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While sitting in Parramatta Square listening to local students perform at lunchtime, or enjoying the midwinter festival after work, one could be forgiven for forgetting the birth of the city’s second CBD was long and painful.
Yet by 2022 the long-promised office towers had arrived, bringing to fruition a vision that was decades in the making.
Now Parramatta faces a new tussle: despite being one of Sydney’s best-performing councils in approving new housing, the Housing Delivery Authority is green-lighting more homes. This puts it at odds with the council, which wants to ensure its commercial district also flourishes and grows.
Parramatta is not a NIMBY council pushing new housing elsewhere. It is a council responsible for maintaining and growing what is a pleasant, vibrant CBD – which is only going to be better when the Metro West opens in 2032.
In a paper released last week, Building a City Worth Living In, Lord Mayor Martin Zaiter and his council make the case that the additional potential housing imposed by the Housing Delivery Authority (HDA) threatens to make the city unlivable.
At present, a child attending Parramatta Public School can move on to Arthur Phillip High across the road, then cross one more road to go to Western Sydney University. From any parent or student’s perspective, that is the definition of liveable. But what happens when population growth exceeds the capacity of the schools?
Zaiter says the additional scale imposed by the potential dwellings fast-tracked by the HDA means the city would need five additional schools, among other infrastructure.
“We’re carrying our weight on housing and believe that warrants a seat at the table when planning for our city’s future,” he said.
Zaiter and his fellow councillors are worth hearing out. Chiefly, they want to work with the HDA to provide housing, including legitimate affordable housing, infrastructure and jobs.
The Minns government has rightly wielded several sticks – the HDA, the low- to mid-rise policy and the transport-oriented development policy – to make councils come to the table on housing. It has successfully done so with some of the most recalcitrant councils in Sydney.
But not every council needed the stick. Parramatta is, after all, the council that sold off the land on which Sydney’s favourite putt-putt course stood for almost 50 years until a decade ago. Now thousands of people live in homes on the Melrose Park estate.
Housing activist Justin Simon from Sydney YIMBY says: “The best thing that councils can do is create good public space … for people to be, and then let them decide what they want to do with the rest.”
That is what they elect councillors for, and this is the challenge facing those councillors.
Now that Parramatta truly has an expertly planned and established CBD, it’s not so simple to start confining its footprint without room for commercial growth. Of course Sydney needs housing. But balance is important; it needs jobs, too.
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