The Daily Telegraph featured an article titled, SYDNEY SUBURB COMES TO LIFE 130 YEARS AFTER PLANS DRAWN featuring…

Plans drawn up 130 years ago to transform Riverstone from farming paddocks to Paddington-style terraces are finally coming to life, with residents staking a claim to building lots. Among them is 22-year-old Chandini Suresh.

It’s a timely article showcasing how slow the local councils and governments are with providing the necessary housing and infrastructure for Sydney’s growing population.

These past few years of pathetic time-wasting and holding off on projects to try to save votes is going to cause absolute chaos in the housing sector as Sydney bursts at the seams.

Just wait and see what happens this year during the council elections, most of the protectionist Councillors will be too scared to make the necessary decisions for what the communities really need and instead they’ll be making decisions and spruiking promises and running popularity campaigns based purely on trying to protect their job, instead of getting on with the job.

As I shared in a recent article, Draft Report: A Look Into 'The Future For Acreage This Decade'

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) medium-growth model, we can expect Australia’s population to grow to 30 million by 2030 and by the end of this decade Sydney is projected to have a population nearing 6.5 million. That’s an extra 1.4 million on top of the current 5.1 million population of Sydney.

Where on earth are all of these people going to live?

The Aerotropolis will provide some of the housing, but it won’t be anywhere near enough to make a dent in the growing housing demand in Sydney

The proposed plans for the Aerotropolis shows that there are 10 precincts proposed in total, with housing estates not included in all of the precincts.

However, the 2 initial housing precincts:

Aerotropolis Core Precinct has a total area of 1382 hectares with housing proposed for 20-24,000 potential residents
Northern Gateway Precinct covers 1,616 hectares with housing proposed for 8 - 10,000 potential residents.

The other initial precincts which are scheduled to be signed off on by the end of 2020 are for parkland, waterways, commercial, light industrial, warehousing, freight distribution, agribusiness and urban services.

“Urban services includes industries that enable the city to develop and its businesses and residents to operate. Urban services support the activities of local populations and businesses. They include concrete batching, waste recycling and transfer, printing, motor vehicle repairs, construction depots, and utilities (electricity, water, gas supply)”, according to the Greater Sydney Commission.

There will be more housing provided within some of the Stage 2 precincts, but by the time the initial 2 housing precincts are gazetted, and the necessary services are provided (roads, water, sewer, electricity, and gas, etc) and the blocks of land get registered, then add on top the delay in getting the building approvals processed , plus the time it takes to build the homes, let alone providing community services like schools, transport, shopping centres, etc it’s going to take years to develop.

My prediction is that, it’s unlikely that there will be any homes to live in out in the Aerotropolis prior to late 2022 - early 2023 at the current rate.

By which time Sydney’s population is expected to have grown by another 300,000 people and yet these 2 precincts will only provide at best housing for 34,000, approx. 11% of Sydney’s population growth during that period (and bear in mind that by the time the population has grown by the predicted 300,000 people, they will only just be completing the first of the 12-15,000 places in these precincts. The construction of all of properties for 34,000 people will take around 3 - 4 years to complete, which means that by then there’ll be another 300,000 people in Sydney looking for a place to live.

Apparently, even the mayor of Blacktown admitted recently that the City of Blacktown is currently about 55,000 homes behind where they really need to be …and this is only going to become a more common and growing problem unless something is done, and fast.

The current NSW Government has been spruiking that they’re building the infrastructure for the future and building a better Sydney, but, they need to pull their finger out and get on with providing housing or we’re going to end up with an unfixable housing crisis on our hands.

Right now is the time for the State Government to start fast tracking projects and for the local governments to streamline processing. It’s also time for the Federal Government to invest further in Sydney’s projects, water supply issues and maybe consider a reduction to the volume of immigration until the country can actually cope with the rate of population growth.

I hope I’m wrong, but it currently looks like Sydney’s going to be in one hell of a horrible mess this time next decade.

Regards

Greg Vincent