FAIRER FUTURE
What the Inner West’s New Housing Plan Actually Means (And Where It Matters)
Most planning documents are written in a language designed to put normal people to sleep. Diagrams, acronyms, floor-space ratios, transport-oriented this and corridor-based that. Somewhere inside all of that are decisions that will shape what your street, your suburb and your skyline look like for the next 10 to 20 years.
The Inner West’s Fairer Future Plan is one of those documents.
Strip away the jargon and it’s basically this: the Inner West has been asked to help solve a housing crisis. Council didn’t like the State Government’s one-size-fits-all reforms, so it came back with its own version – a local blueprint that says, “We’ll add more homes, but we’ll choose where, how and at what scale.”
The headline is volume. Over roughly 15 years, the plan aims to enable somewhere in the realm of 20,000–30,000 new dwellings across the council area. Not all at once. Not all in one place. But enough that, if it actually plays out, the map of where people live and how dense certain pockets feel will be noticeably different.
So where does it go?
Mostly: town centres and transport hubs. The plan concentrates growth around places that already have rail, light rail or frequent buses – parts of Marrickville, Dulwich Hill, Leichhardt, Ashfield and other key centres. Some earlier, more aggressive concepts for Marrickville and Dulwich Hill were wound back after community pushback, with more emphasis pushed towards the Parramatta Road corridor instead. The idea is to soak up growth in areas that can handle more height, rather than stuffing apartment blocks into every quiet residential street.
The mechanics look like this: certain areas get their zoning changed, heights increased, floor-space caps relaxed. Large, under-used car parks or institutional lands are flagged as potential redevelopment sites. There are incentives for projects that deliver social and affordable housing – for example, encouraging churches or charities with big landholdings to partner with housing providers if they dedicate a portion of new dwellings to people who’d otherwise be completely locked out of the area.
What does that feel like for someone who lives here?
If you own on a heritage street, deep in a low-rise pocket far from a train station, your daily life may barely change. You might see a few more people at the local shops, a slightly busier main road, a longer line at the café. But your immediate built environment – the scale of buildings around you – will stay largely intact.
If you own near a centre, things will shift more. You may see mid-rise buildings where two-storey ones once stood. A public car park you’ve been ignoring for years may be fenced off and reborn as housing with ground-floor retail. A block that always felt like a bit of a dead zone could turn into a mixed-use development with apartments above and a supermarket below. Over time, the familiar streets you’ve always driven through will start to feel busier, more vertical, more urban.
For renters and would-be buyers, the hope is simple: more doors to walk through. More options that aren’t an hour from the city. More units close to train lines. More diversity in housing type – not just terraces and freestanding homes, but townhouses, modern apartments, co-living spaces and whatever else planning frameworks allow.
Of course, plans are promises, not guarantees. The Fairer Future blueprint still needs to at least partially align with State policy. Developers have to actually lodge, fund and build projects. Economic cycles will speed some things up and slow others down. But the direction of travel is clear: the Inner West is being prepared to house more people, more densely, in more defined clusters.
The tension, as always, is character. People didn’t move to these suburbs to live in a sea of towers. They moved here because of trees and terraces, because of high streets and heritage, because of community. If the Fairer Future Plan threads the needle – focusing growth where it makes sense, protecting the streets that deserve it, and delivering the infrastructure that density needs – the Inner West could come out of it more liveable, not less.
If it doesn’t, we’ll notice.
The point, for owners, is awareness. If your home sits inside one of these targeted precincts, your land is now part of a larger story – a story about height limits, development options, and future shape. If it doesn’t, your suburb will still feel the ripple effect in population, traffic, demand and amenity.
Planning can feel abstract until the scaffolding goes up at the end of your street. This plan is the scaffolding before the scaffolding. It’s worth paying attention.
— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal