premier, Chris Minns, says he does not believe “Sydney is full” – as the former Labor premier Bob Carr famously declared in 2000 – but he is going to rebalance development away from the city fringe toward the CBD.
The previous decade of Coalition governments has seen development shift toward greenfields areas on the fringes, despite this often proving more expensive because of the need to build new roads, sewers and schools. “If we just sort of add another street to the western fringe of Sydney it’s just not going to work because I’ve got to stretch social infrastructure over a greater plane and I won’t have the balance sheet to do that,” Minns says.
“So it’s part of the reason we’re sprawling but we’re not meeting our housing targets, and the prices just keep going up, and it’s hurting our ability to attract and keep young people.”Last week the planning minister, Paul Scully, told a series of conferences in Sydney’s west that if NSW is to meet its population-based share of the national housing accord, it should build around 314,000 new dwellings over the five years to 2029.