Sydney YIMBY

Great to support another The Daily Telegraph front page story today on the opponents of more housing that are standing at tomorrow's local Council elections. Our friends at Sydney YIMBY have compiled a list of 58 councillors who have pledged to “increase the density” of their council. Chair Justin Simon said anti-development candidates are “prioritising empty nostalgia over building places that kids and grandkids can afford to live”. “They all deny the research, which says supply brings down prices and rents, because they know that saying ‘I have these aesthetic preferences and rents should be 30% higher to maintain them’ doesn’t cut it in polite company anymore,” he said. “There are going to be a lot of candidates who say: ’I support new housing, but,’ and that line of ‘buts’ can get 100 points long. With many of them, you will never get to a yes.” Housing Now chair David Borger said it is “outrageous” that “so many candidates are lining up to block new homes”. “Every delay is pushing another family out.” “We need to make Councils like Bayside a place for everyone, not just for those who already own property and want to keep others out,” he said. The full story - https://lnkd.in/gA9zjt7z

An update on our council candidate debate tomorrow night: we’ve just added Greens candidate for Lord Mayor Sylvie Ellsmore and Cumberland Independent You Wei Chung to the panel. We’ll be grilling each of them on their housing platforms, to help you decide which party to vote for. Register free: https://lnkd.in/gTHXmcM9

Advocacy win! In July we wrote to the minister asking for exactly this outcome. Hopefully Ku-ring-gai will stop wasting everybody’s time now.

It’s 20 days until council elections. We need you to write to your candidates telling them housing will decide your vote. We can then use the responses to figure out who supports density and who’ll bring us four more years of inaction. We’ve made it super easy with our form here: https://lnkd.in/giCWFcXz

“The NIMBYism is poison” Senator Andrew Bragg is absolutely right and the NSW Liberal party need to listen to him! Addressing people’s economic needs when they’re young strongly influences long-term party identification.

Our next big event is a council candidates forum on Thurs Sep 5. We’ve gone to each of the Libs, Labor and Greens to ask for the best housing abundance candidate they’ve got, and the answers were Lyndon Gannon (CoS), Philippa Scott (IWC) and Izabella Antoniou (IWC) respectively. This will be a good opportunity to compare and contrast their approaches to help decide your vote! We also found out one of Sydney’s pre-eminent urbanists David Levinson transport academic and founder of WalkSydney, is running for Bayside so we’ll be exploring his views on how density can complement liveability, and how to get it right. Format will be a moderated panel discussion followed by some Q&A from the audience. When: 7:30pm, Thurs 5 September Where: Henry Carmichael Theatre, Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts (near Town Hall/Gadigal stations) Tickets are free, register today: https://lnkd.in/gTHXmcM9

ADVOCACY WIN: Yesterday the Liberals’ TOD repeal bill came before the Legislative Council and got completely crushed 12-25. This means that we won’t see six storeys around train stations like Gordon and Roseville downzoned back to low density to appease a few loud objectors. Sydney YIMBY was highly active on this bill: we got a bunch of emails sent to MLCs and yesterday had supporters calling the crossbench, some of whom commented that they were fielding a lot of pro-TOD calls. In the end the *entire* crossbench voted with the government. Greens, Libertarians, Shooters, Animal Justice, One Nation and independents, all of them. Thank you to our supporters who took time out of their busy days to make themselves heard on this bill - there’s been a seismic shift in the tenor of the housing debate over the last 18 months and your people power is making that happen.

We’ve spent the last couple of days at the NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association conference. Big thanks to our volunteers who staffed the desk from 7am ‘til close to hear all your stories about how the housing crisis impacts your personal and professional life. As a grassroots org this means we have to rely on annual leave or taking time away from our families but it’s important to hear your stories and link people together who want solutions rather than excuses. In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing some of these stories on our socials. One recurring thing we heard was how much of a waste it is that the government is only allowing 100 homes on this site in Camperdown, just 15 mins walk from RPA. Sign our petition to push them to do better: https://t.co/2i3sS9xFEa

The Abundant Housing Network Australia supports the National Housing and Homelessness Bill with one important proviso: we don’t think it will achieve much. More reports will not sway a political party that fundamentally does not believe non-market housing is desirable or necessary for Australia’s future. For these reasons, we have chosen to focus our submission on what can be done to build capacity within the Australian public service to deliver on the Government’s ambitions to build 1.2 million homes in the next five years. Read the full submission below: https://lnkd.in/gbPJi67G Greater Canberra Greater Brisbane Sydney YIMBY YIMBY Melbourne

This is an excellent takedown of the vacant house myth. Those wielding it are frequently grasping for a solution to the housing crisis which doesn’t lead to any change to the urban environment, but their numbers don’t hold up. We hear crocodile tears from groups like Save Marrickville about negative gearing, capital gains, inclusionary zoning within the existing planning envelopes, vacant homes, immigration, APRA lending policies and a host of other really marginal policies. Anything but an apartment building next door! Housing affordability is, at best, a secondary priority for these groups. They adopt positions on it because they know that if they were honest “we’ll block change even if it pushes prices up because it doesn’t affect us” their enablers would lose plausible deniability. https://lnkd.in/gPS4F4pS