Virtual Seminar

Building more homes where people want to live and where infrastructure costs less
Why is this an issue?

Wednesday, 27 September 2023 5.00pm
Virtual Event - Link to be provided upon registering.

The NSW Productivity Commissioner has recently published two reports on housing affordability. He reported that housing supply in NSW has not kept up with increases in demand, resulting in consistent upward pressure on house prices and rents. The NSW Department of Planning and Environment estimates NSW will require approximately 900,000 additional dwellings by 2041.

The Commission found that the greatest effect on house prices could be achieved with a planning process that increases housing density in areas of highest demand, particularly in areas closest to the Sydney CBD. Doing this would require changing current regulations on building houses in ways that allow more people to build more homes in the right places. This report was soon followed by another on the infrastructure costs of urban sprawl, a topic much debated over the last few decades.

The report recommended:

• To build more housing in Sydney’s existing housing areas, we should:
• raise average apartment heights in suburbs close to the CBD and job opportunities
• allow more development near transport hubs to leverage existing infrastructure capacity
• encourage townhouses and other medium-density development and allow more dual-occupancy uses such as granny flats where increased density is not an option.
• The infrastructure costs of building new homes are lowest near Sydney’s CBD, increasing as development moves north, south, and west. The infrastructure-related costs of building further away can be up to $75,000 more per dwelling.
• Most of the variation in infrastructure-related costs between areas relates to local traffic congestion and wastewater costs, followed by school infrastructure and green space costs.

Keaton will take us through the research that underpins the Productivity Commissioner’s reports and consider where we go from here.

Key Speaker:
Keaton Jenner
Principal Economist, NSW Treasury

Keaton is a former Research Economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and now Principal Economist at NSW Treasury. He has been studying housing cost for many years and is the author of RBA research papers on housing cost.

Chairman
Michael Neustein, Chairman, AIUS NSW

This event is eligible for points/hours towards your required CPD