Alan Davies, Crikey's Transport and Urban Development Consult and Urbanist blogger has pointed to the elephant in the room, small councils hold up unit devopments exacerbating the affordable housing problem in Sydney.
This is a extract from an excellent article.
"There are a number of potential benefits from amalgamating Councils. One is economies of scale in management and in providing services that benefit little from highly-localised administration e.g. rubbish collection, recycling, pet registration.
With fewer Councils there’d also be fewer border problems where Councils adjoin. There’d be better coordination of policies and operations acropolitan-scale implications of planning and heritage decisions.
The ability of residents to improve the value of their properties by suppressing multi-unit developments in their neighbourhood would likely be weakened if Councils were larger. At present, resident opposition to development has a deleterious effect on housing affordability in established suburbs.
But that also highlights one of the disadvantages of amalgamation; it would weaken local representation and increase the distance between residents and those making decisions about their neighbourhood.
A larger Council would spread the benefits of a key revenue source like CBD businesses across a larger population rather than spending disproportionately on gold-plated facilities for a relatively small number of residents."
Government have already taken some steps to take Council out of the process for approving larger scale unit development with planning approval powers for $20M developments now lying with Joint Regional Planning Panels.
A prime example of a council going slow is Mosman Council, which is not supporting its own master plan for Spit Junction despite this long overdue urban renewal project being right next to the council chambers. There just seems to be no political will at the Council to provide the necessary leadership.
http://www.mosman.nsw.gov.au/planning/spitjunction
Submissions can be made on the final recommendations of the Panel and Taskforce and the next steps for local government reform. Reports are here.
No comments:
Post a Comment