NSW Low- and Mid-Rise Housing Reforms and the Pattern Book

About this course.

The NSW housing-supply problem is, in essence, that not enough homes have been built to keep up with the number of people who need them, particularly in the places where people most want to live, and this shortage has pushed up the cost of housing and made it harder for many people to buy or rent a home. The policy response, at a high level, is to change the planning rules so that more homes — especially low- and mid-rise homes in well-located areas — can be built more easily and more quickly. This course does not rely on specific statistics, because figures date quickly and inventing them would be inappropriate; the important point for practitioners is the direction of the problem and the response, which is well established and which practitioners can confirm through NSW planning's own materials.

Understanding the problem begins with the basic relationship between supply and demand. When the number of people wanting homes in an area grows faster than the number of homes being built, competition for the available homes increases, and prices and rents tend to rise. Over an extended period, NSW — and Sydney in particular — has experienced strong demand for housing driven by population growth and by the desirability of well-located areas near jobs, transport and services, while the rate at which new homes have been added has not kept pace. The result has been affordability pressure felt across the community: first-home buyers struggling to enter the market, renters facing rising costs and limited choice, and young people and key workers priced out of the areas where they work.