Latest news with #NotInMyBackYard
Daily Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Business
- Daily Telegraph
Worst NIMBY suburbs: Sydney areas choking housing supply
Chronic opposition to new housing in prime western suburbs has strangled attempts to supply Sydney with the vital homes needed to meet surging population growth. Alarming new analysis has revealed multiple, large Harbour City enclaves where fewer than 20 new homes were built over the past two years, with local housing supply growing by less than a per cent. There were 78 suburb areas identified as having 'minimal to negligible' housing growth due to low dwelling approval rates, according to the SuburbTrends and MCG Quantity Surveyors data. The low approval rates were 'indicative of local opposition or restrictive zoning practices', the research revealed. It comes as NSW continues to fall behind housing targets, with the state well short of the 377,000 homes needed to be built to meet the National Housing Accord target of 1.2 million new homes by 2029. Sydney areas with the least new housing approvals tended to be established suburbs dominated by low density, single-level homes. Less than a third of the homes in these suburbs were units or townhouses when the last census was taken in 2021. These suburbs often had space to grow and much of the community opposition to the new homes has been on density grounds. Council areas where lower volumes of housing were being approved covered much of the north shore and the inner west, along with parts of the Hills District. But individual suburbs flagged as some of the worst perpetrators of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) were in Sydney's outer west – where there is generally space for new housing developments. They included Glenmore Park in Sydney's outer west, along with Harrington Park, Londonderry and Bligh Park. Other pockets with particularly low housing approvals were Menai, Illawong and Alfords Point in the Sutherland Shire and Cromer, on the northern beaches. The research excluded suburbs with less than 1500 dwellings. Low development in these areas was 'placing significant pressure on existing housing stock and exacerbating local affordability issues', the SuburbTrends and MCG research revealed. MCG Quantity Surveyors director Mike Mortlock said low approvals in many areas painted a 'clear picture of entrenched resistance to new housing'. 'Places like Glenmore Park, Illawong and Cromer are emblematic of the challenge: low-density communities, often with strong local identities, where planning inertia and local opposition continue to choke supply,' Mr Mortlock said. Many of the areas with the lowest housing approvals could benefit from densification, he added. 'What's striking is that several of these areas, such as Springwood and Wentworth Falls, offer the very lifestyle benefits that would make them ideal candidates for moderate densification. Yet we see barely a trickle of approvals,' Mr Mortlock said. 'These are the suburbs where policy needs to evolve from rhetoric to implementation, because the mismatch between demand and local supply is only widening.' Regentville, Windsor and Yarramundi were also flagged as low development suburbs, although these suburbs had strict flood control or bush fire zones that limited where new housing could be built. Regional towns within SA4 areas such as Newcastle, Wollongong, and The Central Coast also reflect strong opposition or restrictive planning policies, according to the research. This has limited new housing growth in these areas despite them being critical to relieving housing pressures in metropolitan Sydney. Housing Industry Association economist Tim Reardon said a 'perfect failure' in the town planning system had allowed NIMBY tendencies to flourish in certain councils. 'Town planners get no reward for approving a development and face risks if they do approve a development,' he said. Mr Reardon added that councils were often overly concerned with how new developments would influence voter decisions at local elections, thinking approvals would turn ratepayers against them. 'The areas where there is stronger resistance to new development tend to be older suburbs. We need to strike a balance between preserving these areas and supplying new housing. 'The solution is to take development approvals out of the hands of local councils and let state governments handle it while councils focus purely on town planning.' Mr Reardon explained that a change in homeowner attitudes would also help. 'Opposition from rate payers to higher density developments is often with the view that it will devalue the existing homes and stretch amenities but new developments often deliver the opposite. 'Well-designed developments will often bring better amenities and services and make areas more desirable.' Real estate entrepreneur Peter Diamantidis built a house in Glenmore Park back in the early 2010s and said the current planning system was unrecognisable compared to when he built. 'Most of the area was built about 30 years ago and they staggered land releases over a few years but now it's really slow,' he said. 'There is a lot of land around there but it is not as easy to build. 'The problem with a lot of areas like this is that they are really poorly planned. A whole lot of promises were made about what kind of services would be built in the area but they often haven't done that. 'There are a few suburbs that are like Glenmore Park. They have to be better serviced before they can be developed further. Right now, the infrastructure is coming in last.'
News.com.au
25-04-2025
- Business
- News.com.au
Worst NIMBY suburbs: Sydney areas choking housing supply
Chronic opposition to new housing in prime western suburbs has strangled attempts to supply Sydney with the vital homes needed to meet surging population growth. Alarming new analysis has revealed multiple, large Harbour City enclaves where fewer than 20 new homes were built over the past two years, with local housing supply growing by less than a per cent. There were 78 suburb areas identified as having 'minimal to negligible' housing growth due to low dwelling approval rates, according to the SuburbTrends and MCG Quantity Surveyors data. The low approval rates were 'indicative of local opposition or restrictive zoning practices', the research revealed. It comes as NSW continues to fall behind housing targets, with the state well short of the 377,000 homes needed to be built to meet the National Housing Accord target of 1.2 million new homes by 2029. Sydney areas with the least new housing approvals tended to be established suburbs dominated by low density, single-level homes. Less than a third of the homes in these suburbs were units or townhouses when the last census was taken in 2021. These suburbs often had space to grow and much of the community opposition to the new homes has been on density grounds. Council areas where lower volumes of housing were being approved covered much of the north shore and the inner west, along with parts of the Hills District. But individual suburbs flagged as some of the worst perpetrators of NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) were in Sydney's outer west – where there is generally space for new housing developments. They included Glenmore Park in Sydney's outer west, along with Harrington Park, Londonderry and Bligh Park. Other pockets with particularly low housing approvals were Menai, Illawong and Alfords Point in the Sutherland Shire and Cromer, on the northern beaches. The research excluded suburbs with less than 1500 dwellings. Low development in these areas was 'placing significant pressure on existing housing stock and exacerbating local affordability issues', the SuburbTrends and MCG research revealed. MCG Quantity Surveyors director Mike Mortlock said low approvals in many areas painted a 'clear picture of entrenched resistance to new housing'. 'Places like Glenmore Park, Illawong and Cromer are emblematic of the challenge: low-density communities, often with strong local identities, where planning inertia and local opposition continue to choke supply,' Mr Mortlock said. Many of the areas with the lowest housing approvals could benefit from densification, he added. 'What's striking is that several of these areas, such as Springwood and Wentworth Falls, offer the very lifestyle benefits that would make them ideal candidates for moderate densification. Yet we see barely a trickle of approvals,' Mr Mortlock said. 'These are the suburbs where policy needs to evolve from rhetoric to implementation, because the mismatch between demand and local supply is only widening.' Regentville, Windsor and Yarramundi were also flagged as low development suburbs, although these suburbs had strict flood control or bush fire zones that limited where new housing could be built. Regional towns within SA4 areas such as Newcastle, Wollongong, and The Central Coast also reflect strong opposition or restrictive planning policies, according to the research. This has limited new housing growth in these areas despite them being critical to relieving housing pressures in metropolitan Sydney. Housing Industry Association economist Tim Reardon said a 'perfect failure' in the town planning system had allowed NIMBY tendencies to flourish in certain councils. 'Town planners get no reward for approving a development and face risks if they do approve a development,' he said. Mr Reardon added that councils were often overly concerned with how new developments would influence voter decisions at local elections, thinking approvals would turn ratepayers against them. 'The areas where there is stronger resistance to new development tend to be older suburbs. We need to strike a balance between preserving these areas and supplying new housing. 'The solution is to take development approvals out of the hands of local councils and let state governments handle it while councils focus purely on town planning.' Mr Reardon explained that a change in homeowner attitudes would also help. 'Opposition from rate payers to higher density developments is often with the view that it will devalue the existing homes and stretch amenities but new developments often deliver the opposite. 'Well-designed developments will often bring better amenities and services and make areas more desirable.' Real estate entrepreneur Peter Diamantidis built a house in Glenmore Park back in the early 2010s and said the current planning system was unrecognisable compared to when he built. 'Most of the area was built about 30 years ago and they staggered land releases over a few years but now it's really slow,' he said. 'There is a lot of land around there but it is not as easy to build. 'The problem with a lot of areas like this is that they are really poorly planned. A whole lot of promises were made about what kind of services would be built in the area but they often haven't done that. 'There are a few suburbs that are like Glenmore Park. They have to be better serviced before they can be developed further. Right now, the infrastructure is coming in last.'
Yahoo
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Inadequacy of the Abundance Agenda
I don't claim to have perfect knowledge about why the electorate chose Donald Trump in the 2024 election, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because the masses got priced out of Shaker Heights. The first wave of liberal what-went-wrong books is crashing ashore, and its message, surprisingly enough, is largely about the evils of local zoning. I agree that affluent (and often liberal) communities often use rococo land restrictions to jack up land values and exclude the Wrong Element. Some reforms are in order. But the New YIMBY Order (YIMBY being an acronym for Yes In My Back Yard, in response to the more familiar NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard) places the same naïve faith in market solutions that led government policy astray starting in the late 1970s. And to whatever extent judicious easing of regulations is necessary, it will not set the proletariat free, because it sidesteps some important questions that deserve some attention. The books in question are Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—And How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman, a former congressional staffer; Stuck: How The Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, by Yoni Appelbaum, an academic historian and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic; and Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers, respectively, at The New York Times and The Atlantic. Dunkelman's book, the best of the lot, argues persuasively that Jeffersonian local-control liberalism can get in the way of Hamiltonian big-central-government liberalism—but Dunkelman makes too much of that problem. Appelbaum's book supplies rich narrative detail on the dishonorable history of zoning (it began with the ghettoizing of Jews) but he's weak on economic analysis. Klein and Thompson are better on economics but less persuasively tethered to the real world, replete with sentences such as 'Our era features too little utopian thinking' that lend their book the antiseptic tone of a TED Talk. Collectively, these books advocate what might be called supply-side liberalism. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the hell with demand, let's just create more stuff. Like supply-side conservatives, supply-side liberals say the government should get out of the way. But their preferred method to achieve this is not tax cuts but deregulation, typically at the local rather than federal level. 'Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked,' write Klein and Thompson, 'is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward.' Well, sure. But ignoring demand is also a convenient way to dodge potentially divisive questions about distribution. 'The world we want requires more than redistribution,' Klein and Thompson state grandly. 'We aspire to more than parceling out the present.' That doesn't offer much sustenance to the rest of us drudges condemned to inhabit 2025. Rather than speculate about the future, let's consider the supply-side liberals' revisionist history. To varying degrees, all three books portray Robert Moses, who bulldozed thriving neighborhoods throughout New York City to build his expressways and thruways and parkways, as a force for good. The only reason we don't recognize this, they argue, is that Robert Caro portrayed Moses as a destructive force in his 1974 biography The Power Broker. Moses's most formidable opponent was Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Moses wanted to build an elevated highway through SoHo and Little Italy that would bisect Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, where Jacobs lived. Jacobs stopped him. Bizarrely, Caro left Jacobs out of The Power Broker because the book was too long to include her. (The missing chapter probably resides in one of the 100 boxes of papers Caro recently donated to the New York Historical Society; some enterprising magazine editor should find it and persuade Caro to let him publish it. But I digress.) The delicate ecology of the neighborhoods Moses blasted through didn't interest Moses, but it did interest Jacobs. She wrote about how a mix of retail and residential structures enriched a neighborhood, and how pedestrian flow and smaller-scale construction kept neighborhoods safe by allowing 'eyes on the street.' At the time, urban renewal policies favored building the exact opposite: tall Brutalist high-rises surrounded by inhospitable concrete plazas. In lower-income neighborhoods, housing projects of this type became the perfect breeding ground for violent crime. Appelbaum sees Jacobs as a villain. Her chief sin was that her neighborhood preservation scheme jacked up property values. Jacobs bought her West Village house in 1947 for $7000, sold it in 1971 for $45,000, and today the city assesses it at $6.4 million. Well, yes, making a neighborhood flourish carries some risk that people will want to live in it. The solution is not to crap up that neighborhood but to help other neighborhoods flourish in similar fashion so that livable neighborhoods become the norm and remain affordable to all. Government regulation can help this process by reserving certain housing in livable neighborhoods for low-income families and/or providing subsidies that allow them to live there. At times Appelbaum is so eager to attack Jacobs that he misreads her willfully. 'The key link in a perpetual slum,' Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 'is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out.' To Appelbaum, that demonstrates that Jacobs wanted displace her neighborhood's immigrant renters with 'a stable, gentrified population of homeowners.' This is nonsense. As Appelbaum argues elsewhere in his book, the urban gentry are more mobile than lower-income residents, and therefore less likely to create the stability that makes a neighborhood thrive. Appelbaum is so determined to defend high-density housing that he even celebrates the old tenements of New York's Lower East Side, which in 1910 housed 619 residents per acre, the greatest number of them Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Appelbaum notes cheerily that one old tenement was refashioned into a museum, 'a shrine to America's first rung on the ladder of opportunity.' Has Appelbaum been to the Tenement Museum? On display are cramped sweatshop apartments where families slept at night and sewed garments during the day because management was too cheap to give them a workplace. These places were breeding grounds for smallpox, typhus, and other diseases. Jacob Riis wrote a whole book about this. 'An epidemic,' Riis explained in How The Other Half Lives (1890), 'which the well-to-do can afford to make light of as a thing to be got over or avoided by reasonable care' is 'excessively fatal among the children of the poor, by reason of the practical impossibility of isolating the patient in a tenement.' Appelbaum will have none of this. 'They were just apartment buildings,' he writes. 'Today, the very same units reformers claimed would ruin the health and morals of their inhabitants rent for princely sums.' Eventually Appelbaum acknowledges grudgingly that conditions in tenements 'were frequently horrifying,' as documented by Riis and others. But 'it was also true that reformers hunted for the most appalling conditions they could document, to dramatize their cause.' Oh, please. All three books cite Paul Sabin's 2021 book Public Citizens to argue that Ralph Nader choked off housing supply by encouraging public-interest lawsuits against local governments to prevent developers from despoiling the environment. (I reviewed Sabin's book, which I mostly admired, in The New York Times.) Dunkelman rather intemperately writes that Nader (along with Rachel Carson and a few others) exhibited a Nixonian 'cynicism' about government. In fact, all Nader wanted was for the government to be accountable to local communities that had a legitimate interest in preserving clean water and protecting green spaces. Granted, the avenues Nader created were used later for less laudable ends—ends that Nader himself disparages. But I don't believe these excesses, which warrant correction, have much to do with what truly ails this country. And I don't think supply-side liberalism shows much promise as an appeal to a working class that's abandoning the Democratic Party in droves. I'll continue this discussion in a forthcoming follow-up.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
UK 'ripping up archaic rules' on nuclear plants
The UK government announced plans to approve more nuclear reactors Thursday, including giving developers freedom to build new plants anywhere in England and Wales and scrapping expiry dates on projects. 'This is the latest refusal to accept the status quo, with the government ripping up archaic rules and saying no to the NIMBYs [Not In My Back Yard], to prioritise growth,' Downing Street said in a statement. Britain's nuclear industry has been 'suffocated by regulations,' Downing Street wrote, and analysts tend to agree: The Hinkley Point C plant currently under construction uses the same design as existing French reactors, but regulators required 7,000 design changes. As a result, it is running vastly over budget and years behind schedule, partly thanks to onerous planning rules and ongoing disputes with the Environment Agency and local authorities, Sam Dumitriu argued in his Notes on Growth Substack. The problems are self-perpetuating: The UK hadn't switched on a nuclear reactor since 1995 when Hinkley was announced, meaning EDF Energy, which is building the plant, faced an 'uphill battle' finding skilled workers and was forced to spend around £120 million ($148.6 million) on training colleges, The Times of London reported. The UK isn't unique in finding it difficult to get nuclear projects off the ground: Long-time market leaders such as the US and France have also struggled with project delays and cost overruns, with the vast majority of new construction now in China and Russia, the International Energy Agency wrote in a recent report. That said, Western countries may also be mishandling projects by trying to complete them too fast, the head of nuclear reactor maker AtkinsRéalis told the Financial Times last year: 'Really we should probably slow things down a bit, spend more time on the planning phase and get the execution phase [done],' he said.
