Community fights pro-developer housing plan for Sydney’s inner west
Community members in Sydney’s Inner West are furious at the local council’s proposed “Fairer Future Plan”. The plan is anything but fair. It is a massive handout to developers, aimed at building expensive high-density housing, which will only worsen the Inner West’s housing crisis. Hundreds have mobilised against the plan over the past few months, culminating in a 200-person protest at a council meeting on 22 September.
Opposition to the plan is being driven by the Better Future Coalition, a group of community activists and organisations including NSW Socialists and Action for Public Housing. The Labor-dominated council dodged community anger on Monday night by refusing to allow hundreds of people in and stacking the start of the hours-long meeting with Labor Party stooges (including paid ALP staffers) and pro-developer “YIMBYs” (“yes” in my backyard). A few developers showed up to ask for the right to build even higher apartment complexes, and their concerns were immediately noted by council members.
Mayor Darcy Byrne is pitching his plan as a solution to the housing crisis. His supporters repeated the argument in the council meeting. The housing crisis, they say, is caused by a lack of supply, so the only solution is to build. But this is a myth. There are roughly 8,000 empty homes in the Inner West, according to the 2021 census. The Australia Institute reported in March that the construction of new dwellings has outpaced population growth for the past ten years. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are almost 1 million more residential properties in Australia than there are households.
The housing crisis is a crisis of affordability, not a lack of houses. The Inner West Council’s plan will only exacerbate that crisis. Replacing lower-cost rentals with luxury apartments will affect all prices in the area, putting upward pressure on existing house and rental prices, and pricing many people out of the Inner West. This is a plan for gentrification, not a “fairer future”.
In a slap in the face to the community, and despite thousands of submissions demanding more affordable housing, the council revised its original promise of 5 percent affordable housing down to just 2 percent. “Affordable housing” in this context is something of a misnomer, as it would be priced at 80 percent of the current market rent, which was $700 as of December 2024.
Tellingly, the plan will not build any public housing. Meanwhile, in Waterloo, Glebe and Banksia, the Chris Minns state Labor government is busy tearing down what little public housing does exist.
The Fairer Future Plan contains no provision for new green and community spaces, despite promising to increase the population by upwards of 70,000 people. There is no thought put into the increased need for public transport and schools. The plan will create a developer bonanza in the Inner West, not deliver services to the community.
Mayor Byrne has tried to dodge blame by pointing to the state housing targets set by the Minns government. But his council, a bastion of the ALP, is reaching for double the targets for the Inner West, from 15,000 to 31,000 new dwellings. Byrne, Minns and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are all part of the same rotten party with the same neoliberal approach to housing.
In fact, the council’s plan is a continuation of the Minns state government’s attempt to boost the profits of developers across the state. In the 2025 NSW budget, Treasurer Daniel Mookhey announced that the government would guarantee developers’ profits by buying apartments if they can’t pre-sell enough of them. As Martin Barker put it in Red Flag in July, “They can build overpriced apartments in developments so risky even the banks wouldn’t fund them, secure in the knowledge that the government will bail them out if they can’t find buyers at the price and profit margin that they want”.
The details of what will be built and how will largely be left up to developers. Some fear that developers will drip-feed the release of dwellings onto the market to avoid a glut that could lower prices. This habit of “land banking”, getting development approval to increase the value of land without delivering new dwellings, is already widespread. The Daily Telegraph reported in February 2024 that “almost one billion dollars’ worth of housing in one of Sydney’s most affordable local government areas is yet to be built despite the DAs being approved up to five years ago”. There is nothing in Labor’s plan to prevent developers from playing these games to boost their profits. In fact, the plan encourages it.
How convenient that Labor’s solution to the housing crisis doesn’t challenge developers, investors and banks but instead makes them richer. Real solutions would require a departure from decades of government policy and a fight against the wealthy elites who benefit from the commodification of housing. It would require that every level of government build public housing, end tax concessions to investors, requisition empty homes and cap rents.
NSW Socialists and the Better Future Coalition will continue to fight this neoliberal development plan. The next big event will be a protest against the council vote on the plan on 30 September. The Inner West doesn’t need a plan that is purpose-built for developers; we need one purpose-built for ordinary people.
