Letter to the editor: It’s interesting to me how professional planners are happy to weigh in on their ideas of best practice in the planning of areas they have absolutely zero lived experience of. Their support of the Inner West Council’s Fairer Future plan for Marrickville misses the mark on some key issues and fails to question some spurious claims consistently made by the council. I’m not convinced they’ve done their sums either.
Fairer Future will see a population increase of around 70,000 in the Inner West. They will be sharing with the 190,000 odd already living here with scarce sporting fields and parks when the area has the second lowest amount of open space per person in NSW. There’s no plan to increase that.
Professional planners don’t know what it’s like trying to book an oval for footy or soccer or a netball court here right now, let alone in this fairer future. One sporting club I know of has to travel to Gladesville to secure a ground. They don’t know what it’s like already to use the heavily overcrowded light rail at peak hour.
They haven’t asked what happened when Norton Street had a revamp that took years to complete. No-one wanted to eat out in a construction zone. For years. Businesses went belly up at an alarming rate – only the barber and one cafe survived that. Setbacks can’t compensate for loss of trade.
These and other issues won’t impact just current inhabitants; they will affect all who live here in the future. We’re supposed to accept the vague, empty promises of the state government for more schools and hospitals, and live in hope that the council might deliver the amenities everyone is entitled to.
We don’t see the truly imaginative planning of other major global cities like Copenhagen, Toronto or Seattle. We don’t see an audit of empty homes and punitive council rates levelled at their owners. We don’t see an audit of unused industrial lands suitable for residential development.
All we see is thousands of perfectly serviceable dwellings demolished in the service of a flawed rush to provide housing supply. Which, by the way, the state government’s own 2024 research showed could cause a spike in house prices.
And we don’t see housing affordability for the supposed exodus of young people from the Inner West, which Mayor Darcy Byrne reiterates constantly. It’s old news. There was a drop during Covid, but the latest ABS figures show numbers of 20-39 year olds have bounced back and will exceed pre-pandemic numbers. Supply and affordability are mentioned in the same breath by our mayor and state government, but Inner West’s 2-5 per cent targets have been ridiculed.
The New South Wales Productivity and Equity Commission’s 2024 housing report pegged the cost of building a new mid rise apartment in Sydney at $903,000 in 2023. That figure will only have increased since.
For-profit private developers can’t build affordable housing here – unless they cut the kind of corners that by 2024 had delivered upwards of 30 per cent of apartments to the market with defects. Unless they’re incentivised with greater density and higher high rise, and sales are guaranteed by a $1 billion promise from state government.
Where’s the underwriting or subsidising of social housing by that same government? Of the now 470 odd apartments proposed in the Coronation development at St Peters, JUST 16 APARTMENTS will be managed by community housing providers.
We need to talk not just about Marrickville but the whole Inner West. It’s just 0.3 per cent of the total area of Greater Sydney, but the council is proposing an unprecedented degree of uplift, and the highest in the state. Far from being a template for how other councils can increase TOD numbers, this plan promises everyone a dismal future.
Planning is a very blunt instrument. It never seems to take into account the things that matter to people about how and where they live – broadly embraced by the term ontological security.
It means the sense of constancy, agency, and identity provided by home. “The home is itself a structure of self-formation, self articulation and self-remembrance – it is about much more than just shelter” (Jacobs & Malpas). Planners would do well to take that into consideration when they make poor decisions about where and how we live in the future.
Doodie Herman is a resident of Leichhardt.
Thanks Doodie, your comments and those by Tim Morrison and John Stamilos reflect a real assessment of facts related to housing and planning. As an architect I regret the rise of the planning muddle of rules, standards and regulations. There are positive steps that individuals can take eg Jerry Tyrell and the Tools App to facilitate the NCC and Australian Standards and building to name one. Am not sure the current proposed Planning Reform Bill announced yesterday is really going to help or just become another overlay. Cheers
As a former inner-westie I reckon your analysis is spot on.