The Rajs bought into the Australian dream. It came with a nightmare

Raj Raman and wife Rathiga bought a house in a new estate in Sydney’s far north-west that its developer optimistically labelled “Oasis”. In the past six months, it has been anything but a haven.

After their children finished school, the couple traded convenience for comfort, moving from an apartment in Epping to a subdivision in Riverstone, a suburb that changed from rolling paddocks to suburban gridlock almost overnight.

Bus services, advertised to run from a nearby street to Tallawong metro station, were regularly diverted or cancelled without notice. Access to the one road into the estate, left-hand-turn only, was often cut off entirely by nearby developers closing roads as they built more homes.

Most mornings, Raj drops Rathiga at Tallawong metro station to go to work in Chatswood. It’s a drive that Google Maps says should take about eight minutes but stretches beyond half an hour as they battle, and contribute to, traffic jams on roads that were built for farm traffic.

Welcome to Sydney’s urban fringe, where the population has been allowed to continue to grow for decades while governments have failed to provide adequate infrastructure. Things are at breaking point.

The Herald’s new series, Stranded Sydney, is this week uncovering how, despite promising otherwise, successive governments have allowed urban sprawl to continue unabated, leaving communities on the western fringes buckling under the pressure of growth without proper infrastructure – and how it didn’t have to be this way.

When the state Labor government announced what would become the North West Growth Area in 2006, the Herald reported at the time that it had “vowed not to repeat the kind of development that occurred in Kellyville, where housing estates went in without upgrades to roads of public transport”.

Yet the plans to protect the north-west from the fate of Kellyville were slowly eroded, as developers campaigned for permission to build homes more quickly as a way of easing the burgeoning housing crisis. Now, the infrastructure-last development that occurred in earlier land sell-offs is being repeated in new urban fringes. Homes are still appearing before roads, transport, schools, healthcare and community facilities. In some cases, these never appear.

Raj fears the traffic congestion is eating away at his suburb’s social cohesion. “Imagine people going through this every day,” he says. “It rubs off in road rage, anger. People are always angry, but nobody sees the trigger.”

Greenfield development – where mostly freestanding homes and roads are built on what were livestock paddocks – is one of the biggest drivers of new housing in western Sydney. Tens of thousands of homes have been built in two key areas: the north-west growth area, north of Blacktown, and the south-west growth area, south-west of Liverpool, near the new airport. Rezoned for housing by Morris Iemma’s government in 2006, these were the largest land releases in more than two decades.

Tens of thousands of Sydneysiders have found homes and communities where there were previously none. But the experience of many residents in these areas shows the consequences of unlocking land for housing without supporting the people who live there.

The clearest indication is on the road network. The Hills Shire Council, in the north-west, has data showing Windsor Road and Old Windsor Road are so congested that the average speed on the morning commute is just 21.8 km/hr, 10 per cent slower than the same journey a year ago.

Plans protecting growth slowly chipped away

How did this happen? At the heart of it, complicated planning laws originally designed to allow housing commensurate to infrastructure – not just roads and public transport but schools, hospitals and more – were tweaked and twisted by successive governments.

The story of high-density Schofields, at the centre of the north-west growth area, is illustrative.

In 2012, the mostly rural precinct with a refurbished train station was rezoned for up to 2950 homes, with a minimum plot size of 250 square metres, about the size of a tennis court. Based on that, about 40 homes could be built per hectare.

In 2014, the Liberal government varied the rules about the types of homes that could be built on a site, allowing smaller homes and townhouses. In Schofields, the minimum plot size was reduced from 250 to 125 square metres. Despite more homes being allowed in the region, there was no announcement of an increase in transport infrastructure to support them.

In 2016, zoning rules again changed for the precinct to allow semi-detached homes to be built. No new infrastructure was provided.

All of this led to a vast increase in the number of homes being built in a single area, a story repeated in various plans in the north-west. The kicker came in 2017, when the Liberal state government increased the number of new homes it aimed to build in the entire north-west growth area – from 70,000 2006 to 90,000.

‘Politics and planning are inseparable’

There are whole industries, government departments and the like – whose job it is to avoid such situations. At different times, the Department for Planning and Environment (now the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure), the Growth Centres Commission, the Greater Sydney Commission (later changed to the Greater Cities Commission, before being axed by Premier Chris Minns in 2023) have been responsible for managing the growth. Agencies cannot spend money that governments do not provide.

“Politics and planning are inseparable,” said Estelle Grech, an adviser to former planning minister Rob Stokes and now a policy adviser at the Committee for Sydney. In places like the north-west, “it’s a philosophical question. Was the planning useless, or was the planning helpful until the politics interfered and made it useless?”

The site of the Raj home in Riverstone was rezoned for suburban development in 2016. More land in the suburb’s east was rezoned last year, when 1176 people moved into the suburb – a growth rate of 6.2 per cent, among Sydney’s highest. Last month, the government announced a rezoning of Riverstone’s town centre to allow for up to 2850 more homes.

Premier Chris Minns told an event on Friday that his government was investing $30 billion in infrastructure for western Sydney over forward estimates. Prue Car, the deputy premier and minister for western Sydney, said the government was “using every lever available to deliver the infrastructure that was long overdue and to plan for future growth”.

“The infrastructure deficit across western Sydney will take time to address, but we are investing millions every day to close the gap,” she said. “We are also committed to rebalancing housing growth towards areas with existing infrastructure.”

The government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading roads in the region, and Car said it had introduced 106 bus services for the north-west.

For now, though, the single road into Raj and Rathiga’s development remains without a footpath, despite the bus stop being erected a few metres away. When large earthmovers are brought in for the construction of houses in newer developments nearby, entry to their area is blocked off and buses are rerouted. Complaints to Transport for NSW are referred in turn to the bus company, the council, then the developer blocking access.

“These are systemic issues. No one is taking responsibility,” Raj said. “We’re not asking for big things. All we’re asking is to make it easier to live in this place.”

The Sydney Morning Herald has a bureau in the heart of Parramatta. Email parramatta@smh.com.au with news tips.