Australia: Michael Koziol on Sydney's housing shortage
As I leave beautiful but maddening Sydney, I’ve realised all its problems boil down to one thing. Michael Koziol, Sydney Morning Herald, November 2024.
For people in Vancouver, this sounds very familiar.
After three years writing about Sydney, I’m completely convinced the high cost of housing is the root of all the city’s other issues. It depresses our culture and hurts our nightlife. Damaged though they were by lockout laws, poker machines and ridiculous regulations, none of those threats are as fundamental as the fact people just don’t have as much disposable income to spend on eating out, grabbing a midweek cocktail or catching a show. They’re spending it on rent and mortgages.
What are the most important levers to pull?
How do we change this? The discourse on housing is depressing. Everyone has the pet lever they want to pull: liberalise planning laws, increase density, cut migration, reform taxes, freeze rents, build more public housing. They want their preferred policy, and the others are seen as a threat.
Because I was covering Sydney, rather than federal parliament, a lot of my writing focused on the planning system. It still strikes me as the most ripe for reform – partly because it is not very well understood, and if more people were to understand it, they would be horrified.
On institutional inertia:
Proper change always seems unlikely, and not just because our leaders are chronically afraid of making decisions. We also labour under bureaucratic systems that have captured the people who work in them. Often, you come across people in government who are bemused or exasperated by these systems, but act as though they are unalterable. With so many cooks involved, and so many roadblocks, it’s easier to just blame one of them and go home.
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Via a Twitter thread by Jonathan O’Brien of YIMBY Melbourne.
The fight over your backyard: Why NIMBY has become a ‘dirty word’. Gina Rushton, ABC, July 2025. “When the Sydney Morning Herald asked the head of the Haberfield Association, who successfully secured his entire suburb as heritage conserved, where young people should live, he was stumped, before suggesting Orange (250 km away) or Bathurst (190 km away).”