

She is working on a “pattern book” of pre-approved designs for small apartment blocks that can be built immediately without going through the planning process.

Planning Minister Paul Scully said the process was a world-first that would not “sacrifice quality for quantity” in boosting housing supply.

“This is one of the first times a government has paired a pattern book with an accelerated planning pathway anywhere,” he said.

Ms Galvin is running design competitions for the new low to mid-rise apartment blocks that will be built around transport hubs and neighbourhood centres.

NSW Government Architect Abbie Galvin in front of an early pattern book-style house, the 1842 Horbury Terrace in Macquarie St, Sydney. Picture: Justin Lloyd

The first one will be published in June and it cannot come soon enough for the young people and frontline workers being driven to regional areas and interstate by Sydney’s unaffordable housing market.

“I’m very well placed to understand the housing crisis,” Ms Galvin said.

“My 25-year-old daughter has moved interstate to Perth because it is more affordable to live.”

Her 23-year-old daughter is looking to move to Newcastle for the same reason.

“Both of them are essential workers in the health system,” she said. “I understand why (they had to move), but it is tough.”

Ms Galvin is 55 years old and has been an architect her whole life. “Often it is my cohort that can be accused of being the ones who are preventing change,” she said.

The Watermark building shows how low to mid-rise buildings can be ‘surgically’ inserted into existing suburbs. Picture: Supplied

However the state’s 24th government architect has been put in charge of some of the biggest and most sweeping changes to the face of Sydney in its history.

She walks in the footsteps of 23 previous government architects, beginning with Francis Greenway in 1816 who designed Hyde Park Barracks and helped shape the city.

Her “gentle” stamp will be on every single suburb.

“I’ve got great ambitions for the pattern book, but I don’t imagine it’s going to transform the streets of Sydney, where our suburbs are too established,” Ms Galvin said.

“This is going to have this sort of gentle change like surgical incisions.

“Gentle density is a really important term here.”

A competition entrant to be accepted into the low to mid-rise NSW Pattern Book. Picture: Supplied

Another entry for consideration for the pattern book. Picture: Supplied

The designs themselves will be “background” and will instead allow “the streets and the footpaths and beautiful trees” to take centre stage.

“We want sleepy, non-exciting suburbs. We want to live in calm,” she said.

Ms Galvin said the new designs would have strict guidelines to ensure quality of life for Sydneysiders for years to come.

“We want to make sure it’s well ventilated,” she said, pointing to Sydney’s damp climate as a case in point.

“Do you want to live in an apartment that has poor ventilation and is going to be mouldy in two months’ time in the wardrobes and in the bathrooms? No, so those checks and balances go in.”

Ms Galvin believes greater density of housing on the land we have is the long-term solution to the housing crisis.

“I am an absolute and total advocate for low and mid-rise housing,” she said.

“Being able to transform existing suburbs is something that we’re all working together on.

“I think the pattern book itself is absolutely a vision of the Premier, and we’re here to deliver it.”

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Originally published as NSW Government Architect reveals her own housing pain