In a pocket-sized park on the corner of Glengarrie Road and Goshawk Avenue,in Sydney’s outer northwest,a young couple sit alone with their 2-year-old son whiling away an unseasonably hot mid-winter’s Sunday afternoon.

The park is meagre by any standards:unshaded with three low-hanging swings,a small climbing frame,and a toddler’s seesaw. A newish main road (deserted on a Sunday) runs along one boundary,and a recently completed housing estate sits opposite,the narrow driveways of the cheek-by-jowl houses jammed with cars. Dark grey roofs march away to the near horizon,in defiance of former Coalition planning minister Rob Stokes’ thwarted attempts to mandate lighter roofing colours which would have helped fend off summer heat.

The couple – Ehsan Mansoor and his wife,Haseena – bought into this Marsden Park estate 8 months ago and are grateful for the fact that they have secured a home. But they are acutely aware of how this suburb,50 kilometres northwest of the CBD and bursting with young families,is struggling with poor public transport,absent or over-full schools,a dire shortage of recreational facilities and houses crowded so close together that trees of any size will never thrive.

Mansoor is struck by the contrast with his native Singapore where master planning for greened-up communities takes place 10 to 15 years in advance of residents moving in.

Here,he says,“they only seem to think about bringing in amenities once everyone is packed in”.

He worries about how the area will cope with accelerating climate change when,on this July day at 1pm,its already 26 degrees.

“If you look at some of the suburban developments on our city’s fringes,it’s the kind of thing that was environmentally criminal 20 years ago,and it’s even worse now,” warns University of NSW associate professor Philip Oldfield,head of the school of built environment.

“In Sydney,planning policy is an instrument of class warfare,” observes another industry veteran,scarred by too many years of trying to make a difference.

A change of government in March held the promise of correcting some of the city’s most egregious planning failures. New premier Chris Minns talked of going up,not out,to tackle Sydney’s housing crisis. Buzzwords like “infill development” and tackling the “missing middle” in housing development crackled with new purpose.

Yet not long afterwards,the government green-lit an extra 13,000 homes at Appin,on the city’s far south-west fringes,despite warnings from utility providers that road and transport plans had not been prepared,water needs not properly assessed,koala habitat stood to be impacted,and future mining could occur under the site,with an associated risk of subsidence.

“Pretty much every planning agency had been saying[it] was a bad idea,” says Ryan van den Nouwelant,a lecturer in city planning,also at UNSW. Local mayor Matt Gould says there is still no detailed infrastructure plan for the area,and until there is one,the development shouldn’t proceed. At nearby Wilton,he points out,some homes being built now will need effluent trucked away for the first few years,“and at Appin it’s going to be worse”.

Minns’refusal to guarantee the future of the western metro has sown more confusion,jarring with his professed commitment to higher density along major transport routes.

Now there isintense pushback from the property industry (and some councils) over a signature policy from the state Labor government,announced in mid-June,to incentivise private developers to provide more of the affordable housing the city so badly needs. At times the government’s been giving the impression of throwing mud at a wall to see what sticks.

Trying to square the circle is new planning minister,Paul Scully,who tells theHerald “the size of the task in front of me is not lost on me,by any stretch of the imagination”.

Scully is under pressure from an increasingly impatient Minns to make rapid progress on housing affordability and housing supply as rising rents,interest rates and house prices exert a three-way squeeze on Sydneysiders trying to find or keep a roof over their heads. The state is currently projected to have a shortfall of at least 134,000 dwellings over the next five years.

Scully denies that the Appin extension weakens the sincerity of the government’s anti-sprawl rhetoric.

“The south-west growth area has been a growth area for a long time,” he insists. “Our approach is,it’s not up exclusively,it’s not out exclusively,but its recognition that there’s a point at which we just simply can’t go out for ever more.”

A scion of the Labor right faction,Scully came into the job already well known to the property industry,having been the opposition planning spokesman for two years prior to the March election.

Pragmatic and personable,though overly cautious in the eyes of some colleagues,the 48-year-old is seen as unflashy but solid,“one of the hopes of the side”,in the words of former Labor leader Luke Foley,who backed him to run in the seat of Wollongong when the party was facing a difficult byelection there in late 2016.

Born and bred in the “Gong”,and married to the local federal MP Alison Byrnes,Scully is the first of his family to finish school and university,earning degrees in commerce and management.

His truck driver father and cleaner mother showed an entrepreneurial streak,eventually setting up a successful airport transfer business,a useful touchstone for Scully when he found himself later working in the office of then federal minister Craig Emerson,looking after small business and the service economy.

After a succession of political staffing jobs,Scully moved to the University Wollongong,where he became chief operating officer for its Institute for Innovative Materials,a role that’s left him with a lasting interest in sustainable building research.

Scully had the ears of Sydney property developers pricking up when he told them in a recent speech:“You may have noted we were the first Opposition in NSW in a long time – perhaps ever – who did not take a strong anti-development campaign to the election.” The government was rolling out the welcome mat. But the honeymoon hasn’t lasted long.

On June 15,Scully,Minns and Housing and Homelessness minister Rose Jacksonannounced that new housing developments valued at over $75 million would be awarded a highly lucrative 30 per cent “bonus” in height,and in floor to space ratio,if they allocated 15 per cent of the project to affordable housing.

As an added incentive,developers who signed up to the scheme would be able to access the fast-track State Significant Development pathway,allowing them (or so they thought) to bypass a number of key local planning controls. However,the policy,which hadn’t been taken to the election,had only been worked out in broad brush strokes when it was announced.

“Affordable” housing is defined by the Department of Planning as “housing that is appropriate for the needs of a range of very low to moderate income households and priced so these households are also able to meet other basic living costs”. Generally,that means rents set at 20 to 25 per cent below the prevailing market,although other metrics are also used.

Governments value affordable housing as one tool to keep lower-paid workers living closer to their jobs.

Scully’s announcement of the 30 per cent bonus scheme initially won a rapturous response from the Urban Taskforce,a big developer lobby group,which historically has close ties to Labor. Its chief executive,Tom Forrest,is a former chief of staff to onetime Labor premier Morris Iemma while its head of policy,Stephen Fenn,is married to former Labor leader Jodi McKay. Scully’s current chief of staff,Paul Levins,was a taskforce vice president when he worked in the building industry in 2005.

Forrest told theHerald two weeks ago that the incentive scheme was “a tremendous relief because finally the development sector felt like it had been listened to. We’d been saying ‘we can’t just put affordable housing into existing approved heights and densities became it made them unfeasible to develop at all. The minister heard that message”.

However,as the taskforce has extracted more detail from the planning department as to how it will work in practice,the developers’ lobby has grown increasingly unhappy.

Forrest says while it had been promised that the bonus scheme would allow developers to override existing height and density provisions in local environment plans,it now looked as though other controls – relating to solar access,building setbacks,and overshadowing,for example – would remain in place.

That,he says,would give councils the tools to whittle down the 30 per cent height bonus while the 15 per cent affordable housing obligation would not diminish.

“The practical writing of the policy is eating away at the intent of the government,” complains Forrest,who says affordable housing is more expensive to build because of more rigorous design requirements (such as extra wide hallways for disabled access).

Meanwhile,the policy is also coming under attack from a number of councils,architects and planners who warn it could trash neighbourhoods suddenly facing a potential but unplanned-for 30 per cent increase in demand on local amenities.

“Increased height and density should go hand in hand with a whole lot of planning to make sure that the sites can handle it,that 30 per cent more people can get onto buses,30 per cent more kids can get into local schools,and 30 per cent more dogs pooping in the local park can be accommodated,” says van den Nouwelant. “The approach of giving the uplift now and hoping that at point someone else will pick up the pieces is problematic.”

Fairfield council mayor Frank Carbone,who met with Minns this week,says his council has already put two years of work into methodically planning density around train stations. “You can’t put 30 per cent on top of something that’s already been maxed out 100 per cent.”

The general manager of the Hills council,Michael Edgar, labels the policy “a knee-jerk reaction that will lead to poor liveability outcomes. If you think housing crisis going to be solved by a silver bullet like this,it’s not going to work”.

Other critics take aim at the fact that additional affordable housing units brought on stream under the scheme would only need be held for 15 years,after which they could be returned to the general market.

The Australian Institute of Architects says the scheme risks becoming a “15-year developer slush fund” unless the affording housing component is kept in perpetuity,and managed by not-for-profits.

In the escalating war of words Scully has found one enthusiastic ally – the community housing sector,which provides and manages affordable housing.

“I congratulate Mr Scully on the policy,” says Andrew McAnulty,the chief executive of one of the largest community housing providers,Link Wentworth. “Previous policies only yielded tiny numbers of homes and took years … if this proposal works out to be a little too generous[to developers],it can be refined later. It’s better to be bold and see how it works than not do anything.”

The head of the NSW community housing industry association,Mark Degotardi,is more cautiously welcoming,adding twin caveats. First, he says,there must be a watchdog to ensure that housing delivered as affordable is actually used in that way. Second,he’s concerned about the potential for units to be taken out of the scheme after 15 years.

Adding to Scully’s mounting challenges is the fact that he’s facing a rearguard action from some councils and developers against the government’s new broad-based Housing and Productivity Contribution scheme,which will apply a fixed dollar levy on new builds after October 1 across Greater Sydney,the Illawarra-Shoalhaven region,Lower Hunter and the Central Coast (with exemptions for social and affordable housing,and knock-down/rebuilds).

Carbone calls it a “Minns tax” and claims the burden will fall disproportionately on western Sydney,where it will “have to be paid by every first home buyer purchasing a land and home package”.

Scully disputes this and says the impost will fall on developers,not home-buyers. He badges it a reform of existing infrastructure levies,promising it will mean faster delivery of schools,health services,roads and open spaces to address “one of the most frequent criticisms I hear about housing growth”.

There are more turbulent waters ahead as he develops an “infill” strategy to achieve greater housing density in already established precincts and suburbs.

Scully says he was “pretty surprised to learn that about 85 per cent of lots in low density zoning can’t do townhouses or manor houses ... That’s a little over 1.3 million lots. If you were able to get just 5 per cent of those activated,that[meets] about 20 per cent of the housing task we have to do”. But he says he wants to work with councils on this rather than strongarm them.

Foley makes the pertinent observation that Scully’s seat being in the Illawarra means “he does not carry as much baggage when it comes to Sydney’s development wars – it’s hard to hold an electorate in metropolitan Sydney and not be dragged into local development fights”.

John Brockhoff,from the Planning Institute of Australia,warns that “all the major renewal we will be doing from now on is where people already live. We can’t do dumbed-down versions of intensification … it can’t just be about numbers of dwellings,it’s about how those dwellings create a place that is worth living in”.

To that end,there’s a powerfully held view among architects,planners and urban designers that Scully should look to revive key parts of a grand project that Rob Stokes was in the process of bedding down before his time in the portfolio was cut short in late 2021,after Gladys Berejiklian’s resignation.

That project,known as the Design and Place SEPP,or State Environment Planning Policy,was the product of extensive consultation by Stokes and his team,to bring together a suite of improved design principles for apartments and for urban precincts,new and established.

It included,says Brockhoff,a whole section on urban design,“how you lay out a precinct,how you have enough space for trees and walking and what not,how you ensure that collectively the buildings don’t add to the climate problem we’ve got”.

Stokes’s plan to mandate lighter-coloured roofs in new estates like Marsden Park formed a part of the package,as did another initiative he was pursuing to ban gas connections to new housing subdivisions. That latter step,adopted by Victorian Premier Dan Andrews last month,has already been ruled out by Minns.

Tone Wheeler,president of the Australian Architecture Association,agrees with Scully that there is not enough zoning of medium density redevelopment in Sydney,of the kind he calls “low and close,which is three to six storeys,apartments and townhouses where you can still get the balconies and the gardens and the play spaces”,rather than high-rise buildings “which are greatly damaging to the urban fabric”.

Scully says the government’s own development agency,Landcom,will be given an enhanced role in coming months as “we get it to look at how they might do some of the infill work that needs to be done”.

But he warns:“There is no one housing type,or one housing tenure that’s going to solve the problem. It’s going to take all of us,the proponents,financiers,planning system and communities to share that responsibility”,He pledges that “we have made it clear as a government that we don’t want rubbish built”.

Thus far he’s holding the line in negotiations with the Urban Taskforce over the affordable housing incentive scheme.

At an awards night Thursday a week ago he told the industry “don’t build crap”,citing a survey that showed two thirds of apartment owners would not buy off the plan again because of concerns about defects.

“Of course,you have to make a return,but don’t let that become a singular pursuit that overtakes quality,reputation and our collective responsibility to do the right thing:to provide housing for those that need it;[and] to do it in a way that brings existing residents with us.”

“Fight for your members’ interests,I accept that,but do it sensibly” he says. “I would prefer that it wouldn’t happen through the media. I really hope that given the situation we are in … that people come to the table with a positive and delivery-oriented attitude.”

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