How the population ponzi ate Sydney’s green belt

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By Leith van Onselen

Last week, ABC News published an interesting article on how Australia’s post-war immigration drive chewed-up Sydney’s planned ‘Green Belt’:

A “visionary and radical” plan to protect a swathe of Sydney’s bush and farmland in the 1950s failed because of an unexpected population boom and pressure on development after World War II, experts say.

The ‘Green Belt’, designed to restrict urban sprawl, was part of a vision for a comprehensive and coordinated town plan for metropolitan Sydney…

The plan was the first post-war metropolitan plan in Australia and has been described as “visionary and radical” by many who have studied it.

The problem was no-one foresaw the extent of pressure on housing because of the post-war baby boom and explosion in immigration.

Architect and town planner from Cox Architecture, Bob Meyer, says the County Council’s population growth projections were very wrong.

“The County of Cumberland’s population estimate was dramatically underestimated, because the 2.25 million that they projected by 1981, was reached in 1961, 20 years ahead of their projection,” he said.

“Between 1947 and 1971 Sydney’s population increased by 1.3 million, more than twice the number predicted by the Cumberland Plan,” authors Peter Spearritt and Christine DeMarco said in their book “Planning Sydney’s future”…

Most of the land in the Green Belt was privately owned and land prices were going up due to an extraordinary demand for housing blocks, which worried the state government…

“The Green Belt was holding up development and causing a shortage in land and prices were rising rapidly because of the shortage of land so something had to give,” he said…

Gradually the Cumberland County Council was forced to release more and more land in the Green Belt during the 1950s until it was abolished in 1963 and replaced by a state planning authority.

The more things change the more they stay the same. While Sydney’s Green Belt may have disappeared, concern has now shifted to protecting the city’s food bowl, with the University of Technology Sydney last year warning that Sydney risks losing 90% of its current fresh vegetable production as immigration-fuelled development encroaches on farmland.

The fact of the matter is that as long as the federal government maintains its mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy, then Sydney will have to keep on increasing its urban footprint (as well as building-up) in order to accommodate the millions of extra people.

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It’s not like residents aren’t already being crammed into shoe box apartments, which have become by far the dominant form of new housing in Sydney to cater for this growth:

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With Sydney projected to morph into a high-rise ‘battery chook’ city mid-century:

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So, if you are an environmentalist concerned about urban sprawl and the loss of green space, then lobby to slash immigration. But whatever you do, don’t use it as a fig leaf to further restrict urban land supply and further push-up the cost (and reduce the quality) of housing, which is already at deplorable levels.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.