High density urban renewal has become the orthodoxy de jour among urban planners seeking solutions to the alleged housing supply ‘crisis’. Sydney is no exception where at least twenty years of strategic metropolitan planning has pushed ever higher density development across the city.
While the drivers of this boom are well established, there is little, if any, detailed analysis of the actual economics of the process itself, namely, the search for profitable development opportunities in the context of urban renewal. Yet profitability, as measured by the developers’ feasibility calculations, has now become the principal rationale in the decision making for planning residential development with the models themselves exacting a performative impact on land use planning outcomes.
Using a detailed integrated database for over 1,200 apartment buildings developed across Sydney between 2010 and 2019, the aim of this paper is to present an analysis of the actual level of profits generated during the post-GFC apartment boom.
The findings contribute to discussions regarding the malleability of developers’ feasibility arguments and the now universal acceptance of value creation as the explicit logic underpinning urban development through the ‘calculative turn’ in strategic urban land use planning.
