As recently announced by the treasurer, the repeal of the tax benefits that turbocharged housing unaffordability is long overdue. Yet, though necessary, it is not a sufficient precondition to solving the housing crisis – land is first needed to build on.
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Following the national government’s admonition to states to find more inner-city areas for housing, the City of Sydney’s recent draft response contained something very interesting.
Amongst a list of upzoning suggestions, it also proposes that state government owned land be rezoned to include more housing.
In these kinds of debates there is often a tacit assumption that land is held by the Crown for good reason; for some existing or foreseeable purpose that is in the public good.
The City’s response essentially says, “Prove it”.
Importance of contestability
Government has often been challenged about its asset decisions where they obviously cut across other priorities.
“Asset recycling” was the mantra trotted out to displace social housing tenants from Millers Point and The Rocks. Concerns about social equity and proper state funding of social housing were left unanswered.
The government at the time claimed that recycling increasingly valuable state assets would fund greater provision of social housing elsewhere, though there seemed little evidentiary follow-up.
The housing crisis and homelessness only got worse while wealth-driven gentrification accelerated.
Other state agencies seem more quarantined from these accountability debates.
As this author has previously pointed out, elevated roads stunt development in (arguably) the most expensive and nationally productive real estate in Australia – from the southern end of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Victoria Road, Rozelle – yet there is never any suggestion that they should be undergrounded to release more land.
This is despite the necessity to bore road junction loops under gentille low-rise Rozelle for the WestConnex project, presumably in part to avoid the political and economic cost of tearing through this suburb.
Though similar corridor constraints apply to rail – which carries much higher passenger numbers and requires more onerous lower grade and larger radius corridors – no one seriously suggested that the Sydney Metro extension through Sydney’s CBD be developed by acquiring and demolishing high-rise buildings and constructing elevated rail decks like the Western Distributor.
Instead, the cost of tunnelling was part of the business case and the whole city now prospers as a consequence – as, incidentally, does Rozelle.
Yet the state seriously proposes to develop Glebe Island with these same road decks left intact!
The potential benefits of re-using Sydney Airport land have previously been raised by this author. It appears too that converting Bankstown Airport into high density residential area is also being explored.
It is suggested here that these goals can be achieved if government owned land is subject to much stricter and very public contestability, to determine if it continues to fulfill current priorities. Or, if it is a legacy holding, or is encumbered by the sunk-cost fallacy, like “there’s a costly road on it now, all other claims are thereby extinguished in perpetuity”.
However, such contestability must also be accompanied by a broader analysis of complementary actions – and benefits.
For example, Bankstown reuse would need to be accompanied by an extension of the current Sydney Metro project.
This author’s suggestions for Sydney Airport anticipated a number of interconnected yet mutually beneficial projects that outcome of which could entail a reshaping of the structure of Sydney, which by the way is the goal of residential intensification currently on foot.
The City makes the same point in its submission, “Some of these sites are currently used for essential services or infrastructure (for example facilities that support metropolitan rail operations), which cannot be moved without planning and investment elsewhere” (emphasis added).
Nicole Gurran agrees with the City of Sydney; better use of government owned land is key to resolving the housing crisis, but adds that, “… realising this vision requires a fundamental reset: public land cannot continue to be sold to the highest bidder”.
Housing is urban infrastructure (you can’t have a city if there’s no housing), not the right-little-earner that it has recently become. Crucially, however, increased intensity must be carried out in a coordinated way, a practice that still sadly exceeds reality.
Better practical land use is key
Planning practices also contribute to these pathologies.
One of the problems with planning practices is that they, a little like economics, centre the discipline a little too much in theory.
Two components are worth mentioning briefly here; zoning and car-parking.
Zoning seeks to separate incompatible uses – think sewerage farms from kindergartens – usually in two dimensions, so that a zoned city becomes a patchwork of separate activities. Thus, we get the port area, manufacturing zones, logistic hubs and so forth set in distinct locations separated from, say, housing, schools and the like.
This practice is as much positive as exclusionary, so that we get schools and parkland close to housing, to multiply the amenities offered by each.
Increasingly, we are content to stack (in three dimensions) uses that might previously be isolated.
Apartment buildings now commonly include small businesses, entertainment venues and restaurants at ground level, with adverse impacts managed not by zoning separation but more direct pragmatic interventions like exhaust flues, noise isolation, and timed closing hours.
Yet, two-dimensional separation still exists, most notably expressed as “employment zones”, which are intended to be used exclusively for small high-impact businesses like car repairs, spray painters, small-scale engineering works, bus garaging, and the like to the exclusion of residential uses.
In the search for scarce inner-city land, other cities take a much more integrated approach to managing these use conflicts.
Phillip Thallis, who also writes on these pages, notes the 1991 Rue de Meaux social housing development in Paris by Renzo Piano Building Workshop (see title image), which includes a council street cleaning depot embedded within the development at ground level.
Small but wealthy Geneva part-covered its airport rail line running through some of its unwealthy medium density housing areas, and installed community facilities like parks, kindergartens, schools, and libraries on the concrete deck (which itself also improved residential acoustic amenity).
City of Sydney’s point that many state government owned sites should be exposed to greater contestability should also be applied to planning demands for car parking.
A recent Grattan report alerts to the cost of mandating parking to residential development elevates costs per unit by $50,000 to $100,000.
Surface car parks also alienate large areas of land; consider that around other medium density housing, shopping centres and other big box uses.
It is suggested here that by their consumption of land, each of these vacant on-grade near-city carparks is a rebuke to the unhoused.
If land is scarce, these carparks should be moved underground or built over with housing.
Plainly, reducing on-site car parking would need to be complemented by greater non-car transport provision – increased housing requires an integrated approach to city-remaking.
Obligatory political contextualisation
Sadly, growing global democratic threats from the far-right now overshadow almost any public policy discussion. Policy makers must look over their shoulders more frequently.
Since early last century, hard-right populist backlashes can all be traced back mainstream political failure.
Italy, Germany, Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Hungary (and many others) illustrated the enduring hallmarks of the hard right; the mediocrity of its leaders, contrived narratives of legitimacy, racist viciousness, rampant corruption, democratic undermining, general immiseration, all ending in tears or suffocating oppression.
It is now America’s turn.
Though its staggeringly corrupt, astoundingly inept, kleptocratic leader and his hacks attract most attention, this decline is ultimately due to endemic social fractures, a supine opposition and a significant population of gullible electors.
The same trajectory is strongly evident in the UK, though not yet as advanced.
Despite our superior democratic credentials, Australia is not immune. Our hard-right is busy exploiting housing unaffordability, accelerating cost of living, economic precarity, and stoking resentments over “immigrants”.
We are also seeing Trump-like corruption: compare the gifting of an airplane by Qatar with a smaller example from a local miner.
While taxation and planning changes are a good first step, they both remain in the immaterial realm. This is why we need to oblige all tiers of government to contest – with vigour – the greater and more efficient use of their own land.
On a lighter note: just as occurred in pre-WW2 Germany, Italy and Russia, it is not too fanciful that all American agencies will soon need to comply with new conservative design dictats, so here’s what future Artemis missions might look like.
