This article is from the Australian Property Journal archive
Townhouses and terrace homes will be encouraged by a new Minns NSW policy which could potentially deliver 112,000 homes around 171 town centres and train stations over five years, in an announcement roundly welcomed by key property organisations.
The national housing crisis has been borne from a crushing lack of supply, and governments have scrambled to offer policies that would provide more housing. Sydney and NSW are also the nation’s most expensive housing and rental markets.
From Friday, under the Low and Mid-Rise housing policy, planning controls will allow dual-occupancies, terraces, townhouses and residential flat buildings within 800 metres, or 10-minute walk, around town centres and stations across metropolitan Sydney, the Central Coast, Illawarra-Shoalhaven and Hunter regions.
Restrictions on developing terraces, townhouses and low-rise residential flat buildings on R1 and R2 zoned land will be removed, as will restrictions on delivering medium-rise residential flat buildings on R3 and R4 zoned land in these areas.
“These types of homes have played a really important part in delivering homes over the last century but recently councils have effectively banned them, this reform changes that,” Premier Chris Minns said.
Sites were selected considering access to goods and services in the area; public transport frequencies and travel times; Critical infrastructure capacity hazards and constraints; and local housing targets and rebalancing growth.
“Without these changes, NSW risks becoming a city without a future because it’s simply too expensive to put a roof over your head,” the government said.
“The Low and Mid-Rise housing policy will reintroduce housing choice and diversity back into our communities, filling the ‘missing middle’ between high-rise apartments and greenfield development.”
Currently, only two of 33 councils in Greater Sydney allow terraces and townhouses in low-density R2 zones, and residential flat buildings are prohibited in 60% of all medium-density R3 zones.
The Blue Mountains, Hawkesbury and Wollondilly Local Government Areas are excluded from stage two of the reforms due to the extent of bushfire and flood hazards,
Property Council NSW executive director Katie Stevenson said, “These long-awaited reforms bring certainty and confidence to support the industry to deliver more housing, improve affordability, and provide greater choice for homebuyers and renters.”
Urban Development Institute of Australia NSW CEO Stuart Ayres cautiously welcomed the announcement.
“The government is to be commended for taking on the challenge of tackling the missing middle in our housing market. While this policy will apply at 171 town centre and train stations, the final policy represents a significant scaling back from what was originally announced and its capacity to deliver 112,000 homes over five years must be in doubt,” he said.
The initiative hopes to provide some impetus for the state to deliver on its National Housing Accord target of 377,000 “well-located” homes by the middle of 2029. Analysts doubt the ambitious national cabinet program will reach its target, given labour shortages, high materials costs and capacity constraints across the construction sector.
Minister for Planning and Public Spaces Paul Scully said the new policy fills a gap in new housing supply.
“Allowing low and mid-rise housing in more locations will help increase the number of homes in our state, improve affordability for renters and buyers and give people a choice on the type of home they want to live in.”
The policy is similar to the Minns government’s Transport Oriented Development initiative, which aims to deliver higher density housing within 400 metres of nearly 40 transport nodes
“The homes built under these reforms will be close to transport, open spaces and services that people need, creating better connected and more liveable neighbourhoods by making the most of existing critical infrastructure,” Minns said.
A report from CoreLogic and Archistar late last year identified 1.3 million sites across the country that could deliver more than three million “missing middle” strata units and which could be delivered at a faster clip than higher-density housing being pushed forward by state governments.
The report assessed the development potential of capital city land that doesn’t currently have a strata development and where local regulations allow for higher density dwellings. Just under 351,000 sites in Sydney were identified with the potential for more than 934,000 new units to be built.
The remarkable figure of three million units was produced by analysis that excluded high-rise and mixed-use opportunities, with the average number of potential units per site at just 2.5.
For larger projects, the Minns government in November announced that the planning process in would bypass local councils and be fast-tracked through the planning system by a new Housing Delivery Authority, as well as projects requiring rezoning to move forward.
Announcement of the new authority came just a day after the Minns government revealed it has been quietly trialling a housing taskforce that it says has unlocked more than 13,000 homes in just two months, by resolving delays on developments that have been stuck in government bureaucracy.
