Sydney housing crisis continues with NSW building approvals falling short

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Sydney's housing squeeze shows no sign of letting up with new data showing New South Wales is only getting half of the building approvals needed to ease pressure.

Transcript

00:00The new figures will be disappointing for New South Wales residents, but for anyone

00:05who's been following this issue, they won't come as a surprise.

00:09Australia has a National Housing Accord target of 1.2 million new homes across the country

00:15by 2029.

00:17And New South Wales, for its role, has committed to 377,000 new homes over the same period

00:24of time, which works out to be about 75,000 new dwellings between now and 2029.

00:29Now we've known for some time that we are not on track to meet that target.

00:33In fact, Premier Chris Mins in January admitted that it was not going to happen, and sure

00:38enough this new ABS data confirms that not only is New South Wales not on track to meet

00:43the target, but that we are falling well, well short of it.

00:46The number of new dwelling approvals in New South Wales did rise in the month of May,

00:51as it did for every state and territory in Australia, but only by 2.9%, and it means

00:56that in the year to May, we've had about 43,000 new dwellings approved in the state,

01:01and that's only about half of where we need to be if we want to meet our National Accord

01:06target.

01:07Now obviously this is disappointing for not just the New South Wales government and New

01:11South Wales residents more generally, but also developers, and they have come out swinging

01:15against the Mins government in light of this new data.

01:18They say that we really need to ramp up the number of approvals being pushed through,

01:22the development applications being approved, the Master Builders Association has also spoken

01:27about the need for affordability in the materials space and also speeding up the amount of time

01:32it takes for these buildings to go up.

01:35Chris Mins in addressing the housing crisis has focused on high density living.

01:40He says that we really need to build up rather than out, and certainly there are a number

01:45of policies in place that encourage developers who are working on those really high level,

01:50high rise, high density apartments, those are often fast tracked and given approvals

01:55more easily.

01:56But yes, this new data out today just confirming what we already knew, which is that New South

02:00Wales is not on track to meet its housing targets and we really need to ramp up approvals

02:05if we do want to reach that 1.2 million new homes across the country by 2029.

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