A few streets away from my house, along a busy road long identified as ripe for more housing, there’s an empty block. It was supposed to host an apartment complex, creating homes for dozens of people. Instead, there’s a clump of noxious weeds.

The block was sold to a developer as part of a land bundle before the pandemic, amid the buzz generated by a 2015 Coalition state government plan to rezone the Sydenham-to-Bankstown corridor to build an extra 35,000 homes. The block’s vendor was one of many locals who teamed up with neighbours to put a few houses on the market together, creating a parcel big enough to attract a developer.

An empty block on Canterbury Road that was meant to become a block of flats. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Restaurants and a gym opened, too, in an expectation the population would swell.

Nothing happened. When the final rezoning was not far away, the Coalition government junked the plan and instead gave the job to councils. But with no clarity on building size – and therefore land value – in sight, the developments stalled, the land bundles didn’t sell, the For Sale signs disappeared and the gym shut.

A shudder of collective déjà vu ran through the neighbourhood this week when the Minns government announced yet another rezoning plan.

For some suburbs, this is the third such announcement in less than 10 years. I’m yet to understand how this new one is any different, and the councils are of the same view. It promises high-rise at metro stations, just like the last two. (Eyebrows across the south-west shot up this week when Premier Chris Minns said his plan was “the first time” the city was marrying public transport infrastructure with new housing).

There’s much talk about the urgency of the housing crisis, but if governments of both stripes had just stuck with either of the previous plans, there’d be units rather than weeds by now.

My kids were one and three when I bought a semi in the inner south-west, attracted by cheaper property prices than nearby Dulwich Hill and Summer Hill, a reliable train line and proximity to the city. I hadn’t done much research and didn’t realise that just a year before, in 2015, the Coalition government had exhibited the first draft of its Sydenham-to-Bankstown Corridor strategy, to create tens of thousands of homes over the following two decades along the new south-west metro, now due to be finished in 2025.