If realized, the population of the Woodville Road corridor would increase by more than 80 percent.
The package of documents endorsed by the council includes a public domain plan for open spaces, trees, street furniture, lighting and public art, to transform the congested thoroughfare into a “boulevard of trees”.
An artist's impression of what Cumberland Council believes the Woodville Road of the future will look like.Credit: Cumberland Council Papers
But can anything make this road habitable? Lake hopes that with a good design, with 10 meter drops from the road, the answer will be yes. “With Sydney the way it is with housing, I think people are looking for homes that are safe and well connected,” he says.
“Woodville Road is a fairly central location, not too far from the main workplaces. If the rents and prices are set at the right level, then I think people will find them attractive that way.”
But not everyone agrees. The issue is divisive even among those leading the YIMBY, or Yes In My Backyard, push for higher housing density in Sydney. A Sydney YIMBY co-founder, Justin Simon, says putting apartments on major roads is poor planning, aimed at minimizing objection from neighbours.
“You can't open the windows at night because it's too noisy. If you have asthma, it ends up being almost a problem,” says Simon. “More housing is better than no housing, but it should be a block back from the main road at least. That means better outcomes for everyone.”
There has already been some development along Woodville Road, but the new controls would allow for much more.Credit: Nick Moir
Business Western Sydney chief executive David Borger, a former Labor housing minister, said it was good to arrange housing density in corridors. The real transformation of Sydney's arterial roads would happen when electric vehicles became mainstream, he said.
Borger, who is also involved in the YIMBY movement and chairs lobby group Housing Now, acknowledged the downsides of living on or near major roads. But he said: “There's got to be a few cheap seats in Sydney, or people are locked in. Those are affordable entry points for some people, and why shouldn't we have more?
This part of Sydney is already starting from behind. The draft strategy says Guildford East has a youth disconnection rate of 19% and in 2016, 18.5% of households had no internet access.
The Woodville Road corridor is diverse: half the people who live there were born abroad. But “the corridor population is aging and generally has poorer health outcomes compared to the rest of the Cumberland population,” the strategy notes.
Parramatta Road is perhaps the most hated road in Sydney.Credit: Nick Moir
The planning process so far has been long and laborious, and Lake says there is still “a long way to go” before any changes are made. But it pales in comparison to the paralysis surrounding Parramatta Road, perhaps Sydney's most hated freeway.
In 2016, the State Government published the Parramatta Road Corridor Urban Transformation Strategy (PRCUTS), which was to guide the revitalization of the 20km Camperdown to Granville road.
It pledged to create 27,000 new homes and 50,000 new jobs, in the corridor over 30 years, and committed to a “street rapid transit system”, meaning a tram, from Burwood to the CBD in Sydney.
However, work was “stopped” while traffic studies were carried out. They were still in place when the NSW Government released an implementation update in July 2021.
Roads Minister John Graham stepped in to stop the widening of Parramatta Road.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Inner West Council has recently completed planning proposals for three mini-precincts along the Parramatta Road corridor, Leichhardt, Taverners Hill and Kings Bay/Croydon, which have the combined capacity for around 1500 new homes. (The original PRCUTS provided for 9240 homes in these three precincts.)
But Transport for NSW's comment, namely that the road will need to be widened to accommodate the future transit system, shocked the council and prompted Roads Minister John Graham to step in and rule out the widening of the road.
The skirmish has further delayed modest planning changes designed to encourage additional housing along the corridor.
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Simon said he was “quite skeptical” that anything would be built because the small increase in building heights allowed by the council, as well as a myriad of rules on building materials and design, would make potential projects financially unviable.
Both the Woodville and Parramatta roads cases highlight how the state's planning system involves complex, lengthy and expensive processes that bounce between councils and the state government.
Last year, Department of Planning Secretary Kiersten Fishburn said Herald it was a waste of time for his department to carry out gateway determinations for every council planning proposal. “If it is consistent with [their] own strategic plan, why do we mark their homework?” she said
The department did not respond to questions about whether Woodville Road was an example of the type of duplication against Fishburn. He said he had not received Cumberland Council's plan, but once that happened the baseline assessment time was 45 days.
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