As I leave beautiful but maddening Sydney, I’ve realised all its problems boil down to one thing

You see a city differently when you know you’re going to leave. Moving around town, you wonder if it’s the last time you’ll be in this suburb, the last time you’ll get coffee from that place, the last time you’ll see that stunning view. You imagine how it might have changed by the time you return.

To be honest, I hope it’s unrecognisable. For while Sydney is wondrous, it needs to change. A lot.

You see a city differently when you know you’re going to leave. Credit: Marija Ercegovac

The start of summer is always a sunny reminder of why we live here – a pre-work swim or evening stroll, long Sunday afternoon at the beach, a boat party or harbourside picnic. The stuff we put on the brochure.

Water is our muse, but it’s also our kryptonite. It creates two cities – the postcard Sydney and the other one, the Sydney of long commutes through hot, dreary suburbs and back again, to homes people can barely afford.

As our premier keeps reminding us, people are opting out of this. Young people, people of prime working age, young families – they’re going elsewhere, to Newcastle and Orange, Melbourne and Brisbane. And why not? You can still rent a new one-bedroom flat in the middle of Brunswick for less than $500 a week.

A comparable property in Surry Hills or Newtown is more than $750 a week. Think about the stark reality of that choice for a moment. If I’m 25 or 30, and I want to live a fun and active life near the city, why would I live in Sydney?

The water is our kryptonite.Credit: Getty

For people who are settled and comfortable, the Sydney v Melbourne comparison might be a dull cliche. But it’s a real choice people face every single day, and they are choosing the latter. Because it’s the obvious choice. Housing is killing us, and it’s killing us quickly.

Some may say this is simply the reflection of a functioning market, and the high cost of housing shows how desirable it is to live in Sydney. But desirable for whom? People who can afford it – the bankers and lawyers and management consultants, of whom there are still plenty. But the artists, creatives, key workers, students – people who give the city its soul – are voting with their feet.

After three years writing about Sydney, I’m completely convinced the high cost of housing is the root of all the city’s other issues. It depresses our culture and hurts our nightlife. Damaged though they were by lockout laws, poker machines and ridiculous regulations, none of those threats are as fundamental as the fact people just don’t have as much disposable income to spend on eating out, grabbing a midweek cocktail or catching a show. They’re spending it on rent and mortgages.

The housing crisis is billed as a national problem, but it is really a Sydney problem. To be a fun, thriving, vibrant, successful city, and a home available to everyone, it must be more affordable. There’s really no alternative.

It’s no good saying “just move further out” to Leppington or Castle Hill. If young people can’t live close to universities and jobs and bars and restaurants, you don’t have a real city – you have dormitory suburbs and an inner-city nursing home.

I’ve written about this, and picked on Balmain as an example, which nearly ignited World War III. But the point stands: our inner urban areas are becoming exclusive places accessible only to the wealthy or those already there.

How do we change this? The discourse on housing is depressing. Everyone has the pet lever they want to pull: liberalise planning laws, increase density, cut migration, reform taxes, freeze rents, build more public housing. They want their preferred policy, and the others are seen as a threat.

Because I was covering Sydney, rather than federal parliament, a lot of my writing focused on the planning system. It still strikes me as the most ripe for reform – partly because it is not very well understood, and if more people were to understand it, they would be horrified.

It is also a roadblock that doesn’t need to exist. Bank lending, the cost of materials, interest rates – all these things can limit our capacity to build more homes, but are at the mercy of global factors. You don’t want restrictive planning laws adding to that burden.

But for some reason, the bar is set incredibly high. Critics demand proof that reducing planning restrictions is the best or only way to combat the housing crisis. All that should matter is that it might help.

The more I’ve learnt about the planning system, the more I am convinced the entire apparatus should be dismantled. It is essentially a cottage industry for academics and bureaucrats whose raison d’etre is to restrict, not enable, what can be done on a given piece of land. It provides the framework by which councillors, NIMBY neighbours and department officials can say “no”.

Planning prescribes rules and limitations that are largely independent of what the market might want, or be able to deliver. It is redundant when each building, each billboard and each outdoor dining permit requires a development application of its own. It takes far, far, far too long and involves far too many authorities.

Take, for example, the Parramatta Road corridor between the city and Granville. In 2016, the then state government finalised a “strategy” to guide development and renewal on this ugly and hated stretch of road. But it was then left to multiple councils along the corridor to translate the strategy into their own local planning rules.

Eight years later, the Inner West Council is still working on changing those controls in its three small sections. It is going through them lot by lot, prescribing how tall each site can be, and what can be built there. It will prescribe the floor space ratio for each lot, and whether it needs to have shops on the ground floor. And when all is said and done, it will impose height limits that were considered commercially feasible in 2016.

So it goes across the city. First there is a protracted argument about who is in charge – the state or the council. Then there is a strategic planning process, a master plan, sub-precinct strategies and eventually changes to the local environmental plan, which sets the controls. All this is informed by consultations with people who already live there, not the people who might like to live there.

That’s if things go well. Along the way, the powers that be might decide to change the planning authority. That’s what happened along the entire Sydenham to Bankstown corridor in 2018, when the Coalition gave control back to local councils, starting the whole process again. We are now one year away from a world-class metro transit service opening along that corridor, with no indication that planning controls will change to deliver the density that should accompany it.

What do we end up with? We spend 10 years designing controls based on consultation with entrenched property owners which are obsolete and unworkable by the time they are finally implemented. Then someone comes along and proposes eight storeys instead of four, eliciting objections from those who helped set the four-storey limit a decade ago. Even if it ends up being approved for six storeys, the whole thing has taken so long and cost so much money that it’s not worthwhile. Every time you impose more hurdles, you add to the cost.

I could bowl up example after example. Just across the freeway from the Herald office in North Sydney is a small set of ageing commercial buildings that has been earmarked for redevelopment since 2015. For nine years, it has bounced around between a Joint Regional Planning Panel, North Sydney Council, North Sydney Local Planning Panel and the Department of Planning. The latest proposal includes a basic summary of that history; it runs to 11 pages. The site is half a hectare.

The only people who benefit from this are the consultants, involved at every step. At conferences and networking events, they will complain to you about how awful the system is – but it sustains them. As the British academic Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does. We can only conclude the purpose of the planning system is to stop things happening.

There simply has to be a better way. Does that mean a free-for-all with no rules? It could work, if you assessed each proposal rationally on its merits, without constriction by master plans and “place strategies” and LEPs and the like. Or if you made those plans far more permissive and automatically approved anything that complied. But the status quo doesn’t work.

To his credit, Premier Chris Minns is painfully aware of this. Last week, he announced yet another attempt to meld this system into something more sensible with a troika of senior public servants who will assess rezonings and major proposals concurrently. “I am very cognisant we need reform and change now,” he said, underlining the urgency.

We shall see. Minns genuinely seems to want Sydney to be more equitable and more fun, but his soaring rhetoric is rarely matched by the lukewarm policy solutions dredged up by ministers and departments. On matters such as planning and nightlife, he has tapped into a mood for change that’s still waiting to be realised.

Proper change always seems unlikely, and not just because our leaders are chronically afraid of making decisions. We also labour under bureaucratic systems that have captured the people who work in them. Often, you come across people in government who are bemused or exasperated by these systems, but act as though they are unalterable. With so many cooks involved, and so many roadblocks, it’s easier to just blame one of them and go home.

And we lack leaders with vivid civic imagination. Dominic Perrottet pushed the idea of turning the Cahill Expressway into a public attraction, but Labor binned it. A big deck over Central Station was also jettisoned. The Entertainment Quarter has been left to fester, and a long-planned public square opposite Town Hall is off into the never-never. Instead, we’re left with Tumbalong Park, which is OK but out of commission half the time.

This government has identified the housing problem as the key issue of our time, and openly frets about what will happen to Sydney if we don’t fix it. But let’s be brutal – until now, the government has not reformed, it has tinkered.

Take the Transport-Oriented Development Program. This was sold as a response to the immediate housing crisis, but what it actually does is up-zone land around train stations to allow more homes to be built over the next 15, 20 years. The government allowed it to be portrayed by opponents as radical change to our suburbs – but in fact, if it happens at all, it will be extremely gradual and in tightly contained areas.

The program could have been much simpler and bolder. Just change the controls within a kilometre of every station, no matter where it is. Ten storeys, but it can be more with permission. And explain that this is about putting in place settings that will enable gradual change over coming decades, not next week.

But we are not good at explaining the case for density in our cities and how it can improve our lifestyle. Too often the discussion is framed as: how can we ensure there are sufficient services, amenities and infrastructure to enable more density? A better way of looking at it is: how can we build enough density to justify better services, amenities and infrastructure? How can we show people it will make our city more interesting, more functional, if there are more people?

This may be crucial because, as I’ve learnt in the past three years, NIMBYism is at least as much about opposition to new people as it is to new buildings. At its heart is a reluctance to share and often a skewed perception that space and resources are limited when in fact they are plentiful.

Two competing worldviews are at play. One is that Sydney is essentially “full”, that it is already buckling under too many people, that more will make it worse. The other is that Sydney is under-done, that it can accommodate far more people and that doing so will actually help resolve the problems that the density sceptics fear.

There are competing visions for the Sydney of the future. One is essentially a sprawling, car-dependent, low-density city in the American tradition; the other is more akin to the compact, higher-density, walkable cities of Europe. We are in the middle and probably always will be.

Across an area the size of Sydney, these visions can co-exist, but they can’t co-exist in the same neighbourhood. Politicians like to pretend everyone can be happy – that a perfect balance can be struck between divergent, even mutually exclusive priorities. But that’s just not true.

We now have metro rail, which has the potential to be truly transformative in overcoming the tyranny of distance that hampers a city as spread out as ours. The opening of the Chatswood to Sydenham line has been amusing. It is superb, but let’s be clear – we’re catching up with transit commonplace in other global cities, and we may come to regret the way we’ve designed it.

For the most part, the stations are too far apart, linking places already served by public transport. This will be especially true for Metro West, which could have had double the number of stops and opened up a radical renewal of Lilyfield, Callan Park, Concord and the like. Instead, it will be half-hearted – great for getting to Olympic Park, but not transformational for the city.

Indeed, the Sydenham to Bankstown section, with stops about a kilometre apart based on the old heavy rail network, will most resemble a proper metro. It will change that part of Sydney for the better – if it’s allowed to. But too many people seem to think these multibillion-dollar projects are just about moving people slightly faster than before.

As architect and urban designer Philip Vivian told me when the new CBD metro opened, we’ve understood the mobility part of the equation, but we’re still getting our heads around the city-making part. “The vision is lagging behind, and is still not exactly clear,” he said. “[Our] sense of time and space in our city will be completely changed.”

The Minns government made a big song and dance out of its Metro West review, but for what? It hasn’t actually committed to any extra stations. It hasn’t actually changed anything. Rosehill is a pipe-dream. And the most obvious improvement – extending the line to Moore Park and Zetland – was overlooked.

It’s hard to overstate how good it would be for Sydney to have our two sports and entertainment precincts, Olympic Park and Moore Park, connected by metro rail to the CBD and Parramatta. One reason Melbourne’s CBD is so good – aside from having heaps of people living in it – is that it has a stadium at each end: Marvel and the MCG. That’s a guaranteed crowd streaming in every weekend.

Personally, I would have taken a leaf out of Melbourne’s book and built a stadium at Barangaroo. Or above Central Station. You could still do it in Woolloomooloo. But in lieu of that, our best hope is a metro to Moore Park. Sydney deserves that gift.

Money is a constraint, we are told. But it seems foolish to spend $27 billion on a project and scoff at a few billion more. And these endeavours need not be so pricey. The new stations are beautiful, but you could cut some corners. This is about connecting people efficiently, not architects impressing each other.

Sydney is a city that prizes aesthetics, and so we should. But too often, it’s a rod for our own back. Beauty is used as a bulwark against change. Nowhere is this clearer than heritage – another cottage industry that turns much of our city into a museum.

I am sure heritage has been weaponised because it has strayed so far from what it says on the box. Items are listed as “examples” of a particular style of architecture. But we now heritage-list entire blocks, precincts and suburbs. They cannot be examples if the entire set is protected.

Occasionally, someone will acknowledge this, as one Woollahra councillor did last year. Those who query heritage are reliably accused of seeking to tear down every terrace in the city. What eludes us is a proper conversation about how much heritage protection is sufficient or desirable.

Nobody wants ugly buildings. But given beauty is subjective, it’s not clear you can legislate for it. You can mandate architectural competitions for every development, but this adds to the cost.

It’s more interesting what this says about our priorities. Some people – and not a small number – prioritise aesthetics over housing supply. Fair enough: that’s their prerogative. But whose view is allowed to carry the day?

I remember asking Meriton founder Harry Triguboff about opposition to his planned apartment tower in the south end of Zetland, across Southern Cross Drive from Kensington. He adopted a heavily sarcastic tone and wailed: “Oh, I’m so sorry they don’t want to look at the big tower ... People have to go without houses so he can’t look at a tower half a mile away from him?”

Meriton boss Harry Triguboff.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Triguboff is not a subtle guy, but he hit upon the crux of the matter. It’s nice to think there is a balance to be struck on all these things – that we can put everyone in beautiful, unobtrusive, well-located homes the community will like, which are also cheap to build and affordable to rent or buy. But if that were possible, we probably would have done it by now.

So we have to make choices about our city and who it is for. I think the property owners and corporate lawyers and consultants will somehow be OK. It’s everyone else I’m worried about.

When it comes to fun, there is reluctance throughout government to accept that the biggest “fun police” factor in Sydney is not NIMBY neighbours or local councils but the police themselves. It is the police who routinely object to new liquor licences, later trading hours or more relaxed rules for festivals or venues. And if they don’t get their way, they come down hard.

It was the police (along with the media, let’s be honest) who pushed the lockout laws, and whose instinct – like the councils who stop housing – is to look for a way to say “no” instead of trying to find a way to say “yes”.

People in government will acknowledge the problem but argue some police commands are better than others, which is no doubt true. But that cedes control to the whims of a local administrator. Nobody takes responsibility for the city as a whole.

This attitude seems to have infected our civil administration. It’s always someone else’s domain – someone else’s problem to deal with. There’s deep cynicism and suspicion of people’s motives or trustworthiness. You can’t do anything without agreement from a dozen different public bodies.

Changes must be made because we all want Sydney to fulfil its potential. With its beaches, weather, food, harbour, multiculturalism, economy and attitude, Sydney would be unstoppable if it could just improve the cost of living, the difficulty of getting around and that awful sense you’re always doing something wrong or making too much noise.

There’s lots to work on. Can’t wait to see the results.

Michael Koziol has been appointed the Herald’s new North America correspondent. He has been Sydney editor since 2022. The Herald’s new Sydney editor, Megan Gorrey, can be contacted via [e-mail].