The Joe Walker Podcast - Lucy Turnbull — Urbanism, YIMBYism, and Solutions to Australia's Housing Crisis (Bonus Live Episode)

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Lucy Turnbull is an urbanist, businesswoman and philanthropist. She was the first female Lord Mayor of Sydney, from 2003-4. From 2015-20, she was the inaugural Chief Commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission, tasked with delivering strategic planning for the whole of metropolitan Sydney.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. This is a special episode. It's a recording of a live event. In early May, I had the privilege of hosting a conversation at Sunrise, an annual festival held in Sydney by Blackbird, Australia's largest venture capital fund. There were over 2,000 attendees at the festival, mostly founders, aspiring founders, VCs, and other ambitious people. Blackbird invited me to host an interview at the festival. I decided to focus on solutions to Australia's housing crisis and invited Lucy Turnbull to join me. For those unfamiliar with Lucy, she has an eclectic background. Lucy is a tech investor, businesswoman, philanthropist, lawyer, urbanist. One fun fact about her career as a lawyer is that

Lucy and her husband, Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister, working together as a legal team, famously defended former MI5 agent Peter Wright against the British government in the spycatcher trial. But what most people don't know is that while Malcolm represented Wright in court, when the case was finally appealed to Australia's High Court in 1988, it was an argument devised by Lucy that the court relied upon in its judgment. Her argument was that the case was an impermissible effort by the UK government to enforce in Australia a public law of the UK, in this case the Official Secrets Act. But more relevant to this conversation is Lucy's career as an urbanist, and here she

has a truly unique set of experiences. She was the first female Lord Mayor of Sydney from 2003 to 2004. She chaired the Committee for Sydney, an independent urban policy think tank, and she served as the Chief Commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission, a role which tasked her with delivering strategic planning for all of metropolitan Sydney. So few people in Australia know more about the intricacies of our cities and their planning systems than Lucy. Now the subject matter of this episode is particularly Australian.

It may not be especially relevant to listeners from other countries, unless you're interested in how the Yimby movement is developing down under, and how Australia is no exception to the same housing crises plaguing the Anglosphere. Before we start, I want to give a plug to my weekend's newsletter. Every weekend I send out an email with a bunch of links to things I've been reading, watching, or listening to. Some of the links relate to research for upcoming podcasts, but more often they're just random interesting things I've discovered during the week, papers, articles, videos, etc. According to the platform I use to send the emails, each weekend about 20% of my mailing list clicks at least one of these links, which if you know anything about email marketing is an extremely good click-through rate.

But there are only a few thousand subscribers on this mailing list whereas my podcast audience is about 20 times bigger and that tells me I need to do a better job of telling you all about this newsletter that you're missing out on. As I said it's very high signal, I only share stuff I've actually consumed during the week and that I think is worth sharing. I don't force myself into a template where I give you the same number or type of links each weekend. Sometimes you'll get three links, sometimes you'll get 11. It's purely stuff I've actually been reading and usually you'll learn something. To sign up, go to my website jnwpod.com. That's jnwpod.com and click newsletter. Okay, to the conversation. Enjoy.

Thank you, Tom. So allow me a couple of minutes just to set the context for this conversation. So this is going to be a conversation about cities. And that raises the question, why talk about cities at a festival focused on startups? Cities are one of humanity's greatest technologies. They're one of humanity's greatest technologies because they're the places that give birth to all of our other technologies. It's no mistake that humanity's most astonishing efflorescences have arisen in cities or clusters of cities, from the Renaissance in Florence, to the Industrial Revolution in Manchester and Birmingham, to the computational revolutions of Silicon Valley. But today, Australia's major cities are facing a major problem, and that is a lack of affordable

housing in the places that people want to live. Indeed, according to the latest Demographia report, Sydney and Melbourne are the second and ninth least affordable cities on the planet, respectively. And a lack of affordable housing is constraining Australia's startup ecosystem like a boa constrictor. Between 2016 and 2021, according to the New South Wales Productivity Commission, for every one person in their 30s who moved to Sydney, two people left. That is, people in their prime working years are on net leaving one of Australia's most productive places. Late last year, the Committee for Sydney, which Lucy used to chair, published a report which

estimated that if Sydney doesn't make housing more affordable, it risks recording up to 10% fewer patents over the next decade as researchers and inventors leave to other places and becomes home to 50 to 100 fewer well-funded startups just over the next five years. So in this session, we're going to talk about what we can do about this, how we can create housing abundance and how the tech community might actually be able to help with that. And I can think of no better person to speak about these topics with than one of Australia's, well, both a tech investor and one of Australia's great urbanists, Lucy Turnbull, as you heard in that introduction from Tom. So

Lucy, great to speak with you. Welcome. Thank you, Joe. Great to be here. So I thought we would start with a fun question. And that is, so you're a Sydney girl at heart. You grew up here. You love this city. You wrote a history of Sydney. And indeed, I think, you know, Sydney, your love for Sydney is why you originally went into urbanism. Yep. But you're also a lawyer and you can appreciate both sides of the argument. So I want you to play advocate, make the case to me that Melbourne is actually the better city. Okay. I'm making a case. I live here. I've always lived here. I've never considered going to Melbourne. But with that caveat, Melbourne has a couple of really good attributes and it has to do with its topography, which is much flatter,

which means its spread is less contained as Sydney's is by all the national parks, the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury. We're in the Hawkesbury plateau or not plateau, we're in the Hawkesbury Basin. So we've got the Hawkesbury River, you know, down to, you know, the Illawarra and the mountains all around. So we are spatially constrained, which actually gives us a lot of good attributes, but it makes spreading out a bit of a conceptual and practical challenge. Melbourne has, they were settled in completely different times. So Sydney was first settled, obviously, the Aboriginal people were here for at least 10 to 20,000 years longer than we ever were. But

when, you know, the colony arrived in 1788, we, you know, we were, that was still in the pre-industrial era. That was in the Georgian era. And that was actually in terms of town planning and the shape of cities, exactly the same kind of basic principles applied as applied in, you know, Renaissance time. So I know it's a really funny thing to say, but actually Florence and Sydney's initial urban grain, like the rocks in Millers Point and going down to the Town Hall and down indeed to Central, you know, originally had a lot more in common with Georgian England, you know, sort of, I guess, in the Enlightenment period and before that back to the Renaissance than Melbourne did, which was very much established after industrialisation had set in and after,

you know, I guess, orderly town planning had set in with wide streets and, you know, common urban forms and setbacks, etc. So they were settled at very different times. And it actually plays into what it's like now. Like Sydney, possibly less so than before, but Sydney always had a sort of like a raffish, you know, sort of like disorderly, messy streak of libertarianism and, you know, individual kind of, you know, naughtiness. And that might be our convict, original convict, you know, settler origins. And Melbourne was always slightly more serious and I would say kind of Presbyterian. And you see that actually in the character of each city, I think still. So the DNA is still there. Right. So you can almost trace those cultural differences back to the

topography and when they were founded. So Sydney's topography, as we all know, because at least if we don't live here, we visit here because you're all here. It's kind of bumpy and sort of like a bit disorderly too. And I think that plays into our geography determines and the constraints around the edges plays into the way it's kind of organised into the east, the south, the north and the west. And before the property boom really got cracking, you know, back in 2003 when I was in the town hall, actually Maxine McHugh, who was then a journalist, I think on the Bulletin or somewhere,

asked me a question, what do I think of the differences between Sydney and Melbourne? And I said, well, in Sydney, people ask you where you live, right? Whereas in Melbourne, they ask you where you went to school. And there are two differences there. If you're asked where you live, you could have moved into where you live like last week, the week before, two minutes ago, or you could have been living there for 50 years. Whereas if you're asked where you went to school, you can never change that. You are kind of a product of your school. And I've had some very funny experiences where I bump into strangers on ski slopes and women with bedraggled children when our kids were, you know, little and skiing, you know. And if they came from Melbourne, the second question would be,

where do you live? Or, sorry, they would ask me where I went to school. And I thought, well, she lives in Melbourne, so why would she care? But it was a way of placing me. And a friend of mine who was actually with me in Melbourne, sitting with her, she said, oh, well, that's actually really a way of finding out whether you're a Catholic. I said, Fiona, I'm a Catholic. So, you know, like what relevance is that? So it's, it is quite quirky. It is quite quirky. That is quirky. Yeah. Less, I guess, less kind of direct than just asking someone their religion. Correct. More polite. Yeah, more polite. So in my kind of introduction, I mentioned cities are like a technology.

I actually meant that in a very real sense in that if a technology is something that gets us more from less, cities are such a thing. I know one of your favorite books is Green Metropolis by, I think, David Owen. He talks about how denser cities are more efficient. They use less energy per capita. But at the same time, they're actually, you know, as cities grow, they become more productive per capita. So you kind of get more from less. But in this case, you're getting

more innovation from less energy. So given those amazing agglomeration effects and I guess what they imply for entrepreneurship and innovation, let's talk about the different forms that cities can take and in particular, the forms that are more or less conducive to entrepreneurship and productivity. So just to play a thought experiment, if you were planning a city and you were optimizing just for productivity, and so you only really cared about sustainability and livability to the extent that they supported productivity, what would that city look like? Can you describe its characteristics? Well, it would be very high density because one of the determinants of productivity is how long it takes you to get from A to B, whether it's work or, you know, going and

doing, you know, cycling in the park or whatever it is. Whatever you do, go, if you do, on real life, in real life retail, getting to shops and services. So it's a question of distance travelled and every hour spent commuting is an hour lost. But I actually disagree with that because you can listen to podcasts naturally, like yours, and learn a lot when you're commuting these days. You need to go for a very long commute for that. But it is, I guess, loss. You lose the least opportunity or least opportunity cost is good. So that would lead you

to a very dense environment. But soon, if you overdo that, even if you thought it could happen and there'd be a huge political pushback, you would get to dystopia very quickly. So there is a point beyond which, you know, focusing on productivity alone, and we can see this in the economic system too, it actually becomes dystopian. You know, it becomes very unfair. And in a big sprawling city like Sydney, which although constrained by our, you know, we're a city in its landscape, as we said in our plan, in the green sort of surroundings of Sydney when they're not on fire, you have to keep people inside there but not have a spatial disadvantage.

So say, for example, it's not a satisfactory social outcome and I wouldn't say it's a satisfactory productive outcome either to have some people living on the fringe spending two hours to come in to work around here or the CBD or something, and then spend two hours going back. It's just not a good outcome for families. Therefore, they become less happy, less fulfilled. Kids spend less time with their parents. So you've got to actually think of productivity in a wide sense, not just how long it takes a tech startup person to get to their work, to their office. You've got to have

a wider conceptualization of what productivity is. Right. That takes me to my next question, which was given agglomeration effects. So for context, in 2018, while you were chief commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission, published a report called the City of Three. Metropolis of Three Cities. Metropolis of Three Cities, sorry. And that refers to the Eastern Harbor City. The Central River City. Yeah, which I guess like Parramatta. And then the new Aerotropolis

forming around the Badger East Creek Airport. And so my question is, given agglomeration effects, why not just focus on like densifying the Eastern Harbor City and making it as affordable as possible by building up rather than kind of spreading all the way out to you know almost near the blue mountains because it wouldn't necessarily be affordable because the land values would explode if that was the only place where development was happening and there would be huge spatial inequity if you lived in paramatter and there was no opportunity for jobs or services in paramatter that would be

a very bad thing for the current population but it's also not building out opportunity for jobs or services in Parramatta, that would be a very bad thing for the current population, but it's also not building out opportunity for the future population of Parramatta. So we call the eastern harbour city the established city. The central river city, Parramatta, is the emerging city and the growing city, its momentum is growing and it has grown a lot since we did those plans in 2018-19. And the Western Parkland city is emerging, right? It is very much an emerging area. So the population growth in percentage terms will be very high. So you've got to actually support the services,

whether it's schools, hospitals, jobs, transport, that those new areas need. If you just suddenly flatten the whole of Darlington and all the way to, I don't know, maybe Homebush, just flattened everything and built 50-storey buildings, you would have incredible spatial inequity if you happen to live in Penrith because you wanted to live there or you worked in a hospital there. So you've got to actually balance things out a bit. And I guess the big move with the metropolis of three cities is that people always assumed that Sydney was the east. And for some people that stopped at George Street in the city. For some people it stopped in the Anzac Bridge. And this is what I

learned like in when I was writing the book in in the mid-90s about the history of Sydney I sort of like conceptually thought you know once you got onto Parramatta Road past the Anzac Bridge you were in the western suburbs and you know as time went on I realised that was completely misconceived and western Sydney and the Olympics actually taught us that you know the the centre of the centre of Sydney really is that area from, you know, Olympic Park all the way to Blacktown, you know, spatially in terms of where the change has been happening, that's the centre.

And in fact, if you spend time around Parramatta and even Blacktown and, you know, the Rhodes Peninsula, et cetera, that's where the growth is, that's where the change is. And you've got to support the jobs and the services, be it transport, health, the Rhodes Peninsula, et cetera, that's where the growth is. That's where the change is. And you've got to support the jobs and the services, be it transport, health, education, whatever, retail, to make that population productive and make sure they're not stuck in traffic all day. Right. Got it. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's talk about building supply and medium density. So I was in New York a couple of weeks ago, staying in Brooklyn Heights. And I had this strange experience walking down the street where everything felt very unfamiliar

and kind of foreign. And it wasn't the fact that the cars were on the wrong side of the road, or there were metro stops everywhere. But it struck me that what it was, was I was walking through just continuous blocks of like four to six story apartments. And then we just don't have that in Australia. We don't have that kind of medium density, the classic sort of like, I guess, six to eight-story apartment blocks. The kind of apartment blocks you see in Paris and, you know, Barcelona and parts of London. Rome.

Rome. Yeah. Why don't we have that here? Well, this is the funny thing, which I've actually conjured with for decades now. We were really good at doing medium density, maybe not six to eight storeys, but three to six, in the interwar period when we were building the tram lines

and the suburban bus, which became the suburban bus network when they pulled out the trams, another story, because the trams were so slow because the trans was so slow, but that was unfortunate that they did that. But if you go, say, around Bondi Beach, not just on the beach but a couple of blocks back, and around, say, you know, Pluma Road in Rose Bay is another example, even a lot of Point Piper where we live and even, you know,

not so much Double Bay now because, well, there are bits in Double Bay but the lower North Shore too, there is a huge amount of three- and four-storey brick, dark brick apartment buildings. And they've been there since the 1920s, the 1930s. There was a building boom at that time. Then suddenly the Depression hit in the, you know, early 30s and that all stopped.

But that was actually a really good urban form, which I wish we'd done a lot more of. And then what happened is we had the Great Depression, which really knocked Australia sideways and knocked the property market sideways and buildings sideways. So when we came out of the Second World War, we had this massive housing crisis, and there was a kind of like, build anything, we had this massive housing crisis and there was a kind of like, build anything, like we have an emergency and there were high levels of immigration, post-war immigration, there was bipartisan support around the idea of populate or perish, which doesn't exist now, but you had huge waves of immigration and housing crisis.

So the response was to borrow the modernist idea and principles which, you know, the Bauhaus espoused, which is, you know, modernism. I don't need to tell you what modernism is, look it up if you don't know, but it's basically very, you know, sort of simplified design and construction, very concrete and masonry driven, mostly concrete and glass. And that actually was a good response. But because of the crisis, the modernist idea could just get built up and built up and built up. So it did get built up in places like, you know, in the Towers and Darling Point, which led to a huge revolt, say, of Willara Council against density, that the whole political complexion changed in Willara Council. There was a similar kind of revolt in North Sydney where there was a lot of

high density going up. There was this huge local political pushback, which combined with the idea of, you know, the huge movement to support heritage, like the Green Bands movement to save Victoria Street in Potts Point and Hunter's Hill, the combination of the revolt against modernism plus the need to preserve heritage actually led to a reaction against modernism and height and density, which led to, you know, I guess the NIMBY movement. There were two forces driving the NIMBY movement, heritage and anti-modernism. Right, right. Yeah, interesting. So talking about solutions to that, if we wanted to enable template approvals for mid-rise apartments, what would it take to create like a style book of approved designs for each sort of suburb or

local government area? Is that a complicated task? Has that been tried before? No, that's how Paddington and Glebe and around here, that's how all the inner suburbs that we all value so highly now were actually built. They weren't built by professional builders. They were built by people who borrowed patent books, who used patent books and got the elements, say, of the wrought iron balconies. they bought them from a patent book in the UK. And they were typically built by, if you can see, you can see it particularly in Paddington because it's hilly, you know,

you can see three or four terraces in a row, which are obviously built by the same person and with the same wrought iron. But they, you know, Paddington, Glebe, et cetera, were built with patent books. And that's another thing that makes me worry because it's like with the revolt against, you know, the median density we used to do so well in the 20s and the early 30s. It's as if we had our brain sucked out and we forgot how to do patent books and standard planning, you know, urban forms. And everybody had to do their very own starting from scratch. And it's really frustrating because it adds to time and to cost and complexity. Whereas if you can say, okay,

this is a type A medium to high density apartment block or a type B or a type C, and if it's standardised and it's not going to fall over because it's built on sand, etc, the geotech's okay, you should be able to build it because we need to get going quickly. And I think the government architect is trying, Abby Galvin is trying really hard to get these patent books underway. Strangely enough, I spoke to her sooner just before she got appointed and I said, Abby, you've got to do patent books. Like, we've got to speed this whole thing up. And so I think that's where we should be going back to. We've got to go back to where we were, truthfully, in the late 19th century, in the early 20th

century. We've got to go back because we've been making a lot of mistakes and making things way too complicated. Right. Back to the future. Speaking of which, so this isn't an apples to apples comparison but i do think there's some information in it so very famously the empire state building took a year to construct and then i don't know maybe the planning before that was like two or three years i think they

bought the world office yeah hotel and knocked it down in like 1928 29 or something and by 1931 the empire state buildings's constructed, something like that. Anyway, by contrast, the Barangaroo redevelopment takes 15 years. So if an alien landed on Earth and you had to kind of explain that situation to them. Not easy to explain. So how would you begin? Well, I mean. Why is that the case?

It's really, it's actually really hard to explain. So why did it take so long? It's a really good question. So I guess the deal and everybody who here is in, you know, the startup economy, the deal or the proposition advocated by the former Prime Minister Paul Keating, was to build the Barangaroo Headland and the balancing item to offset that green headland, which is magnificent, was to put a whole lot of density on the southern edge, which is where you've got the towers. Now, a lot of people didn't like that density because it was a big, sudden change, and they still don't like it,

and a lot of people who live in Balmain still don't like it, but that was the fundamental architecture of the deal. And then they still haven't figured out what's happening in central Barangaroo, by the way, which I find, like, I just find it really hard to come to terms with, because the other thing they've done in the meantime is that they're putting a metro stop there, which will be open, which is just built, you know, like a concrete block. It'll be open, I think, in June or July this year, something like that. And it will be a magnificent addition to that Barangaroo area. It will really connect it to the city so you don't have to walk for miles to get to, say, the eastern side of the CBD.

It will be amazing, but there is no immediate development around it. The other thing that I think is the lost opportunity is the absolute deficiency of affordable housing. Like it's all like, you know, sort of expat, very rich people housing. And I think that's really sad because the rocks and millers point has a tradition and a history of supplying a lot of worker housing, a lot of affordable public housing, and we've completely dropped the ball there. So I think, you know, it's like it's a very imposing thing, but it hasn't – there are a few bits missing,

like some serious bits missing, like social and affordable housing. Right. And they actually, talking about New York, New York is very good at doing affordable housing. So what I call, you know, we have an apartment in New York, not in a billionaire building, in one of the 1931 buildings along Central Park West. And that was built at a time when, you know,

20 storeys, 30 storeys, that was good and it's great. And in the meantime, they built all the billionaire, sort of like the pencil, I call them the pencil buildings, all over the midtown area, some of them downtown, but they still have affordable housing as part of it. And we just never do that. And it's really sad. We tried to put it in our plans, but it actually hasn't been delivered in any meaningful way. And it doesn't matter who's in government. It doesn't matter who's in government. It never happens.

Right. And why does it never happen? What are the incentives of politicians there? Well, I think they're obviously not focusing on delivering affordable housing. I mean, we did try at the Greater Sydney Commission to drive this agenda, but there wasn't enough buy-in by government or by, let me be honest with you, the property sector. Okay. Yeah. It's not business as usual for them. Whereas in New York, building affordable housing is taken as an integral part of building housing. It hasn't been kind of embedded in the culture of how you build things and how you do stuff. And so if that isn't part of the DNA of how things get built, there's a lot

of pushback when people try to change it. Right. You mentioned the Greater Sydney Commission, just reflecting on that. So you were the Chief Commissioner 2015 to 2020. Would you offer like a retrospective assessment that future policymakers could learn from? Like, you offer like a retrospective assessment that future policymakers could learn from? Like, is there like a key lesson, something you might have learned? Well, what was great about the GSC was that, and the reason we were invented, well, statutorily invented, and there was bipartisan support for the Greater Sydney Commission Act,

is that we worked collaboratively across the key tiers of government. Like on the infrastructure committee of the GSC, we had treasury, premiers, education, health, infrastructure, planning. You had all these agencies of government. So we could sit up, we could, and transport, of course, did I say transport? That's fundamental. You could consider all the key areas of government could consider the plans, right? So you didn't have this exciting, not, and very tedious, long drawn out, okay, planning sensor to transport, transport makes a comment, da, da, da. It had everybody in the room, like you had everyone in the room who needed to be in the room. And that was actually fantastic. So for the first time ever in New South Wales history, we had an integrated land use plan,

which we did, the metropolis of three cities, the transport plan done for transport for New South Wales and the infrastructure plan. And we all talked to each other a lot. And it was a coordinated and collaborative set of plans. Now that, you know, what happens then is one government agency has its planning, redoing planning cycle on another timeline, and another one has another. So you fall out of sync. And I think that's a great pity that that integrated planning doesn't happen. Another observation I'd make is that we don't need to do new plans every five years. We need to actually

make sure we're implementing the plans that we have. We spend far too much time on writing plans and not enough time implementing them and measuring and monitoring. So one of the things we did the year after we delivered the metropolis plan with transport and infrastructure plan is we did a document called the pulse of the city we had a whole lot of citizens panels and you know community forums to ask people what matters to you and they were universal like it's access to services the 30-minute city was really important tree canopy was really important walkability is important and people very jane jakes but think about walkability people think productivity sustainability and livability are, you know, mutually exclusive.

But in fact, there's a fundamental principle. If you walk to work and it only takes you, you know, you're not going to walk three hours to work, you know, 10, 20, 30 minutes to work, you're going to be healthier. You're going to be more productive. You're going to, you know, have a more livable life, right? So, you know, those ideas are universal, you know, human ideas and we've got to embed that in the planning and see how it's going. And access to green space is another one.

So how long does it take you to walk to a park or an open space? All those things need to be measured and reported on and I think that's more important than writing a whole new set of plans, right? That's my view so like me you're a a fan of the yimby movement which has sprung up in melbourne sydney now i think everywhere everywhere yeah started in london i think but that was the first one i heard of i could be wrong but that was the first time i heard of it. But yeah, it's certainly come to Australia now. I want to do like a pre-mortem with you.

So fast forward, say, 10 years, and the YIMBY movement has failed to achieve its objectives. We haven't meaningfully increased housing supply. We haven't improved housing affordability. What's the most likely explanation for that? The natural conservatism of communities. But I think that if we can use this housing supply crisis as an opportunity for change, I think we won't look back in 10 years and be sad with not enough having happened.

And I think I'm positive about the potential for change for the following reasons, that the rate, you know, the percentage of people who own their own homes or think they have any realistic chance of buying their own homes is much lower than it was 10 or 20 years ago. And also, rents are unaffordable. So it's not as if you can substitute not owning a home with easily defined, easy to find rental accommodation. So there is an emergency and there is a growth intergenerationally of people who would traditionally be owning their own homes, having lots of kids and stuff who don't have home security. And if we don't address home security, we will have much lower rates of fertility. So we'll have a much older

population and that will be seriously less productive because if everyone's over 70, you know, like my case, I mean, I'm not there yet, but you know, you need to have intergenerational equity and spatial equity. So the thing I love about the YIMBY movement is that they are advocating and I wish they could come to some of the planning committee meetings I had to chair when I was in the town hall, because you would have these older people coming to meetings and saying, we don't want any change in our community. We don't want any change in our community. I would think, I wish young people could come and say they needed to buy a house here, but they were nowhere. Nobody nobody could, nobody was speaking.

I'm not blaming anyone, but I would have loved to have had that voice when I was in the town hall because, you know, you can only kind of listen to who's there, you know, at the planning committee hearing. And I would have loved to have had that voice of non-homeowners, non, you know, not older people, younger people arguing for what they want to make their lives as good as they can be. Right. Yeah. There's always been that sort of asymmetry. Yeah. Lack of voice. So all of these community movements, you know, local community movements, which typically like things the way they are. And the great thing about the YIMBY

movement is that they advocate for what they want to change. Voices for Change. Love that. Yeah, love it. Yeah. All right. I have a few questions about how technology interacts with the housing abundance question. So one of the things that the history of cities teaches us is that distance is a temporal concept and you can shrink distance by creating better and faster transportation. So if trains and cars shrank distance in the 19th and 20th centuries, what do you kind of anticipate will be the technology that does that in the 21st century? Oh gosh, I'm not that clever.

I really don't see us. So when I was a little girl in primary school, there was this huge thing about hovercrafts. And I thought by the time I was 21, I was born in 1958, by the time I was 21, I wouldn't have a car, I'd have a hovercraft. So that made me very cautious about predicting future transport types. Strangely enough, I think, you know, demand hiring services like Uber and its, you know, comparables has actually really shifted the temporal problem with getting from A to B. Because, you know, in the olden days before these ride services were available, you would have a very, you know, sort of stay in the lane taxi industry.

So it was impossible to get a taxi in heavy rain at three o'clock when it was changeover. So there have been very positive changes. And on a positive note here in Sydney, there is an investment in transport infrastructure, the like of which we have not seen since the 1920s. Like the metro, I know it's going through its teething problems with people getting from Sydenham to Bankstown, et cetera,

but that'll be, I know it's horrible, but it will be over in a couple of years but the the metro connection from tallowong which is just west of rouse hill all the way down to bankstown will really shift the you know the spatial dimensions of the city so somebody you know a kid in bankstown who lives in Bankstown who desperately wants to study a subject at, say, Macquarie University, they might be offering something special. That person can get on the train and be there in 20 or 25 minutes. That is really amazing and vice versa. So it will make people much more easy to transit in and around the city. So that has, you know, people, I think, underestimate that because at the moment the metro stops at Chatswood, which may not be everybody's, you know, required destination or location.

So once it comes down past the Lower North Shore, down Barangaroo, Martin Place and out to Sydenham, that will be like incredible. So watch this space and it's very quick and it's not going to be long. Okay, that's cool. I was wondering whether also maybe technologies like virtual reality could help in a way shrink distance because you can kind of then just do meetings from your living room. Well, I think we do that already, don't we, with Zoom. I mean, my most recent experience of virtual reality is going

to the Ramsesses exhibition, which is great. Go and see it. It's closing in a couple of weeks at the Australian Museum. But they have a virtual reality room at the end and you put on the goggles, et cetera, and there's a 12-minute thing and they swing you around. I think the target market is possibly our grandchildren's age, you know, 10 and 8. But it is an amazing thing.

But it's very self-contained. We are in ancient Egypt when we're doing it, obviously, in Ramesses period. But I'm struggling with how that will actually ever change the texture and the feel and the vibrancy of being in the same room as somebody. I mean, we do Zooms when we need to, but that, and we learned how much we missed it during the pandemic, that human contact and actually seeing people's eyes in real life, that's

something that I don't think we'll ever not enjoy and appreciate or need. Right, right. And especially for, you know, innovation, you need collision, the collision of ideas, and you need collision spaces. So that's either inside or outside. But don't underestimate the need for collision spaces, you know, like places like carriage works, but also, you know, outside spaces where people can bump into each other,

like the street, for example. Yeah. That's why walkability is important. Yeah, so Jane Jacobs is probably one of your biggest influences as an urbanist. In The Death and Life of Great American City, she has this concept of street ballet. Yeah.

And eyes on the street. And eyes on the street, yeah. Where is the best street ballet in Sydney? So for me, it's maybe, I don't know, Stanley Street in Darlinghurst or Maclay Street in Potts Point. No, I think, you know what? I would not agree with that. I was at Stanley Street on Sunday after going to the museum

with Malcolm, our daughter and her kids. And, yeah, it's okay. But I would actually think King Street, Newtown, I think actually Oxford Street on a day or even a night because there's lots more you know food and you know drinking and places to hang out at night time the night economy is really kicked up there i actually think i know this is really bizarre people should try it sometime go to paramatta on a friday night you know go to those places close to the river down Church Street and, you know, the river, especially when the light rail opens, that is really dynamic.

And you actually see future Sydney there, you know, so, you know, we're present Sydney, but in places like Parramatta, you can really see the future of Sydney. For example, you know, say in the last census, the amount of members of the Gujarati community from India who came and settled around Parramatta and Hyde Park exploded like by 400%. So you see the place undergoing change and transformation. I love that change, and I love that us, and I love that sidewalk ballet, because to me, a bunch of old people walking down Maclay Street is not sidewalk ballet sidewalk ballet yeah it's a kind of ballet um so i just want to briefly come back to this question of working from home i i think it's a a really good point you make about how yeah i mean these virtual

technologies aren't substitutes for in-person interactions. They're complements. And I think even in Ed Glazer's book, Triumph of the City, which I know you like, he makes this point about how, like, if you look at the people with the most interpersonal connections in Manhattan, they also have the most phone calls. So like, they're not- Connecting on all levels.

Yeah, connecting on all levels. And the in-person interactions are increasing the demand for the virtual interactions. But having said that, to the extent that working from home is now more of a thing, I was reading your book, Sydney, Biography of a City. And one of the interesting things I learned was during the commercial real estate bust of the early 90s, or after that, in the aftermath of that, in Sydney, a lot of the commercial real estate bust of the early 90s or after that, in the aftermath of that in Sydney, a lot of the commercial office space was repurposed to residential. And I think the same thing happened in Melbourne as well in the early 90s.

Absolutely. And that was very much championed and advocated by Frank Sartle, who I stood on his mayoral ticket. I was the deputy mayor, but I stood on his ticket. And he, in the mid-90s, developed a planning principle. And it was really good because every single planning control and document of the city of Sydney was organised around the principle of making it a living city because it had become very much a non-living city because it was all commercial. And you're right,

the commercial, there was the debt crisis and all these big companies went under with too much leverage. And a lot of the buildings were either rebuilt or repurposed for residential housing. Now, I'd like to think that could happen again because you need for any CBD, especially these days, to be vibrant and exciting. You need a combo of work and play and live. And it can't just be work. Right. And so I guess my specific question was, given the kind of working from home trend, might there be another opportunity to convert a lot of office space into residential? Well, I think that would be a good thing. I think the costs are going to be a barrier if they've got big floor plates. It's not as easy as you think. But I think the other thing we need to think about is co-housing. And we've got a housing crisis. We

have as a subset of that housing crisis, a huge women escaping violence crisis. And so one of the ways to address both those crises is to develop more co-housing, like student housing, where you have shared common spaces like living areas, et cetera, which removes social isolation, particularly for people who are, say, leaving violent relationships. And they do this for you know, not for everybody, brilliantly in the US, especially I visited this amazing development in Washington, DC, like three caves from the Capitol building. There's a developer, I think it's called Graystar, but they build to rent housing for young people. So young people have, you know, small private apartments, but they use the common spaces on the ground floor for coffee,

hanging out, living. And I think we need to get much smarter about doing that. And that is a potential use for these commercial third, second, third tier old tied commercial buildings is to actually create co-housing. So to finish in the public discourse, there's been a lot of focus on regulatory solutions to the housing supply problem. But I'm also interested in the technical solutions. And I know you're a tech investor and you're interested in this space. Are there any newer emerging construction technologies that you're particularly excited about? Well, there is more modular housing being built, but not nearly enough. So some of the big development companies had modular housing prefabrication, but it didn't work out and I don't really understand why. But, you know, like eight, 10 years ago, people were very optimistic

about prefabbing, say, kitchens and bathrooms, so you just drop them in so you accelerate build time. There is more modular housing being built, and it's easy to do in a low-density sort of single-dwelling context. I'd love to see it scaled up to that six to eight storey medium-density thing. They do this, bizarre bizarrely enough they do it really well they do not so much modular but they do the deliver I know it's going to be really unpopular when I say this but they deliver the best affordable housing most beautiful affordable housing in Iran and I'm very indebted to Philip Oldfield who's the professor of architecture at UNSW and also in Spain they deliver beautiful affordable housing because they make it a priority

and they've been doing it for a long time. But if you go modular, you can speed up the process and actually get things done very quickly. And there's a guy who built, that I met recently, who had a very big house that he did a renovation of in London. And then he came to Sydney and decided to do a modular house because he got the building quotes and it was just off the charts because the cost of building is off the charts. So if you can use modularity as a way of reducing costs and also efficiency, that is a great idea.

And there's no reason you can't do that. I know that one government agency has looked at that, but we just haven't executed it. It's like writing plans all the time and not actually monitoring how they're going, rather than, oh, let's write a new plan, because we love writing plans. We don't actually like checking that they're all tracking along nicely. So you've got to kind of focus on building new housing types. So support innovation and make it happen. Make it happen. That's a great note to finish on. Please thank Lucy. Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for listening. Two quick things before you go. First, for show notes and the episode transcript, go to my website, jnwpod.com. That's jnwpod dot com. And finally, if you think the conversations I'm having are worth sharing, I'd be deeply grateful if you sent this episode or the show to a friend. Message it to them, email them, drop a link in a WhatsApp group, or even better, blast it out on Twitter. The primary way these conversations reach more people is through my

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