At the Festival of Regenerative Urbanism housing debate on Wednesday night at the University of Sydney, six panellists slam dunked as many views as they could into a tight but exciting four-minute format. If the pollies happened to be listening, they’d find enough insight and action plans to change the game. All that would be missing were the public servants to say, “yes minister”. And mean it.
According to one of the panellists, Steven Rowley, director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, this is not as wild an idea as you’d think.
In his slice of the tiny pie, he managed to ping the political temperature and we reckon he got it to a “t”.
“We’re actually seeing some changing narratives”, he said. Renters were becoming a little more important – the emergence of build to rent was a small part of that story but it was at least a signal to something “different”, he said.
Another indicator of the political temperature is that the crisis was hitting home with parents and grandparents – with the fear of losing their kids to far flung places.
OK, it would be a brave government that would tackle the tax reform to the point it can actually shift the dial on affordable housing, but “the political tide will turn, and I don’t think it’s that far away,” Rowley said.
A look at recent planning responses from state governments in Victoria and New South Wales proves how close to the mark he is. By comparison with the glacial movements on planning and housing of the past – not to mention the obfuscation – those states looks like pop politics on crack cocaine. In the case of Victoria, the response from serious planning voices in that state is that the planning “reforms” are over the top and more than a tad panicked.
But then housing has now risen as one of the top political touchstones, not because it’s worthy but because young people, as well as renters, are growing as the proportion of voters.
The abundance trope
The session on Wednesday was officially a debate on abundance – agree or disagree that “abundance is the solution”.
Moderator and host was the University of Sydney’s uber talented Professor Nicole Gurran, who set the scene before a full and overflowing house and dinged a rare Tibetan bell borrowed from the Chau Chak Wing’s museum collection (the venue) to signal the time limits were serious.
The audience loved it.
Interestingly, an online voting system before and after the speakers showed opinions were rusted on, with the vast majority of votes in disagreement with the statement; and just a tiny few percentage points of voters changing their minds. And this after about an hour of passionate contest and panellists, to be truthful, more in furious agreement than anything else.
This little data point is pretty distressing for anyone in advocacy; it shows how hard-won change is.
The session started with the evidence-based data and stats from planner Ben Hendriks, founder of Mecone.
The Fifth Estate, which was part of the panel, then stuffed as many of its views on planning, housing and that new viral abundance scourge as we could manage into the allotted time. To be fair since we first wrote about that emerging ideology, it seems the sheen has worn thin and revealed the same-old-same-old neo liberal agenda.
One reason is the revelation that it seems to be powered by the tech bros who want unfettered freedom to roll out AI. Another is that as climate worsens on a daily basis (as we keep abundantly approving new gas fields) we’re running out of nature’s patience and the natural resources to build an unending material world.
The abundance we need now is with discipline, restraint and creative solutions.
Panellist Jess Scully clearly gets this. We saw first-hand why she was such a standout performer in her days as a City of Sydney deputy lord mayor, and now in her several creative ventures.
Land was a problem. In Sydney, two thirds of housing costs come from the price of land. “So you’re not buying a house. You’re paying for the use of that piece of land, and its value arises from the value of the publicly funded goods and the infrastructure that are around it that has been extracted into private gain.”
Scully ticked off the background conditions of the housing market – construction and skills shortage and high borrowing costs for a start. What she wanted to see was an abundance of tenure types, funding and financing models.
Land was a problem. In Sydney, two thirds of housing costs come from the price of land. “So you’re not buying a house. You’re paying for the use of that piece of land, and its value arises from the value of the publicly funded goods and the infrastructure that are around it that has been extracted into private gain.”
That message really has to get through, as many writers have stated in our pages. Public funds through rezoning for instance continually get funnelled into private value – with no feedback loop to repay the favour. Value capture is the way to turn that around, something on which there’s rarely any disagreement but scant action.
If we just rely on the market to solve this problem, we will never solve this problem, Scully continued, but added that you can’t really blame developers for wanting to stay in business. “Developers are just businesses operating in a market. They’re not super villains”. And no-one survives if they sell something for less than it costs to make it, she added.
(But then what to do with the never ending demand that the public purse prop up the private sector by paying for the externalities of its products?)
Cooperatives were a solution, Scully said, noting several countries rich and poor that manage it.
“That’s the abundance we need,” she said giving a generous shout out to Professor Louise Crabtree-Hayes [who was in the room] “one of the global experts in permanent affordability and Community Land Trusts.”
Patrick Fensham, national leader at SGS Economics and Planning, to stand up for the planning profession, given it’s being blamed for the current problems.
No matter how much planning was relaxed and made more permissive, it was not likely to work for the housing crisis.
“Planners incentivise and attract development, rather than just upzone and hope…we don’t build the actual housing”
“It’s not likely because planners already do this,” he said.
“Planning for the future is our superpower. Planners understand the need for a roadmap that, alongside providing planning capacity for housing over the next, say, 15 to 20 years, also identifies the required infrastructure.
“Planners incentivise and attract development, rather than just upzone and hope.”
The reality is that planners can only approve what’s submitted.
“We don’t build the actual housing”.
Would abundant housing put downward pressure on prices?
So planners have provided capacity. We’re approving dwellings that aren’t getting built. There’s lots of empty and unsold stock
“Well, we already have this too. We’ve got over a million homes empty on census night in 2021. Nearly 100,000 homes – about one in 20 were empty or underused in Melbourne in 2023.” In Melbourne 8000 apartments built in metropolitan Melbourne remained unsold.
“So planners have provided capacity. We’re approving dwellings that aren’t getting built. There’s lots of empty and unsold stock. So why isn’t there housing and affordable prices for all that need it.
“In two words, market failure.”
Fensham says the blame sheets home to the time we “stopped seeing housing as shelter and an essential right, and we supercharged it as an investment class based on the lethal combination of negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts plus concessions to existing owners … we bid up the prices.”
At the same time we dropped the ball on public housing. “Between 1955 and 1985 Australia built around 15,000 public housing units a year and set the country up for a generation of abundance. In the past decade, we’ve managed about 3100 a year.”
The impact on the young
Mehnaaz Hossain editor of University of Sydney student newspaper Honi Soit revealed the impact this switch in ideology has had on the young.
For her fellow students – or any young person struggling to make their way in the world in the inner city where most of the opportunities are concentrated – the housing crisis has a major and negative impact on so many aspects of their lives.
Faced with expensive rents of around $1000 a week within walking distance of the university and a youth allowance of $331.65 a week, Hossain and her friends realised moving out of home was not an option.
Others are forced to move further afield.
But moving further out no longer doesn’t mean moving to Hurstville (24 kilometres from the city) or Blacktown (36 km) it means moving to Oran Park (60 km) or Campbelltown (57 km).
This means not being able to participate in any number of activities that add opportunity for young people.
Hossain noted the current mix of buildings were not sufficiently diverse. “There are too many people approaching retirement in large detached homes, there are not enough smaller investment to downsize… not enough mixed used developments.”
What do we need? Action now!
Scully loved the shift in political temperature that Rowley noted but made a powerful point saying people needed to form their own action groups.
“I’m just struggling to think of one instance in history where leadership came from a government; [change] is not going to come from government. There has to be an informed social movement of people knowing what to ask for, and you have to give credit to the YIMBY movement.
“I disagree with their singular focus on supply, but to give credit to them, they have changed the conversation, and they’ve given people something to advocate for, and they’ve been successful in doing that. It’s not the solution, but they’ve done something.”
“I think we have to get better at telling the story of the fact that there are multiple problems, multiple solutions … and we need to do all of these things at the same time.”