Urbis | 70 years of failure? From Cumberland Plan to Greater Sydney Commission

1 Jun 2023

The need for more housing is desperate in NSW, a state that underperforms its eastern seaboard counterparts in the number of new homes built.

Sydney’s great on development plans. It’s not so good on implementing them. Since the end of World War II, the country’s largest city has come up with two big-picture schemes to manage growth – and they’ve fallen well short of ambitions.

The latest attempt to manage the growth of housing, infrastructure and economic development – the Greater Cities Commission – is in doubt. And if that falls apart, it will mark 70 years of failure, worsening a housing shortage that routinely puts Sydney among the world’s most unaffordable cities.

The above is an exert from the Australian Financial Review, published 31 May 2023, where Urbis Director, Ashleigh Ryan was sought for her expert opinion on Sydney’s housing crisis. Read on for Ashleigh’s comments.

Strategies and targets for new housing need to be enforced

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State planning controls need to be simplified to encourage simple assessment of good developments and to deliver quick or certain timeframes for development.

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Strategies and targets for new housing need to be enforced but that can’t be done by state governments taking over from local councils, as that would only deepen the distrust, says Ashleigh Ryan, a director with planning consultancy Urbis.

“Having the state government ‘take over’ from councils would potentially further increase anti-development sentiment at a local level, and we need to be thoughtful in demonstrating to existing communities the good outcomes that density can deliver,” Ryan says.

“It’s not about taking power away from councils, but about reining in the hundreds of pages of controls that they are currently using to limit and restrict new housing and empower councils to refine and guide the local controls that may be relevant to a local area, such as building materials, landscaping, and even street wall heights or setbacks if that is what defines a local character,” she says.

“In the absence of a widespread rollout of more complying development codes for housing across NSW, I do support legislating minimum densities or non-discretionary development standards set by the state for new housing in accessible areas, and then maintaining council’s role in determining the finer details of development as may be relevant to a local area.”

Read the original Australian Financial Review article.

70 years of failure? From Cumberland Plan to Greater Sydney Commission

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Strategies and targets for new housing need to be enforced

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