Are cemeteries, rifle ranges and greyhound tracks the future of Sydney’s housing?
By Nick Newling and Cindy Yin
Cemeteries, golf courses, racetracks and defence land are all potential opportunities to unlock housing.Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald
Already crippled by an unaffordable housing market, Sydney is expected to balloon to 6.3 million residents by 2041, and drastic measures may be necessary to accommodate a growing population.
As the city prepares to house an additional 1.4 million people, controversial solutions that have been floated or historically implemented may unlock large swaths of potential housing throughout Sydney. But what are these contentious ideas?
Converting cemeteries to public parks and housing
While interfering with final resting places may seem taboo, the practice has been integral to the formation of major cities around the world. In Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, bodies have been exhumed to make way for housing, roads and parks.
Sydney’s Central Station, Town Hall and Camperdown Memorial Rest Park are all built on exhumed graves and former cemeteries, as are Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market and Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium.
While removing burial sites to build housing may make some distasteful, turning cemeteries into parks could allow for the upzoning of surrounding areas and the introduction of higher-density living. One example is the popular Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, the site of a former graveyard, which services busy parts of the inner west.
Sydney has a number of large cemeteries in prime locations, including Waverley Cemetery on the cliffs at Bronte, Macquarie Park Cemetery and Crematorium adjacent to transport hubs and facilities and Rookwood Cemetery in the western suburbs.
Defence
The defence force is the largest Commonwealth landowner. It has more than 1000 owned and leased properties. Plans to sell off parts of its sprawling portfolio to boost housing supply are on the table. Last year, the Herald revealed that plans for the sale of sections of Defence’s 3 million-hectare stock in a bid to raise money for new military equipment and base upgrades had been shelved.
Mosman’s HMAS Penguin and Paddington’s Victoria Barracks are among the hundreds of properties that have been eyed for sale. However, beyond what has been proposed, there are large tracts of Defence land that could become prime residential areas if military sites were relocated to more spacious areas.
The sprawling mini-city of HMAS Kuttabul at Potts Point, for example, could become a major residential hub if Defence sites were relocated out of the CBD.
Selling off Defence properties is appealing to governments due to the high maintenance costs involved and the need to pay for costly programs such as the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines. If sold to developers for residential or commercial use, Defence’s portfolio could have a resale value of as high as $68 billion, the Australian National Audit Office estimates, and could clear the way for large housing developments.
Rethinking unpopular or land-hungry sporting sites
Since becoming premier in 2023, Chris Minns has championed the transformation of Rosehill Racecourse to build a 25,000 home “mini-city”, and the halving of Moore Park Golf Course to establish a new public park adjacent to the booming Green Square precinct.
If underutilised and increasingly unpopular facilities were converted into housing, thousands of dwellings could be added in already established areas.
Royal Sydney Golf Club in Rose Bay is one of the country’s private members’ clubs. Its joining fee is about $30,000.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Maroubra’s Anzac rifle range, which holds a large chunk of headland real estate, is regularly open just eight days a month. Glebe’s Wentworth Park racetrack, the home of an increasingly unpopular sport within the greyhound-adoption-friendly inner west, could also undergo the Rosehill treatment.
Then there are Sydney’s 47 golf courses, which capture a gargantuan share of land for a sport that less than 5 per cent of the population plays.
The conversion of parts of these sites to public parkland or aged care facilities, as seen at Moore Park and Chatswood Golf Course (the latter is currently closed to convert half its course into 106 seniors living apartments) could allow for increased housing accessibility, and may even bring more players to the sport.
Converting places of worship
The tax concessions, underutilised land and declining membership of religious communities throughout the country have ignited debate on how they could shoulder the growing needs for more housing.
The Catholic Church is one of the biggest non-government property holders in the country, owning $30 billion worth of property.
Up to 20,000 new homes could be built in some of Sydney’s most desirable locations if zoning obstructions that prevent most housing tenures – including affordable housing, serviced apartments, student housing and social housing – from being built on places of worship were removed.
About one-third of the almost 2500 parcels of land occupied by places of worship in NSW are within 800 metres of a railway station, and plans to fill gaps in the housing market are under way, as church groups are releasing unused land and signing up to the federal government’s $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to build homes for those in need.
Banning or heavily regulating short-term rentals
Short-term rental platforms such as Airbnb were once lauded as the future of tourism but in recent years, they’ve developed a bad reputation for taking rental stock out of the market. There are about 13,000 entire homes or apartments on Airbnb alone in metropolitan Sydney, not counting individual rooms that are rented out.
A report commissioned by Airbnb found that in 2022, short-term rentals constituted over 2 per cent of housing stock in NSW. That number has been found to be as high as 25 per cent in certain LGAs.
In Sydney, properties can be rented for 180 days a year and stays of more than 21 consecutive days are not counted towards that total. In other cities, such as London and Berlin, the cap is half that, and in Amsterdam, the cap is 30 days. Other cities such as Barcelona are working to phase out short-term rentals altogether.
A change to short-term rental laws, like Byron Bay’s recent limiting of rented days to 90 per year, wouldn’t shake the core of the housing crisis, but it might help ease the pain.
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