2031: a land odyssey – article in New Home Buyer

As each new apartment building reaches high above its small-scale neighbours in Sydney suburbia, and a plethora of villas rise from the ashes of just a few detached houses, higher density housing seems to strengthen its grip. As land becomes scarce, the possibilities for new home buyers to buy lots for their detached dream homes seem to dwindle.

However, there are plans in place now to ensure that land continues to be available in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area for another 25 years — or at least up until 2031. Here’s a guide for where to look for information, inspiration, and ultimately “for sale” signs.

Steering our way through the paperwork jungle

The first place to look for a map of the future is from the NSW Government’s Department of Planning. Reassuringly, there is a plan for Sydney’s next 25 years. It’s called the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy. The final component of this strategy is called City of Cities - A Plan for Sydney’s Future. This plan was released in December 2005, and forecasts that by 2031, Sydney will require 640,000 new dwellings to house the increased population. It then expands on where the new dwellings will be located, and what type of dwelling they’re likely to be.

Then, in November 2006, another plan was released. Premier Morris Iemma announced that the NSW State Plan marked “a new direction for the delivery of government services and public administration in NSW”. As part of this new direction, the plan aims for an “Improved Urban Environment”, and as part of this improvement prioritises “Jobs Closer to Home”. However, as this new plan itself says, this was already a “key performance measure within the NSW Government’s Metropolitan Strategy for Sydney”. What’s revealed by this disclosure is that in respect to land distribution in Sydney and its surrounds, the State Government is repackaging and representing existing strategies, instead of creating new ones.

Rather than view this as a deliberate misrepresentation, however, it’s probably more accurate to consider it part of the nature of planning and preparing land for thousands of new homes. As the latest relevant, and easily most informative of all the planning documents, MDP 2007 (or the Metropolitan Development Program Update) reveals, “the process from a Government decision to release an area to availability of the first new lots for sale typically takes seven to ten years”. There’s rarely any real “news” when it comes to land releases; instead, there’s gradual, sometimes incremental movement through rezoning, servicing, subdivision, and finally, sometimes decades later, blocks being sold, new homes being built and people moving in and creating a community.