Sydney must be in America

Smart Growth:  It's an ideological disease that's causing a pandemic across the globe.

It's rather amazing to me even now, that all these countries all over the world are using the same Playbook for urban planning - as if every place and every culture were the same, and people of diverse backgrounds and religious beliefs have the same needs and desires.  In some ways this is true - we all desire self-determination, in our government and individual choices of how we live.  Smart Growth is taking that away from us.

How does this happen?  How do planners from places as disparate and distant such as Lake Oswego, and Detroit, and Canada, Australia, South Africa, Great Britain, Holland and more, get caught up in the same urban planning?

Read this White Paper from Australia, "Department of Planning and Infrastructure: New Metropolitan Strategy - Sydney Over the Next 20 Years," by Tony Recsei of Save Our Suburbs (SOS).   The issues and problems discussed could have come from Lake Oswego or any suburban or small town in America.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In its current Metropolitan Strategy the Government of New South Wales sees highly prescriptive planning policies based on higher population densities as the solution to housing a population increase. These policies take little account of peoples’ preferences. This practice conforms with current planning ideology. Such policies are variously euphemistically termed “smart growth”, “urban consolidation” or more recently “urban renewal”. They are characterised by highly restrictive land regulation.

These high-density policies are proving to have deleterious effects on the cost of housing, on people and the environment. The general public has not yet comprehended how tight the link is between such restrictive planning policies and the increasing prevalence of these community problems.

However, developers of high-density dwellings are likely to benefit from these policies due to the greater number of these structures that have to be built and the higher prices they can command due to the overall housing shortage the policies cause.

The proponents of current restrictive planning policies have provided no evidence that these policies will be beneficial. The well being of the people of New South Wales is being threatened by these state land planning policies that have become increasingly focussed on minimising current expenditure to the detriment of future sustainability and on an ideological agenda that is bereft of evidential substantiation. These policies are imposed on unwilling communities. There is also a lack of coordination between state and federal governments. The result will have long-term adverse consequences.

It is essential that a new metropolitan strategy be evidence-based and fully take into account the multiple requirements for housing in New South Wales.