With the NSW Election to be held later this month, the backlash against Sydney’s hyper immigration-driven population growth and over-development continues to grow.
Last week, The Guardian visited marginal seats in Sydney’s outer-suburbs, where residents are angry about congestion and rampant over-development, and are sick and tired of politicians’ hollow promises to address the problems:
…everywhere voters are united in their anger about the traffic on Sydney’s roads and the lack of public transport that forces people into their cars for a long and infuriating commute to work, to school, to anywhere…
One longtime resident of Padstow, Ken Tyrell, summed up his discontent at change in East Hills, as he waited for his fish and chips at the local shop.
“It was a pretty good suburb, Revesby,” he says. “Even 20 years ago. I loved the place, but I have seen it degraded. It’s now unliveable, it’s overpowering,” he says. Tyrell believes the issue underlying it is overpopulation…
Infrastructure is under stress. Schools have demountable classrooms, the trains are full and the main roads congested… And then there is the issue of cost of living: tolls, electricity bills and rising house prices…
Anger is also building in inner-Sydney where high-rise development is running riot:
About 7500 homes for more than 14,000 residents are planned for towers up to 40 storeys high on the Waterloo public housing estate… This would make the area roughly double the density of two of Sydney’s most built-up suburbs, Rhodes and Zetland…
Lord mayor Clover Moore said the plans set “an incredibly poor precedent” and were an “experiment in overdevelopment with the most marginalised people in our community”…
“It’s almost impossible to find anywhere on earth a government has proactively planned to build a development as dense as what this government is planning for Waterloo”…
Welcome to the future Sydney ghetto, Cr Moore. This future is all but baked-in as Sydney’s population surges and detached housing blocks are steamrolled in favour of high-rise apartments:
No matter what Sydney does – whether it builds up or out – liveability will be crushed, with Infrastructure Australia projecting worsening traffic congestion, as well as reduced access to jobs, schools, hospitals and open space as the city’s population balloons to 7.4 million by 2046:
There’s only one ‘solution’ to Sydney’s overdevelopment: slash immigration and prevent the city’s population from balloning:
Anything else is fiddling while liveability burns.
