Inner West LEP fails to deliver
Inner West Council have released their Local Environment Plan update proposal to get more homes built. After two missed deadlines, how do we grade this assignment?
The #1 criterion by which this plan should be judged is “will it deliver their target of 7800 homes by June 2029?” According to their own feasibility analysis it won’t. It estimates a takeup of just 1000 homes during that period, and 5,900 through to 2041.
You have to dig into Appendix 11 to find that detail. In the main report, council instead cite a “potential additional capacity” for Stage 1 of 22,000 dwellings - most of those homes will not be built out anytime in the near future. It makes no sense to cite that number except to gas up any unsophisticated readers who you want to trick into thinking you’re doing a good job.
Note that feasibility studies were not provided for Stage 2, but that had less than half as many dwellings as Stage 1, so if we assume similar levels of take up you’d end up with 1500 dwellings.
This slow take up projection is a result of council’s timidity on heights - they have created a bunch of capacity which is either not feasible or only marginally so. The bulk of it is around six storeys, and most of that has upper level setbacks which reduce the capacity further.
A lot of the uplift this plan enables will barely make sense for a developer to build- it's hard to cover the costs of buying land, knocking down the existing building and paying high construction costs if you can only build a handful of apartments across a few storeys. Going taller means developers will get projects off the ground quicker.
When we consider that:
The deadline to meet their target is in 4 years time.
This plan will take at least 6 months to finalise.
Average construction time for an apartment building is about 2 years.
Approval time for such projects is significant (6+ months).
If council is actually serious about its housing target it needs to create at least 8000 homes worth of capacity that people will rush to build NOW. That means high rise in high-demand locations. We don't have that because the planners at council are scared of the NIMBY backlash.
Rejuvenated Norton St fails to materialise
Why are they so timid? Let’s take Norton Street South as an example. This is limited to six storeys (not really feasible). Some goals listed are:
“Moderate development scale, height and density adjacent HCAs, ensuring appropriate transitions”
“reduce impact on surrounding lower density development”
Even with those restrictions in mind, here’s their map which shows that only about 20% of the sites in this study area will actually be upzoned. The rest are impacted by heritage, indicated by the red boxes:
If council wants Norton St to be a thriving retail strip again, they need to take notes from Burwood and Chatswood who have surrounded theirs with 20-30 storey buildings with great success. Those suburbs are bustling even on Sundays because there is organic foot traffic.
Upper level setbacks in defiance of evidence
Upper level setbacks appear again and again in the document. Lots of six storey buildings but the top two storeys need to be 3 metres back so they’re not visible from street level. Our friends at YIMBY Melbourne have written the definitive takedown on these, they simply do not make sense for mid-rise buildings.
These setbacks increase construction costs, increase defects, reduce energy efficiency and reduce apartment yield in exchange for little benefit.
The list goes on:
In Catherine St, Leichhardt they propose upzoning to allow 3 storey buildings. There may be some houses built up to this level but 3 storey residential flat buildings are not feasible just about anywhere in Sydney so we will not see a net dwelling increase from this change.
The Parramatta Rd section wants to “Retain the historic commercial shopfront fabric… and its prevailing two storey street wall” and “Ensure infill development… respects the fine grain rhythm of the historic character” and as such places all sorts of limitations on what can happen there. Heights again top out at 6 storeys with significant setbacks - do we want to rescue Parramatta Rd or preserve it?
We’ll have more to say when community consultation on these changes opens, but if this is the plan council proceeds with there is no way they are meeting their housing target.
Read the documentation yourself here.
