0°C | Tuesday April 29, 2025 
10 September 2024
By Hannah Wilcox
Young people are increasingly frustrated as the prospect of owning a home in the area where they grew up or wish to live and work becomes increasingly out of reach. This widespread concern has led to the formation of YIMBY, a grassroots advocacy group campaigning for greater housing availability in Sydney.
While the group has achieved notable success in Sydney’s Inner West, its message is also gaining traction in North Sydney. This momentum is driven by frustration with local politics that, despite expressing support for more affordable housing, consistently rejects specific development applications that would boost supply.
The council also oversees the second-slowest DA process in Greater Sydney. The North Sydney Sun sat down with four local residents who identify with the YIMBY movement to hear their perspectives and commit their views to print in order for the incoming council to understand their hopes and concerns.
“I feel like my generation is disenfranchised,” said Josh Morgan of McMahons Point. “I think just having YIMBY is just a symptom of people beginning to come together and organise. This is because we’re not high income earners yet – we don’t own much property here or physical space.”
Without the construction of affordable housing, many would not be able to take advantage of what the area has to offer.
Morgan added: “It’s really important that we get some platforming. I think from a local perspective here, you could really resign yourself to impossibility as the council is just not going to represent people like me at a young age.”
“I don’t feel like much change is going to come out of the next council elections in short, but it is a first step.”
“If you have a debate where none of the young people arrive at the table because they feel defeated, you don’t get a fair representation of other people in the community. So I think it’s important that you have a group of people that can at least represent the emerging groups in the community.”
He said locals who want to see change aren’t interested in sitting around a table with a Council where “eight out of 10 people are fundamentally against development.”
“It’s not even a negotiation or an interesting discussion from them. It’s just a: ‘get out of our way. You have no idea. You are too young.’”
Morgan asked: “I feel like that’s where the helplessness comes from in these sorts of suburbs. Why, in one of the wealthiest, smartest parts of town, are they unable to solve those fundamental problems?”
Josh Brown of Cammeray agreed, noting there is a clear lack of pro-development representation amongst the Council candidates.
“I think we’re a bit of a voice in the wilderness,” he said. “I think that’s been the case ever since the early 1970s. Development’s been a dirty word. There was a flourish in the late 1960s, early 70s of a few residential towers around the place, but I think Ted Mack and a few other NIMBY mayors clamped down on that and declared a lot of the municipality to be heritage conservation areas.”
Brown added: “I think the local residents are quite happy with that because low density equals scarcity and the property values have skyrocketed in that time.”
“So it’s very hard to preach the YIMBY cause in this area.”
UNAFFORDABLE: St Leonards local David Lee admitted it was unlikely he would be able to stay living in Sydney for the long term. “It’s going to take me too long to buy a place and the amount of money I need to earn is actually too much,” he said.
“I was reading through all the statements from the candidates and each one is going to limit the density in the area, or put a brake on the TOD [project] by the State Government.”
Councils often defend their vetoes on higher value apartment blocks on the grounds they aren’t affordable. This irks the YIMBYs, who say that even building more luxury housing will improve affordability overall through the process of “filtering.”
Brown welcomed Council’s cooperation with the State Government’s housing plan in Crows Nest, but notes that it still backs heritage zones which lack credibility.
“The thing that really irks me about Cammeray is they have heritage listed a lot of early 20th century project homes. They’re nondescript, they’re not architecturally remarkable, and I really can’t understand why they’ve done that,” he said.
“There wouldn’t be many other cities in the world where you’ve preserved early 20th century houses three or four kilometres out from the centre of the city. It’s bizarre, really.”
Morgan believes the big issue lies within the difficulties of developing older, pre-existing buildings.
“From my perspective in particular, we’re in an old building in an old apartment, the quality of it is decreasing and half the residents are quite a bit older,” he explained.
“We’re not even allowed to level a building that’s old and dilapidated, and put in new apartments that are up to modern standards and codes.”
He added: “I think that means the stock that we get to choose from compromises our lifestyles quite a lot. We need more density.”
“A big barrier here is the deliberate downward pressure on approving DAs,” he added.
QUICKER DAS: “If they can come up with a way or a strategy that the community accepts, with more DAs being accepted or moving quicker through the system, that would be good.”
He expressed concern that the community is divided, with some focused on increasing paper wealth whilst putting aside the consequences for economic productivity. “My apartment building is really dilapidated, we can’t agree on improving it because we’re scared that we’ll overinvest and then want to sell it, and then we’ll decrease our margin.”
“What a horrible little spiral to be in, he concluded.
“I think once you have more people in one area, you don’t have to travel as far to get to stuff so you can have more supermarkets, more cinemas,” Lee noted.
Chantal Reid of McMahons Point advocates for medium density housing. “I wouldn’t want to live around high density, I wouldn’t want to live around sky rise. I think that’s part of the problem,” she said.
“I think anyone who wants to live in Sydney, just needs to get out of their head that they have to live in a house to live a good life.”
Reid added: “Look at people who live in London and Paris and all of these other really big cities – so many of them live in apartments. It’s just that they have to be well-designed apartments that are well connected and I think that’s just the most important thing.”
“North Sydney is the perfect place for this, with such a good connection to the CBD and with a lot of green spaces.”
Reid said she supports YIMBY because she felt hopeless about ever owning a home in Sydney.
“I’d be renting for the rest of my life,” she lamented.
“The actual decisions to boost housing don’t seem to be happening fast enough. I don’t think housing is getting the representation that it absolutely deserves given it is severely impacting young people, or anyone who didn’t buy a house 10 to 15 years ago.”