Fast-tracking approvals to raise city rooftops a climate-friendly, space-effective way for Labor to remedy Australia's worsening housing crisis

Sky News AU

a day ago

A year into the National Housing Accord, Treasury's own papers concede the program is already 55,300 homes behind where it should be.
Land is scarce, builders are folding, and approvals are still crawling through council inboxes.
Yet ministers keep prescribing more of the same, rezonings here, grants there, while ignoring the cheapest, quickest real estate Australia owns: the air sitting idle on top of city rooftops. The case for looking up
Walk any CBD and count the flat roofs dotted with nothing more than air-conditioning units and pigeons.
In a conventional project, those few hundred square metres of land would cost millions.
In the sky, they cost nothing.
Add factory-made timber or light-gauge steel modules, quietly craned into place while the shops or offices below keep trading and you've slashed both the budget and the build time in half.
There is a climate dividend, too.
Re-using an existing concrete frame avoids as much as three-quarters of the embodied carbon baked into a new tower.
And at a time when suburban sprawl devours paddocks and infrastructure dollars, rooftop residents piggyback on pipes, rails and fibre that are already there.
This isn't guesswork.
London and Manchester have waved through more than 180,000 'airspace homes' under a fast-track code introduced in the past couple of years.
Rotterdam's RoofScape program is stuffing housing, solar panels and rain-capture systems onto 18 square kilometres of flat roofs.
Property giant CBRE, which crunched the numbers for Australia, puts the local rooftop market in the 'tens of billions'. How big could it be here?
NSW's Low and Mid-Rise Housing Policy is forecast to unlock 112,000 dwellings around 171 train stations in five years.
Copy that uplift to the other capitals, modestly discounting for lower densities, and you arrive at about 150,000 ready-made apartments hovering in the sky.
That's one-eighth of the Accord target without touching a single greenfield hectare. A two-year plan: no white papers required
If governments are serious, the roadmap is brutally simple.
First, map the opportunity.
A national LiDAR/Drone-based scan could, within six months, produce a searchable atlas of every flat roof built after 1950, tagged with ownership, zoning and structural capacity. The tech has already been developed; it just needs a green light.
Second, cut the red tape.
England's rule is blunt: if your lightweight addition meets height, daylight and fire parameters, you skip the planning quagmire.
Australia should mirror that 'if-it-fits-it-passes' test for rooftops and let certifiers sign off within weeks, not years.
Third, prove it works on the government's own buildings.
State asset corporations could pre-approve the airspace above twenty car parks, TAFEs and depots, tendering them exclusively to modular builders.
Those sites alone would pump at least 2,500 units into the pipeline and give lenders the confidence they crave.
Fourth, make the numbers irresistible for existing owners.
A simple strata-sharing rule, half of any air-rights windfall must fund lifts, solar and façade upgrades, turns objections into applause.
Leaky roofs fixed, bills fall, asset value climbs: who votes against free money?
Finally, back the early movers with concessional debt.
Housing Australia could open a $500 million window for rooftop projects that cut embodied carbon by 40 per cent and set aside at least 20 per cent of apartments for sub-market rents.
Super funds chasing green income streams would do the rest.
Put the whole package in motion by the end of 2025, and the first cranes could be swinging over Sydney and Melbourne pilot sites eighteen months later, well before the 2028 federal poll.
Ministers love ribbon cuttings; here's a batch ready-made. The politics write themselves
Rooftop housing is a rare policy unicorn: it saves governments money, pleases environmentalists, delights the construction unions hungry for factory work and offers landlords a windfall to renovate the tired offices Australians no longer need five days a week.
Every module lifted onto a CBD roof refreshes stamp duty revenue without bulldozing a single paddock on the city fringe.
For critics who fear 'ugly boxes in the sky', Australia already has a poster child: 55 Southbank Boulevard in Melbourne, where 10 storeys of cross-laminated timber were added above an existing concrete hotel.
The extension banked 4,000 tonnes of CO2-e, generated almost no street disruption and delivered 220 new rooms in under a year. Time to stop staring at paddocks
Canberra keeps telling voters it will 'unlock new land' while tip-toeing around the fact that good land inside city boundaries is tapped out.
The cheapest block in the country is the one we already own: the thin slice of air above every flat roof from Perth to Parramatta.
Map it, recode it, finance it and share the dividends and we could plug the Accord shortfall, revive hollowed-out CBDs and prove that bold promises don't have to die in committee.
The sky is no longer the limit; it is the fastest housing pipeline Australia has ever had.
All we have to do is look up and get on with it.
Dr Ehsan Noroozinejad is a senior researcher at Western Sydney University who writes about innovative housing policy, modular construction, and urban resilience. He advises governments and industry on affordable-housing strategy and has appeared on ABC News, The Guardian, The Policymaker, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Conversation.