During the pre-COVID mass immigration boom, Sydney was swamped with high-rise towers, with 211,000 high-rise apartments built in the decade to December 2020:
Sydney was swamped with high rise towers as immigration boomed.
With net overseas migration (NOM) now frozen, and thousands of locals leaving Sydney for greener pastures, people are questioning why Western Sydney is still being swamped with ugly high-rise towers that destroy amenity and livability. From The SMH:
A COVID-19-struck community with severely limited open space has been asked to review a plan to increase the number of homes by more than 70 per cent while enduring the strictest lockdown the city has seen.
The residents of Campsie, a suburb struggling through punitive restrictions in Sydney’s south-west, are set to see more than 6000 new homes and high-rises but only a fragmentary increase in public space…
Canterbury-Bankstown Council has previously consulted the community over a blueprint to increase the density of the suburb from 24,500 to almost 40,000 people with more than 15,000 dwellings in total by 2036…
However, residents, who say the area is already “bursting at the seams”… “This area is already inundated with people,” Ms Carrillo said…
The plan acknowledges that open space in the suburb is limited and, with outdoor recreation heavily policed during lockdown, many children have been restricted to playing at the front of apartment blocks…
Similar sentiments were expressed recently in Domain:
“There’s no infrastructure to support all these developments,” Mr Eltakchi, a local real estate agent for LJ Hooker Granville, said. “You speak to any of the locals, and they will tell you the same thing. It falls on deaf ears”…
“This is the most rapacious period in Sydney’s history. The rate and scale of change is shocking to many people. There are a lot of people building buildings who wouldn’t want to live in them themselves” [Architect and City of Sydney councillor Phillip Thalis said]…
These western suburbs have, and will continue to, bear the brunt of state-imposed housing targets that were put in place to meet projected population growth. The Department of Planning forecast an additional 154,500 homes would be built in Greater Sydney by 2025 on the basis that the city continues to grow.
This “rapacious period” of over-development was caused by one thing: mass immigration driven population growth.
Sydney’s population ballooned by 1.1 million people in the 15 years to 2019, which necessarily required many thousands of high-rise apartments to be built very quickly.
“Rapacious” over-development will obviously continue if mass immigration is rebooted post-COVID, as planned by the federal government (chart from the Intergenerational Report):
Permanently high immigration projected by the IGR.
The next chart shows the pre-COVID projections from the ABS, which predicted that Sydney’s population would swell to 9.7 million people by 2066 – around 5 million more people than if NOM was zero.
Before COVID, the ABS projected that Sydney’s population would almost double by 2066 – all due to net overseas migration.
Thus, anybody concerned about Sydney’s over-development and declining livability should lobby to keep immigration low. Because returning to the mass immigration policy post-COVID will spread the high-rise plague far and wide across Sydney.
