Approvals turbocharged in bid to tackle housing crisis
Farid Farid |
It’s taken nearly 50 years, but a state is vowing to make new homes a reality via a more efficient planning system, with advocates urging authorities to seize momentum behind the “significant” changes.
Councils in NSW will get only 10 days to dispute small variations of development applications that normally take months to be processed.
An alternative approval body panel will also be made permanent, while 16-year-old regional planning panels will be scrapped.
Premier Chris Minns touted the ambitious overhaul as the biggest reform to planning and housing in the state’s history.
His planning minister said it was time for NSW to stop “sweating the small stuff” and assure projects don’t get stuck in the system.
“It’s a necessary reset of the way the planning system and its pathways work … it tackles the practical delays that are holding up the delivery of homes and job-creating projects and driving up costs,” Paul Scully said.
The reforms rewrite large swathes of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act, first passed in 1979.
The foundation of the state’s housing, infrastructure and energy delivery pipeline informs decisions about new and existing developments.
But decades of tweaks helped balloon wait times in recent years to 114 days in 2024, despite the number of applications lodged compared to 2021 falling by almost a third.
Experts note that’s partly because councils devote scarce resources to assessing low-impact projects, such as adding a deck or pergola to a house.
“The momentum exists for this change. It hasn’t been there before,” advocacy group Sydney Yes in My Backyard chair Justin Simon told AAP.
“We like what we see here and encourage the opposition and crossbench to work with the government to get this through.”
The proposal has bipartisan support after the coalition assisted in development of the reforms.
“Our commitment is clear – we are pro-housing, pro-reform, and determined to see NSW move forward,” Opposition Leader Mark Speakman said.
Greens MP Sue Higginson said developers, rather than prospective home-owners, would be the big winners.
“Setting up the planning system to reward developers, so they can profit from building houses, won’t fix the housing affordability crisis which is where real housing pain is being felt – and it will do nothing for the 66,000 households on the wait list for social housing,” she said.
Alarm bells rang in February 2024 when the state’s productivity commission warned Sydney’s unaffordable housing market would turn it into “the city with no grandchildren”.
The commission’s research found the NSW capital lost twice as many people aged from 30 to 40 as it gained between 2016 and 2021.
According to the urban policy think tank, Committee for Sydney, the city is in a “generational housing crisis”.
“Too often, good projects for housing, infrastructure and economic development are caught in a maze that can run through as many as 22 agencies,” CEO Eamon Waterford said.
Treasurer Daniel Mookhey is promising the changes will allow NSW to leapfrog other states in its quest to build 377,000 homes in five years, under the National Housing Accord.
The long-awaited changes also establish a Development Coordination Authority to act as a single front door for advice on development applications and planning proposals on behalf of all government agencies.
Regional planning panels, brought in 16 years ago to deal with major developments of more than $30 million, will be scrapped.
The old independent bodies, which are not answerable to the planning minister, had been slow to expedite approvals, the NSW government said.
AAP
