In this Sydney suburb,one in three homes is empty. It’s not just a data error

There are 164,624 empty homes in Sydney,yet we have a five-figure waiting list for public housing. In the latest in our Unseen Sydney series,experts say solving the city’s housing crisis will not be simple.

One-third of homes in Millers Point were empty on census night.

One-third of homes in Millers Point were empty on census night.Wolter Peeters

Barney Gardner watched as his once-bustling,working-class suburb of Millers Point was turned into extravagantly renovated townhouses and rows of empty holiday homes.

“Just about all of them are Airbnb because they were turned into one- bedrooms,and there are still quite a lot of empty properties that have been sold,and the people haven’t done anything with them,” Gardner said.

The harbourside enclave,which was once known for its social housing,has become the Sydney suburb with the highest proportion of unoccupied dwellings,with 34 per cent of its homes empty on the most recent census night.

It’s one of the suburbs contributing to the 164,624 empty homes across Greater Sydney.

There are 164,624 empty homes in Sydney,yet we have a five-figure waiting list for public housing. Solving our housing crisis,however,is not so simple,experts say.

The unoccupied rates of some places,such as Copacabana,The Entrance and Avoca (28 per cent),are easily explained by the high proportion of holiday homes. And unusually high vacancy in Kensington (18 per cent) and Glebe (14 per cent) might be explained by the absence of foreign students during lockdowns in 2021. But that’s not a one-size-fits-all explanation.

North Parramatta – in the heart of Sydney suburbia where the median three-bedroom house price is $1.06 million – had a relatively high 16 per cent of homes unoccupied on census night. Raine&Horne Parramatta senior property manager Rachael Barr has a theory about why.

“North Parramatta got hit especially hard because of COVID but also the construction of the light rail around that area,” she said. “Coming down O’Connell Street every day,there was just a lot of traffic and roads were closed.”

While the light rail is still being completed,Barr has seen demand for homes across the suburb recover recently.

“We had trouble even getting people into units last year because half the roads were closed,” Barr said. “But it’s starting to clear up in that area. Buses aren’t limited by road closures and demand for homes has gone back up. It’s actually better now than it was pre-COVID.”

Barney Gardner sits outside the home he lived in for most of his life,which is now being sold once again.

Barney Gardner sits outside the home he lived in for most of his life,which is now being sold once again.Steven Siewert

Emma Baker,a professor of housing research at the University of Adelaide,said the number of empty homes across Greater Sydney was at least partially a reflection of the “haphazard” way that Australia collects housing data. “Not many of the empty houses are genuinely just sitting there waiting for someone to come and live in them,” she said.

“The census was conducted on a cold winter’s night so a lot of the empty houses would have been holiday homes in places where no one bothered to respond to the census.”

Of the approximately 9 million homes in Australia,about 1 million did not return a census form.

Sydney’s rental vacancy rate hit an all-time low of 1.1 per cent in September 2022,improving fractionally to 1.3 per cent in December. Amid this rental crisis,UNSW professor Hal Pawson said expanding a program where developers are forced to include a portion of affordable housing in their developments or pay a levy,called inclusionary zoning,could be key to keeping low-income people in the city.

The levy would then go towards the construction of housing.

Developments in Pyrmont,Ultimo and Green Square have had similar schemes in place since the mid-90s. The state government approved an inclusionary zoning scheme in the City of Sydney in 2021 that requires developers to commit three per cent of new residential buildings to affordable housing. But in 2020,the state government rejected an application by the City of Ryde to apply inclusionary zoning rules.

Pawson,the associate director of the City Futures Research Centre,said it was “egregious” the scheme hadn’t been expanded to more areas.

“It’s really pretty shameful that the government,particularly in a city where land is so valuable,has failed to utilise this method of generating funding for affordable housing at no cost to government.”

The state’s strategies to boost broad housing stock have long been on a collision course with local government. In the 1990s it was objections to dual occupancy laws. In 2017-18,then planning minister Rob Stokes’ “missing middle” policy – to allow homeowners to subdivide their properties and build more medium density in suburban areas - was met with requests from at least nine councils to delay the new rules applying to their LGAs.

By 2021,19 of 33 Sydney councils did not meet the target for homes to be built in the preceding five years,theHerald reported last year.

Committee for Sydney chief executive Gabriel Metcalf told theHerald in April 2022 that boosting supply was part of the solution to the city’s housing affordability crisis.

“Building more sprawl at the edge of Sydney is not the right answer,” he said. “It puts people far from jobs,locks them into long commutes,and forces those households to spend huge amounts of money on transport.”

Commuting is clearly not a drawback in Millers Point,where the median dwelling price is just under $2.1 million and median weekly rent is $1,056,according to data from CoreLogic.

In the 1960s,when Barney Gardner and partner Glenda Cox grew up blocks away from each other,boys followed their dads onto the maritime wharves and public housing was handed down through generations. The wharfies have gone,but Gardner and Cox were among a handful of residents who were allowed to stay.

After the state government announced in 2014 it would sell off its inner-city housing in a bid to fund additional public housing elsewhere,Gardner and Cox spent the next several years watching the “brutal and rapid expulsion of people who had lived here their whole lives”.

Barney Gardner in his home in 2014.

Barney Gardner in his home in 2014.Tamara Dean

In total,1749 units have been built and 149 are under construction as a direct result of the Millers Point sales,a Department of Planning and Environment spokesperson said.

These new projects have helped reduce the social housing waiting list,which went from 59,354 in June 2014 to 57,550 in June 2022. That’s amid a population increase of more than 700,000 people in NSW. However,the number of priority applicants has risen 11.3 per cent in the same time.

TheHerald put questions about housing and social housing to Planning Minister Anthony Roberts. Roberts referred theHerald to the department and declined to comment.

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Angus Dalton is a science reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Billie Eder is a sports reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Millie Muroi is a business reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She covers banks,financial services and markets,and writes opinion pieces with a focus on economics.

Anthony Segaert is a reporter covering urban affairs at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Angus Thomson is a reporter covering health at the Sydney Morning Herald.

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