Nice idea, Albo, but populating Parramatta Road will be a nightmare

Recent calls by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and business groups for more apartments on Parramatta Road as a solution to the housing crisis are a smart idea, but almost impossible to realise.

At first, it seems an ideal place for more residents. It’s in the city’s “missing middle” where TOD, or Transport-Oriented Developments, can take advantage of existing public transport, infrastructure and services. Inner West Council has made the eastern part more attractive to smaller developers by zoning it as “shop-top housing”.

Housing of the future on Parramatta Road? Count the hurdles.Credit: Ben Rushton

But new housing developments are thwarted at every turn as the combination of design challenges, council demands and builders’ restrictions create almost insurmountable obstacles.

Two recent projects I designed and managed show how devilishly hard building infill housing can be. Both are less than a kilometre from where Albo grew up, but are a million miles from the halcyon days when good social housing – the kind he called home – was well supported and easy to achieve.

Parramatta Rd is actually unattractive for housing: the existing buildings are old and dilapidated, the thoroughfare is busy and noisy (only marginally improved with West Connex), there’s no greenery, there are punitive parking restrictions, and one side of the road faces only south, with no sun. Designing apartments that will attract people is the first stumbling block.

There are two options for shop-top housing: build large apartments for sale or smaller “micro-units” in boarding houses for rental. The design codes have far more demanding requirements for the former than the latter, requiring large internal and communal areas, private balconies, and high numbers of car-parking spaces, among myriad restrictive controls that can’t be easily achieved on a busy road.

Hence, my clients for these two sites, in Stanmore and Annandale, opted for micro-units. However, both wanted high design quality to compensate for the location. Going against a long tradition of turning quick profits, they wanted to hold long-term investments.

Approval for the designs ran into the brick wall that is the local council. Despite both schemes being fully compliant, its computers were seemingly set to say no as a first response, followed by notoriously long delays.

Three interwoven issues were at play. First, more codes than ever before required checking by multiple council staff. Previously, a few drawings, reviewed by a building inspector, would have sufficed. Now it \meant 30 to 40 drawings and a dozen reports. New regulations every year have added time, and holding costs.

Second, code compliance may not be enough as councils see themselves as aesthetic gatekeepers. Designs are assessed by peer review panels to enforce “design excellence”, often driving up costs while creating more delays. Then there is “community consultation”, and the inner west NIMBY objectors are top-notch. They’ve got NOTEs – Not Over There Either.

Even if your proposal is fully compliant, these CAVE dwellers (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) demand refusal. Their most potent weapon is heritage: 19th century good, 21st bad. On Parramatta Road, they argue that shoddy shop houses, with outdated technology, from an era of horses and carts and rear dunny lanes, are to be preferred over modern technology. So they bombard council with their spurious objections, all of which delay the application.

Crucially, this rigmarole must be handled by a chronic shortage of council staff. Inner West Council has a continual 10 per cent vacancy of assessment planners, creating excruciating conflict. Impatient developers can speed up approval by recourse to the Land and Environment Court, causing council staff to stop work on other applications to address court demands.

The delays don’t end at council approval. The added design complexity, and the building commissioner’s demands, have created an increasingly complex construction process, with multiple consultants required for documentation and supervision, a big part of building costs increasing by 30 per cent or more in the past two years.

Once building starts, it becomes clear that the neighbouring buildings on Parramatta Road are riddled with shoddy workmanship. Perversely, current construction law puts greater weight on protecting the rights of owners of illegal structures than the legitimate needs of the future residents.

Despite the fraught process, the two projects turned out well. One is at the bottom of a hill at a set of traffic lights, next to a live-music hotel, opposite Maccas, and under the flight path. Bit noisy. But an internal courtyard, construction in modern materials and building techniques including heavyweight construction, double-glazing and a clever system of mechanically filtered fresh air mean the residents hear none of the abusive noise, and pay no more for the pleasure.

The other scheme also has an internal courtyard and balconies for the units, a communal room and a spectacular roof terrace with views beyond the city. Car parking was included, as demanded by council, even though the attraction of building next to public transport is to eliminate cars.

The killer challenge is how delays at every stage push up costs. On our numbers, one boarding house cost an additional $8000 per unit, which the developer will recoup in the first five years of operation by adding $30 a week to every room. Hardly the ideal way to develop affordable housing that everyone from the PM down is demanding on Parramatta Rd.

Tone Wheeler is president of the Australian Architecture Association and the design director of environa studio, which specialises in social and sustainable architecture.