In the wake of the NSW Productivity Commission’s report warning that young productive families are being driven out of Sydney by high housing costs, Premier Chris Minns has called for a post-war home building boom to alleviate Sydney’s housing crisis:
Planning Minister Paul Scully told a conference of property industry leaders that the state had previously stepped up to address an even larger housing crisis at the conclusion of WWII, when returning soldiers and migrants needed a place to live:
“We need a similar housing construction boom in NSW right now”.
“Sydney ranks 48th amongst developed economies … but ranks 859th in the world in density, which places it among the least densely populated cities in the world”…
“Cities are not museums, they are home to millions of people and every day they are changing”.
“So we need to ask ourselves: is our city keeping pace with the scale of change that has happened and is it providing good homes for everyone?”
“I think a reasonable assessment would say right now the answer is no”.
Sydney built record numbers of apartments last decade and what happened?
A recent NSW government strata survey revealed that more than half of newly registered buildings since 2016 had had at least one serious defect costing an average $331,829 per building to fix.
Research by the Strata Community Association NSW also revealed that waterproofing is the most common major defect followed by fire safety.
Around one in 10 buildings also had structural and enclosure issues, such as defects in the roof or the facade.
Do we really want to repeat the fiasco again to meet the absurd population demands of the federal government’s mass immigration policy?
Net overseas migration into NSW hit a record high 174,000 in 2022-23, driving all of the state’s population growth:
In the decade to June 2023, NSW added 935,315 people with 791,944 or 85% of this growth coming from net overseas migration, most of which landed in Sydney:
Sydney’s population is projected to grow to around nine million people by the 2060’s via permanently high net overseas migration.
So long as Sydney’s population grows so rapidly via mass immigration, the city’s housing shortage will worsen, and house prices and rents will continue to climb. This will necessarily drive more incumbent residents out of Sydney.
Building thousands more low-quality apartments won’t solve the underlying problem and will create a host of other undesirable consequences, like we witnessed with last decade’s high-rise apartment boom.
The primary solution to Sydney’s (and Australia’s) housing shortage is to limit immigration to a level that is below the capacity to provide high-quality housing and infrastructure.
Otherwise, the housing crisis will become permanent.
The NSW government should at least be honest about the situation, instead of gaslighting people into believing that Sydney’s housing shortage is a supply issue.
Too much net overseas migration is the problem, and it is driving young residents out while forcing others to live in insecure housing or debt slavery.
