Sensible redevelopment of three of Sydney's major arterial roads could add thousands of medium rise housing units to help ease the city's current housing supply crisis.
Paul Nicolaou, Executive Director of Business Sydney, said Parramatta Road, Victoria Road and the Great Western Highway represented a huge opportunity to help ease the shortage of affordable homes for purchase or rent.
Mr Nicolaou said for this to happen there was a need to free up planning rules, shorten the glacially slow development approval process and allow the private sector to get on with building the much-needed homes along these corridors.
"Sydney has three golden opportunities to dramatically increase housing supply in the form of Parramatta Road, Victoria Road and the Great Western Highway," Mr Nicolaou said.
"Each of these roads is crying out for sensible development and is well suited to medium density housing of up to eight storeys complemented by innovative public transport solutions.
All three present opportunities to provide a mix of affordable housing to enable essential workers to live closer to where they work."
Mr Nicolaou said there were lessons to be learned from Auckland City Council's efforts in recent years to increase residential housing supply.
The Council had upgraded the zoning of large swathes of residential land previously limited to single dwellings to allow for terraces and apartment buildings of up to five storeys.
"Business Sydney's overall message is to let business get on with the business of building a range of medium density housing options," Mr Nicolaou said.
"It could be useful to have approved templates of attractive building designs that could help speed the approval process.
"Template design has long been a feature of Sydney housing. Some of our city's most popular suburbs have attractive housing of a similar type because there was once a catalogue approach to choosing new homes."
