If you want to get an idea of what’s wrong with housing policy and planning in Sydney, reading the Housing Diversity and Affordability study is a great place to start. It is written by a firm of consultants, HillPDA, whose speciality is financial feasibility analysis for property development, which is appropriate because money, as usual in Sydney, is the backdrop to this whole story.
The study HillPDA has prepared is for the Land and Housing Corporation (LAHC), which is responsible for the NSW government’s social housing portfolio. It is a public trading enterprise. It wants to redevelop the government’s land holdings in Waterloo at least cost to government. The key to this approach is to sell off government-owned land to developers. With a recent AHURI study estimating a shortfall of 431,000 dwellings in 2016, how does LAHC justify this when we have such a shortage of social housing in Australia?
That’s pretty straightforward – you are doing it not as a budget measure, but helping social housing tenants. The magic number that LAHC has plucked out of the air is 70 per cent private and 30 per cent social as the split between social and private housing on any Sydney social housing renewal project. Apparently, when you get that mix, social housing tenants get the advantages of all those private sector neighbours who will obviously offer them life tips, line up jobs for their children, and everyone will be better off.
The only problem with this story, as my colleagues Michael Darcy and Dallas Rogers point out in a recent article in The Conversation, is that there is no magic number and no evidence that a 70:30 split is optimum. After reviewing the extensive literature on this topic, they conclude: “Social mix renewals that apply a simplistic 70:30 target within a narrowly defined boundary around an ‘estate’ risk seriously undervaluing large public housing assets.”
In my view, the 70:30 mix seems more focussed on saving the government money rather than helping social housing tenants. A different mix might produce better outcomes for social housing tenants and reduce our shortage of social housing in Sydney. Indeed, this is an ambition of the City of Sydney Council, which has the public view that it wants the site to work harder and has suggested a 50:50 split.
How do our friends at HillPDA deal with this debate between LAHC and the City of Sydney? They ignore it. Even though the report is about housing diversity and affordability, it doesn’t address this key debate. I am not too critical of the consultants – if they wrote about this issue, their report would not make it past the draft stage or LAHC might have fired them. But the result is that we end up with a study that should have been debating this central question but instead disregards it.
The index refers to City Makers as “professionals, knowledge and key workers that support and enhance the effective operation of a global city.” This is a weird definition to put in a report about diversity. I would like to think we all can be city makers – social housing tenants, shopkeepers, retired people, etc.
I also find it strange that it is not clear in the document itself that it was funded by LAHC. That might help the reader deal with some of the strange conclusions the report reached.
The report also seems to work pretty hard to come up with the answer the client wants. HillPDA comes to the following conclusions in its analysis of housing affordability:
“Retaining and/or improving housing choice within the study area and the City of Sydney is a real and growing challenge.
- Whilst historically a range of factors have enabled a diversity of dwelling and household types to reside within the Sydney LGA (such as social housing, lower entry costs, etc.), its growing attraction as a place to live is positively influencing property prices which in turn increases barriers to affordability and therefore diversity.
- Of the households within the study area that were renting, 43 per cent were experiencing rental stress.
- The housing affordability challenge in Sydney is affecting more than just the socially disadvantaged or low income earners.
- Households on very low or low incomes cannot afford to rent a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the Sydney LGA. Households on a moderate income could afford a one-bedroom but not a two-bedroom apartment.”
So, despite the pretty obvious conclusion from this evidence that we have a shortage of affordable housing and that a target like the City of Sydney’s preferred option might be better at addressing this shortage than the LAHC proposal – NO, the answer is 5 per cent affordable.
It gets worse when we look at how we deliver the social housing in the renewed development. On page 69 the report states:
“Of all approaches examined, the building-by-building approach presents the lowest level of risk and based on community engagement, sits most comfortably with the majority of tenants.”
A building-by-building approach is when you separate out the social housing tenants in one building and the private residents in another. This is LAHC’s preferred option. You get some more details on what tenants think in the consultation section where it says (page 74):
“46 per cent of respondents wanted social, affordable and private housing to be provided within the same building.
“26 per cent wanted social and affordable housing together within the same building, alongside private housing in separate buildings.
“16 per cent wanted all three types of housing to be separate.
“13 per cent had no preference.”
By my maths, the majority of the tenants ask to be located in the same building – i.e., not a building-by-building approach. Maybe the consultation results aren’t important because tenants aren’t really city makers?
My one-word summary is ughhhhhh!
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Professor Peter Phibbs is Director of the Henry Halloran Trust at Sydney University.
The print version of this article was heavily edited by SSH due to last-minute space constraints. This web version is the text as agreed with the author.
