The Minns government will tie hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for key local infrastructure including schools and hospitals to councils that build more houses, as it dangles new incentives for areas which meet and beat new five-year housing targets.
Premier Chris Minns will on Wednesday unveil the NSW government’s long-awaited housing targets meant to spur new development across 43 local government areas spanning Greater Sydney, the Central Coast, the Hunter and the Illawarra over the next five years.
The government will reward councils that take on more development. Pictured is the riverside suburb of Rhodes at sunset.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Seen as crucial to meeting the government’s commitments under the National Housing Accord, the premier will reveal the targets during a speech in Sydney in which he will also dangle hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure funding to councils that meet and exceed them.
Minns will reveal the government has set aside $200 million in the budget in grants funding for councils to spend on local infrastructure such as green space, sporting fields and fixing potholes if they meet their targets.
But he will also promise to use funds from developer contributions paid to the state government on major new infrastructure such as schools and hospitals in areas where there are significant increases in density as a result of meeting housing targets.
Minns will tell an event held by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia that meeting and beating the housing targets will automatically translate to greater funding support, saying there will be “additional incentives” for councils that “meet their performance targets”.
“Meaning that the parts of Sydney which drive more development will also receive more funding for schools, hospitals and roads,” he will say.
Last year The Sydney Morning Herald revealed the government had received draft recommendations from the Greater Cities Commission which envisaged an area stretching from the eastern suburbs to Burwood building 92,000 new homes over the next five years.
But it rejected those recommendations because it viewed the targets as not sufficiently ambitious in some parts of the city.