On the emerging ideology of “abundance” and why we need to be abundantly disciplined about it

There was a lot to celebrate with the new pattern book for housing launched by the New South Wales government on Wednesday morning.

The designs by eight architectural practices in Sydney are compact, sustainability-leaning and really quite beautiful.

The idea is to take a site with minimal land area and cleverly insert two to four dwellings – from terrace houses to manor style homes.

Among its key advantages is that the designs strip projects of the regular architectural costs, offering patterns right now for $1 “less than the cost of a Freddo frog at the local servo” as both the premier and planning minister mentioned, reverting to $1000 later and with the true costs of design picked up by the government.

At the crowded launch for the pattern book at The Mint, Premier Chris Minns also pointed out that there was a fast track approval process for most locations.

It will significantly cut time and costs of buildings, he said.

“If you go with one of these designs, there’s a new approval pathway, which means you could start building within 10 days of making your application,” he said.

Planning Minister Paul Scully said: “every mum and dad, health worker, firefighter, police officer, cleaner or doctor will have the opportunity to buy their designs, the technical drawings and everything they need to get approval to build an architecturally designed home within just 10 days.”

Government Architect Abbie Galvin light heartedly thanked the premier for the challenge he had set her team:

“Thank you, premier for a brilliant and difficult brief – make it beautiful, make it affordable, make it sustainable, make it adaptable. And importantly, make it approvable. And really quickly.”

The new pattern book can work in most places – but mostly from the mid to outer suburbs and across the state. In heritage protected areas the local controls will still operate we heard later and in areas such as the City of Sydney’s patch there might only be a street or two with lot sizes big enough for the pattern book houses.

Check out the website where you can download the CAD designs.

At the presser Minns and Scully later explained how the pattern book would help build critical mass in skills and building methods that may help lower delivery costs over time.

It would help alleviate the chronic shortage of affordable housing.

But will it?

Getting a build-ready design is just a fraction of the problem would be house buyers or builders face. Developers are proving this every day by letting approved apartment project lie unbuilt.

So many impartial analysts and the data will tell you that it’s getting tedious to repeat it. But the premier, asked about the cost of construction (which including skyrocketing labour costs) chose to focus on what the housing industry lobbyists tell him.

The deregulation of the planning system has been a feature of the housing lobby for decades, so you’d think they’d get bored too. But no. Even when the evidence points to oversupply of housing even during periods of tangled planning.

We are NOT saying planning should not be improved, streamlined or made less costly. But it’s the financialisaton of the housing market that is more critical to turning our homes into assets, something repeated in the UK and the US – but not Vienna where they’ve been working on generous levels of social housing for decades, which takes the pressure off the private sector letting it do what it’s good at.

In this country we’ve followed the dogma that the free market knows best and will deliver. For most things yes. For housing, no.

We let the market do its thing and this is the result it’s given us. An unholy expensive mess that is undermining our productivity.

 So the federal tax system allows any number of investment properties to be negatively geared (how about stopping at two?). And in our view (yes we have a LOT of views – it comes when you speak to impartial experts and not just the Urban Taskforce) even more critical is the free kick, the manna from Canberra heaven that’s thrown at existing owners who pour their wealth into their own homes and soak up all the available trades to make “huge houses even bigger” as one our planning contributors Philip Bull puts it.

How about limiting that capital gains tax free regime to some level and charging people a bit of capital gains for the bounty this rich and favoured land pours on to those who have lots?

So pump up the social housing sector – we are sitting at a miserable US equivalent 4 per cent while the UK is at 19 per cent.

But Premier Minns ignored all this when asked about the other bigger elephant in the housing room, construction costs, if you can just look past planning for a minute.

He told the media pack from a huge range of outlets this:

“I’ll just point to the fact that New South Wales has been producing six houses per 1000 people every 12 months. Victoria has been producing eight, and Queensland has been producing nine so notwithstanding the fact that we’ve got the highest average prices, the most expensive city on Earth, the highest rents, the highest increases in rents, the lowest affordability, the worst homelessness problems, we’re producing the lowest number of houses on the Eastern Seaboard.

“Now part of that, the major part of that, if you speak to any builder or developer or NGO or community, community housing provider or government agency that’s trying to get an approval, will tell you it’s the planning system.

“And if you’re genuinely coming here and saying the solution to it is more bureaucracy or the existing system, I think you can expect more of the housing crisis that we have.”

Asked about the cost of construction of one of the units and how can $1 million be considered affordable, the premier said “it won’t cost $1 million.”

No, said a guest later said, “it will cost $2 million”.

What builders and developers tell us is that it’s the cost of construction that is a barrier to supply. This includes the cost of finance – so not sure why the high interest rates we’ve had since Covid are the other factor conveniently left out of the planning argument.

Marc Lane a director of cities, Vivendi Consulting has plenty of referenced evidence in an excellent piece that shows how affordability can dramatically fall even while housing approvals soar.

Abundance – the word that captures

So what’s going on?

It’s been a mystery for a long time.

But finally the strings finally connected this week when we discovered that the Melbourne YIMBYs  led by Jonathan O’Brien has just been gifted $US500,000 ($762,000) by the $US120 million Open Philanthropy.

The other big telltale is the intriguing word that’s been popping up – abundance.

The first we heard this word was from the Sydney YIMBYs. “We want abundant housing,” they called.

The word stopped us in our tracks. How seductive, how appealing the concept was. We said we wished they were calling for more affordable housing instead.

Next in the history of this word was the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers is said to be a fan. Along with most of the Canberra pollies who have “dog eared copies by their bedside”.

The word feels like Disneyland on a stick. Plenty for everyone. You can imagine the kid in the lolly shop and the parents smiling and saying “go for it” son. Or the “all you can eat restaurant”, or even the squire sitting in the back of the Rolls tossing out hundred dollar bills to the serfs milling around.

Something smells fishy.

The Melbourne YIMBYs’ O’Brien is not the problem. He seems a very considered person who is clearly motivated by getting more housing for people who need it and especially where they need it. We agree and celebrate his goal.

Others do too. He now has attracted 500 volunteers, including existing homeowners who are all “supporting development, not developers”.

That’s great. And they’ll have plenty of work to do to counter the vocal NIMBYs who oppose development because they fear their nice places will be spoiled by unsightly, insensitive, overly dense apartments.

Developers have a bad track record that NIMBYs have good reason to be suspicious of.  Let’s remember no one complains of density in Paris or New York.

But it’s this word abundance that is the problem. It’s a word deeply rooted in emotions as we’ve tried to point out. It tugs at the heartstrings of our childish selves – “if only we could have all the money in the world, all the time, all the resources, what we could do!”

Let’s look more closely at the word and the ideology that tacks alongside.

The people behind the organisation that has been so generous with the Melbourne YIMBYs Open Philanthropy is controlled by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, former Wall Street Journal reporter Cari Tuna, and backed by wealthy supporters, including Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison.

The group wants to “support movement-building efforts to bolster “material abundance that can allow everyone to live richer, healthier, and fuller lives,” its website says.

“Where does economic growth come from?” it continues.

“Because new ideas — from treating infections with penicillin to designing jet engines — can be shared and productively applied by multiple people at once, mainstream economic theory holds that scientific and technological progress that creates ideas is the main driver of long-run growth.”

“In fact it probably added 50 per cent of per-capital GDP growth in the past 50 years the site says.”

Its Abundance and Growth Fund’s plan is to “absorb and expand Open Philanthropy’s current land use and innovation policy programs, primarily focused on reducing restrictions that limit housing development, green energy infrastructure, and scientific research”, the fund’s website says.

The barriers to this, it says can include environmental review laws that “slow a wide variety of infrastructure projects, including green energy”.

Well those environmental barriers in Australia look like driving another innovation – the rollout of rooftop solar and home batteries that, at scale, might just negate new coal fired power stations and giant wind farms that require thousands of kilometres of transmission lines. Reminds us of India, which managed its restrictions in rolling out telecom cables by going straight to mobile phones.

There are benefits that come from rules and regulations because they’re put in place essentially to protect us, through cost or the preservation of our environment.

Of course we need to continually revise them to make sure they are fit for purpose or more streamlined. Let’s remember that a lot of highly detrimental ideas or innovations started with a great and humanitarian idea such as mobile phones or AI which now threatens to read our minds (we kid you not).

It’s how we manage the detail and the implementation that counts.

And that, sometimes requires patience and time.

The danger with this seductive notion of abundance is that it might result in the opposite of the benefits it promises to our communities but bestows squillions of those doing the rolling out.

Abundance is such a big beautiful word, but we need to ask if it’s “Trump beautiful”.  It reaches straight for our emotions and releases a surge of wishful thinking and possibilities. There is so much to admire and encourage in the abundance of creative thinking, technology that solves problems and world hunger, or abundance of goodwill to others.

But our natural resources are anything but abundant. To survive climate change we need immense discipline. The way we manage our built environment and the planning laws that control it is critical.

What we need is an abundance of discipline.