The latest from Sydney

Looks like Australians have the same ideologues and true believers we have here.  Notice the one-sided view of the suburban-urban divide:  suburbs are all bad and urban areas are all good.  That should be a huge red flag that this is propaganda, not fact.   

Hi SOS Members and Friends

Chris Johnson, chief executive of the Urban Taskforce (see below), had an opinion piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he looks forward to half the dwellings in Sydney being units.   He quotes a reference which compares home owners to locusts, “being clearly predatory and maximising individual gain”.

Of course this is not the predominant motive for people purchasing single-residential homes.  Home ownership provides security and the preferred environment for people trying to carve out a decent life for themselves and bring up a young family. They can enjoy the benefits of Australia being blessed with a sunny climate and enough space to enable people to enjoy a relaxed free lifestyle.

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Today the paper printed the attached letter from me in reply.

Regards

Tony Recsei

President

City of two halves: how Sydneysiders will split into house or apartment living

Date

February 5, 2015

Chris Johnson

 Sydney has sprawled close to its natural limits and must now look up. Photo: Jessica Shapiro

Sydney is in an apartment boom that is restructuring the form and character of the city. At the 2011 census, 25.8 per cent of Sydney's 1,660,000 homes were urban apartments according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The swing to apartment living has increased since the census, with 70 per cent of housing approvals being for apartments. At this rate Sydney will become half apartments and half suburban houses in the next 40 years or so. There will be two characters to Sydney's built form and there will be two different ways of living.

Sydney leads the country in density according to another ABS survey. The Australian Population Grid divided the whole of Australia into one kilometre squares and measured the density of each square. The densest level measured by the survey is land with more than 8000 people per square kilometre.  In Sydney, 21 square kilometres of the city fitted this category. Melbourne had only one square kilometre in the densest category, and nowhere else rated. We still have a fair way to go by global standards, as London has 327 square kilometres at this density.

The obvious solution to housing this increasing population is to increase densities where people want to live and this is generally around railway stations and close to work opportunities.  

So Sydney, as Australia's global city, leads the way on density - as it does with the move to apartments. But why is this happening? The city is reaching the limits of its horizontal spread as the distant suburbs reach the ring of national parks that contain the Sydney basin. The city can't keep spreading as this forces longer and longer travel times, yet our population continues to increase.

The two different lifestyles that are evolving in Sydney relate to the type of dwelling you live in. One dwelling type, the suburban house, represents the Australian dream of a self-contained house with its own front and back garden,  garage, swimming pool, a home cinema and an exercise room. The State of Australian Cities Report 2012 said the average size of the Australian house was 240 square metres. You own everything you and your family could possibly want (well ownership may be a exaggeration - it is highly likely that the bank with its mortgage will share your ownership).

The other dwelling type is the apartment, with an average size half that of the house (120 square metres), where you share the gardens, swimming pools, cinemas and gymnasiums. The facilities consumers want are still there but it is access rather than ownership that drives this group. A good example is the Central Park apartments on Broadway - recently named the best high-rise building in the world. Here there are a number of shared swimming pools, there is a shared car pool in the basement with 50 cars, so you can choose a different car each week and of course there are restaurants, supermarkets, art galleries, and health centres all within a few minutes walk.

Read more at:  City of two halves

Letter to Editor

Developer the locust

Chris Johnson insults home owners with his reference likening them to locusts ("City of two halves: how Sydneysiders will split into house or apartment living", February 6).

This tag applies much more appropriately to swarms of developers striving to eat their way into single-residential suburbs.  Developers, whom he represents, strip communities of attractive homes with their flowers and foliage, replacing them with grey skeletons of concrete and asphalt.  Rather than home owners it is these developers that warrant the description of "being clearly predatory and maximizing individual gain".

World-wide evidence shows that high-density results in stifling traffic congestion, longer travel times to work, overloaded infrastructure, environmental unsustainability, unaffordable housing, lack of housing choice and destruction of heritage.  Why do we need to endure these deprivations for the benefit of locusts?

Tony Recsel, Warrawee