Cracks starting to show in Minns’ housing density mission

It was only in November that Chris Minns stood across the park from the Lachlan’s Line apartments in Macquarie Park and announced his government would build 8000 new homes in the suburb.

It was the opening salvo in the government’s plan to turbocharge new housing in Sydney. He and the Planning Minister Paul Scully were “on a mission”, he said, “to have density done well”.

The Lachlans Line development and its walkway at Macquarie Park. Credit: Brook Mitchell

They would win over Sydney to the idea with “beautiful buildings, well-designed, located near public transport with open spaces”.

“We’re not going to convince everybody, but we feel we can convince enough people in metropolitan Sydney to say, ‘Well that’s a great addition to our community’,” he said at the time.

Less than three months later, the apartments have proven to be an unfortunate backdrop.

On Wednesday, the NSW Building Commissioner slapped urgent work rectification orders on the developer, Greenland, because the four blocks of 900 apartments are at risk of collapsing as a result of “serious damage” to the concrete in its basement.

NSW Premier Chris Minns and Building Commissioner David Chandler.Credit: AAP

On one reading, this is evidence of the system working as it should. Aware of the justified suspicion of developers held by many Sydneysiders after a well-documented legacy of shoddy projects, Minns has sought to assuage us by holding up Building Commissioner David Chandler as evidence the days of cowboy operators are over.

When he talks about building more homes in Sydney, Minns is careful to use the word “quality”, and the government has invested millions beefing up both the capacity and powers of the agency Chandler oversees.

Minns acknowledged to the Herald last year that the push for greater density requires confidence there is “a cop on the beat who’s looking after the people of this state”. The Building Commission’s announcement on Wednesday — coupled with the orders made on seven more apartment blocks earlier this month — is evidence Chandler is doing his job.

Not everyone will be so charitable. Ryde Council has already launched its own campaign against the Macquarie Park rezoning, and its Liberal mayor Sarkis Yedelian was quick to link the defect notice to the NSW government’s density push on Wednesday.

Dismissing councils as NIMBYs has worked well for Minns so far because convincing us that Sydney needs more housing is easy in the abstract.

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hadn’t complained about real estate prices at a barbecue or pub or rental inspection queue lately.

But what this government is proposing represents a fairly radical reshaping of Sydney. Hundreds of thousands of new dwellings spread across dozens of suburbs, all with their own pre-existing gripes. The traffic is already too heavy. The buses are always full.

To convince an already sceptical electorate they should accept not just an influx of new neighbours, but also a wider re-evaluation of what their neighbourhood will look like and how they themselves will live, requires significant trust in the process.

In other words, if we are going to swap the dream of a standalone home with a big backyard for an apartment near a park we want to be sure the walls aren’t going to start cracking, and the building won’t sink.

We don’t want to face the same fate as retired couple Veronica and Clif Baker, who may now receive about $400,000 for the Mascot Towers apartment they previously had valued for about $2.2 million dollars, under a solution to the years-long saga surrounding the building put forward by Chandler.

Adding to the tension is the speed at which Minns wants this density push to occur. Faced with the daunting National Housing Targets which require NSW to build 375,000 new homes in the next five years, the premier has made no secret of the pressure he is putting on Scully to deliver.

Asked earlier this month about Australian Bureau of Statistics data which showed that new dwelling completions were 42 per cent lower than in 2018, he said it was “a big concern” and said he would be meeting with Scully “at least twice a week” to find ways to speed up completions.

That comes with risk, of course, both political and practical. If shoddy buildings are already slipping through the cracks, how will the regulators cope when Sydney is a construction zone?

Minns has promised the electorate he can deliver density without sacrificing quality of life. Now he has to prove it.

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