Sydney City Council’s proposal to impose a tax on new homes will make housing in the city
less affordable, unfairly burdening owner-occupiers to subsidise those who are renting, says the lobby group Urban Taskforce.
The city’s draft “affordable housing” strategy argues for an extra 8,000 new properties to be built over the next 20 years. Rents will be capped and regulated by the government. Of
these, 2,000 properties are to be paid for by a levy on newly-built homes and as much as $900 million may need to be raised by this new tax.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Aaron Gadiel, the taskforce’s CEO, said. “You can’t create thousands of new homes with subsidised rental unless someone is paying for them — and the council wants owner occupiers to bear this burden.”
Gadiel was disappointed that the Council had ruled out the option of allowing
developers to build more affordable housing on a commercial basis.
The Council’s draft strategy expressly excludes studio apartments from its definition of
affordable housing.
“The Council’s own planning restrictions are a major barrier to the construction of new more affordable housing,” Mr Gadiel said.
The City of Sydney restricts the supply of housing by prohibiting the development of compact, high amenity urban communities. It also imposes high cost additional building requirements above those mandated by the Building Code of Australia.
Last year an Australian Building Codes Board study revealed that council planning regulations increase the cost of building homes by up to 14 per cent, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the prices of new houses and apartments.
