The New South Wales planning minister, Paul Scully, has told property developers “don’t put up rubbish” proposals for “crap” housing that people don’t want to live in.
At the Property Council of Australia’s housing summit on Wednesday in Sydney, Scully also criticised local council zoning laws that prohibit terraces, townhouses and manor houses from being built, saying these denser dwelling types would help the state achieve its housing target.
Speaking to a crowd of developer chiefs, Scully recounted the sweeping changes the new Labor government has introduced since coming to office in late March, which include allowing developers to build taller and denser projects with a fast-tracked approvals process that bypasses councils, as long as at least 15% affordable housing is proposed.
Scully also explained how changes announced on Tuesday to effectively gut the Greater Cities Commission and Western Parklands City Authority by redeploying almost 350 of their staff to the planning department will cut red tape and help the state speed up the development application approval process. Average processing times recently blew out to 116 days, their slowest in nearly a decade.
As he spoke of the need for the state to swiftly increase housing stock to address housing stress for essential workers and reverse the trend of 30,000 people leaving the state each year, Scully said zoning laws were depriving suburbs of sensible growth opportunities.
He said 85% of low-density residential R2 zoning across metropolitan Sydney – marked by low density housing where the objective is to protect the single dwelling character – “prohibit … manor houses and terrace houses”.
Scully said manor houses – single buildings comprising three or four dwellings which can be up to two storeys, with each dwelling attached by a common wall or floor – as well as terraces and townhouses will be important in helping achieve housing targets.
“Townhouses and manor homes are part of the history of Sydney, yet in many places they are being stopped from being part of its future. Now let’s just say we’re able to put a semi on 5% of those 85% of (R2) zone lots. That would deliver 67,500 new homes which is more than 20% of what we need to build by 2029,” Scully said.
“This infill development would also allow people opportunities to stay in their communities and neighbourhoods through different stages of their life,” he said.
Proponents of addressing the “missing middle” of housing stock criticised a move from Bayside council in Sydney’s inner-south this week to remove the opportunity for townhouses and apartments be built in R2 areas, which is zoning covering more than 80% of residential areas in the former Botany Bay council part of Bayside.
“This is completely the wrong direction to go in a housing crisis!” said the group Sydney Yimby (Yes In My Backyard).
Scully also delivered a blunt message to developers that the concerted effort to boost housing in the state did not mean they could skimp on quality, and that “the social licence for development has been diminished over time because of rubbish proposals”.
“What we really need from people who are putting up proposals is good proposals. Don’t put up rubbish,” Scully sad. “It’s really hard to argue, ‘you want density but I’m going to build crap’. Don’t do it.”
“We have to build in a more sustainable manner more generally, we have to think about the people who live in these homes and how they’re going to interact and pay for the operating costs of those homes long into the future.”
Scully said government and private developers had a duty of “creating spaces …people want to live in”. “We have a responsibility to not only the current generation … but also the future generation that are going to inherit the buildings that we’re building at the moment.”
Scully flagged the planning department was exploring using artificial intelligence to speed up the development approvals process, with a focus on weeding out applications with elements likely to trigger a rejection.
“It may be in the proponent side of things, where people can run their proposal through the system and see where there might be problems early on,” he said.
