The NSW Government has green-lit humongous shoe box apartment towers across Sydney. Sacrifices must be made to accommodate Mad Albo’s ‘Huge Australia’ mass immigration.
Last week, the NSW Government handed large developers stronger incentives to build higher, denser housing developments that override local environmental plans.
Large developments valued over $75 million that include at least 15% affordable housing – i.e. homes typically offered at 20% to 25% below market rate for 15 years – will be eligible for a 30% floor space bonus and a 30% height bonus above what is permitted under the controls set by corresponding local council environment plans.
As expected, the mayors of Sydney local councils are pushing back, claiming the policy is a ‘Trojan horse’ for more shoebox-size apartments.
Peter Gangemi, the mayor of the the Hills Shire – the Sydney council delivering the most new homes for its size – labelled the policy a “free for all” for developers and “a Trojan horse for more shoebox-size apartments in suburbs that can barely cope”.
“Our roads are congested. Our schools are overcrowded. Our sporting fields are under pressure”, he told The SMH. “Now the premier says our local environment plans are the problem. It’s an insult to councils and a slap in the face for residents”.
“This proposal ignores years of carefully considered and community consulted strategic planning work and has the potential to trash our suburbs”.
Councils, through their representation body Local Government NSW, have decried this as an unacceptable infringement on their rights, claiming that they require a seat at the table and should not be “sidelined”.
“They’re laughing, because they will have had significant windfall benefits as a result of putting in a few affordable housing units for a short period of time”, Waverley mayor, Paula Masselos said.
“So the question is what happens to these people who are in these places after 15 years, where are they going to go to? It is a model that I don’t believe really works, because those units revert back to the developers”.
“You’re also cramming a whole lot more people in at the detriment to public amenity”.
Obviously, these high-rise shoe box towers wouldn’t be required if the federal government did not choose to grow the nation’s population like a science experiment via extreme immigration.
Sydney’s population has expanded by more than 1.2 million people this century, almost entirely via net overseas migration.
The federal budget also projected that NSW will add an enormous 578,000 people over the five years to 2026-27, with almost all coming via net overseas migration:
Source: 2023 federal budget
Assuming historical settlement patterns hold, 70% of NSW’s projected population increase will land in Greater Sydney, equating to around 405,000 people.
The depressing thing about all this is that we are only a few years removed from the ‘crisis’ of flammable and defective apartments across Sydney.
Indeed, research released in October 2021 by the Strata Community Association NSW found nearly four in 10 new apartment buildings in NSW have serious defects.
Yet, the NSW Government has doubled down on a high-rise apartment future by removing controls from councils and handing the reins to developers.
Welcome to Sydney’s Bladerunner future in which those that wish to protect living standards will be hunted down and retired for “racism”.
