Ask a couple in their early thirties renting in Sydney's inner west what a deposit costs, and they answer in years, not percentages: a mental calendar counting down toward the day they might afford to bid on a home anywhere near where they grew up. That calendar now runs past a decade — roughly 12.6 years of disciplined saving for a 20 per cent deposit on a median-priced Sydney home, longer than in any other Australian capital (Cotality/CoreLogic, Housing Affordability Report, November 2024, approx.). Most give up on the inner west long before they get there. A growing number give up on Sydney altogether.
That is the arithmetic under the defining domestic story of Chris Minns' first term as Premier. Sydney's median dwelling costs more than thirteen times a typical household income on the measure researchers use to compare cities globally — a level classed as "impossibly unaffordable", ranking the city among the two or three most expensive housing markets on earth (Demographia, International Housing Affordability report, approx.). Minns Labor was elected in March 2023 promising to fix a housing shortage decades in the making, and has spent its term rewriting the planning rules that decide where, and how fast, new homes get built. Whether that rewrite is closing the gap between what a home costs and what a worker earns is the question this article puts to the evidence.
What the government did
The Minns government's central bet is that Sydney's crisis is, at root, a supply problem, and that the state controls the lever the Commonwealth does not: planning approval. Its first move, from 1 July 2023, was demand-side — lifting the First Home Buyers Assistance stamp duty exemption threshold from $650,000 to $800,000 and the concession threshold to $1 million (Revenue NSW; NSW Budget 2023-24). The larger program has been supply-side. In 2024 the government introduced Transport-Oriented Development (TOD) planning controls, rezoning land within 400 metres of 31 well-located stations for six-storey apartment buildings, with eight "accelerated precincts" — including Bankstown, Crows Nest, Homebush and Macquarie Park — earmarked for state-led rezoning (NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, TOD Program, 2024). Government figures put the capacity unlocked at roughly 230,000 homes over 15 years (approx.).
From 28 February 2025 the government layered on the Low and Mid-Rise Housing (LMR) policy, permitting dual occupancies, terraces, townhouses and shop-top apartments as of right near nominated centres and stations, projected to add roughly 112,000 homes over five years (approx., NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, LMR Policy, Feb-2025). In January 2025 it stood up a Housing Delivery Authority (HDA) to fast-track large private developments as State Significant Developments outside ordinary council assessment; by its 12-month review in May 2026 the HDA reported a pipeline of more than 117,000 potential homes across 351 proposals (NSW Government, HDA 12-Month Review, May 2026). On social housing, the 2024-25 Budget funded the $6.6 billion Building Homes for NSW package — the state's largest-ever such investment, targeting 8,400 new public homes, 21,000 affordable and market homes and upgrades to 30,000 existing properties (NSW Budget Paper No. 3, 2024-25). The 2025-26 Budget added $83.4 million to accelerate approvals and a $1 billion pre-sale finance guarantee (NSW Budget Paper No. 1, 2025-26).
The strongest case
A government that finally moved the lever only the state controls
The Minns government's strongest defence is that it did the genuinely difficult thing rather than the merely popular one. Rezoning concentrates visible, immediate opposition from existing homeowners against diffuse, future benefit to people who do not yet live locally, and state governments of both colours had avoided broad rezoning of established suburbs for a generation. TOD and LMR are the first sustained attempt in decades to legislate housing density near jobs and transport as of right, rather than fighting each development project by project through a council process that structurally favours objectors. The government also built in an inclusionary-zoning mandate for the first time in NSW history: TOD precincts require a minimum 3 per cent affordable housing contribution held in perpetuity, rising to 18 per cent on key government-owned sites (NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, TOD Program, 2024).
The Housing Delivery Authority is a genuine institutional innovation: moving qualifying projects into a dedicated state pathway targets the approval-timeline bottleneck industry analysis has long identified as a binding constraint, independent of how much land is zoned. And the $6.6 billion Building Homes for NSW package is the largest dedicated social-housing investment any NSW government has made, built as a multi-year program that gives Homes NSW and community housing providers certainty to plan a pipeline rather than bid for money year to year. A reasonable reading is that this government identified the correct binding constraint — restrictive zoning and slow approvals — and used the state's own constitutional authority over planning to attack it directly.
The evidence
Start with price. Sydney's price-to-income ratio sits above 13 times median household income on the international comparison measure, and Cotality/CoreLogic's own dwelling-price series puts the city at roughly 10 times income — either way, a figure that has climbed for three decades under governments of every stripe (Demographia; Cotality/CoreLogic, approx., 2024-25 editions). The deposit-hurdle and serviceability numbers translate that ratio into lived time and income: 12.6 years to save a 20 per cent deposit, and roughly 58 per cent of median household income required to service a new Sydney mortgage, against a traditional benchmark near 30 per cent (Cotality/CoreLogic, Housing Affordability Report, November 2024, approx.). Renters are not spared while saving: the share of income going to rent nationally sits at a record high near 33 per cent, and Sydney rents track at or above it (Cotality/CoreLogic, approx.).
Set that pain against supply. NSW's share of the National Housing Accord's 1.2 million national target is 377,000 new, well-located homes by July 2029 — a straight-line run-rate of roughly 75,400 completions a year (National Cabinet communiqué, Aug-2023; NSW Planning housing targets, approx.). Actual completions have run well below that: ABS Building Activity records 47,567 NSW completions in 2023, falling to 45,552 in 2024 (ABS Building Activity, Australia, approx.), with no step-change yet in commencements — a shortfall on the order of 30,000 homes a year against the Accord's own arithmetic, and because the early years have undershot, the rate now needed to still hit 377,000 by 2029 is higher than the original figure, not lower.
Loan data shows first-home buyers reacting to the squeeze, not escaping it. NSW carries the largest average owner-occupier loan of any state, at $873,000, with investor and owner-occupier loan sizes converging for the first time on record — $857,000 against $873,000 (ABS Lending Indicators, Dec-2025 quarter). Nationally, first-home-buyer loan numbers rose 6.8 per cent that quarter, driven substantially by expanded Commonwealth deposit-guarantee schemes rather than NSW prices becoming easier to meet (ABS Lending Indicators, Dec-2025, approx.). On its own reforms, the government reports approval times running roughly 15 per cent faster than under the former government and applications up 28 per cent year-on-year, with more than 70,000 homes under construction statewide (NSW Government, State of the Housing System Report, 2025).
A deposit that takes 12.6 years to save is not a market working slowly. It is a market that has stopped clearing for an entire cohort of buyers.
The critique
Judge the government by the target it set itself, and the honest verdict is: correct diagnosis, unproven delivery. TOD and LMR together rezone land for roughly 340,000 additional dwellings — close to the 377,000-home Accord target on paper — but rezoning capacity is not a completed home. Both describe capacity over 15-year and five-year horizons; neither converts automatically into the near-term completions the Accord's 2029 deadline requires, and completions data through 2024 shows no acceleration yet visible at auction. A rezoning is necessary for more supply. It is not sufficient, and the gap is exactly where builder capacity, financing costs and construction-sector conditions still bind.
LMR also carries a fairness gap. Unlike the TOD precincts, which mandate a minimum 3 per cent affordable-housing contribution in perpetuity, LMR imposes no equivalent requirement on the dual occupancies and townhouses it enables — a gap Local Government NSW called a "missed opportunity" the day the policy took effect, arguing the new supply will overwhelmingly sell or let at full market price (Local Government NSW, media statement, 21-Feb-2025). That does not undermine the case for more supply in aggregate, but it means LMR does relatively little for the buyer whose 12.6-year deposit timeline is the sharpest expression of the crisis.
Implementation has been rockier than the policy documents suggest, too. LMR was announced and commenced with what several councils, including Woollahra, described as less than a week's practical notice, and Ku-ring-gai and Mosman have since pursued litigation and lobbying to carve out exemptions (Woollahra Municipal Council, media statement, Feb-2025; council public statements, 2025, approx.). Every month spent disputing interim controls is a month in which zoning capacity on paper is not yet capacity built on the ground — and the Accord's clock does not pause for a court date.
The Housing Delivery Authority raises a related concern about who benefits first: its fast-track pathway favours large, well-capitalised developers above roughly $60 million and 100 homes, while the smaller infill projects LMR envisages still move through the ordinary, slower council system. A pipeline of 117,000 potential homes at the HDA's 12-month review measures projects declared eligible for fast-tracking, not homes approved, financed or completed.
Finally, the government inherited most of the scarcity it is trying to fix. Sydney's price-to-income ratio had already climbed for three decades under governments of both parties, driven by planning restrictions, population growth and federal tax settings — negative gearing and the capital gains discount — outside any state's control. What this government chose, rather than inherited, is the sequencing: a demand-side stamp duty concession in its first Budget, ahead of harder supply-side rezoning more than a year later, and an LMR policy pushed through on a compressed consultation timetable that maximised conflict with the councils it needed to implement it well.
What they got right — and the honest caveats
Credit where due: no NSW government in a generation had rezoned established suburbs at this scale, attached an in-perpetuity affordable-housing mandate to a major precinct, or built a dedicated fast-track authority for large housing projects. Approval speed has genuinely improved on the government's own reporting, and the $6.6 billion Building Homes for NSW package is a real, multi-year commitment, not a one-off announcement — 1,711 new social and affordable homes were built or restored in 2024-25 under it (NSW Government, Homes NSW, 2025, approx.). The honest caveat is timing: TOD and LMR describe capacity over horizons extending well past this term, so the fairest test — whether 377,000 homes actually arrive by 2029 — cannot yet be run on today's data. That verdict remains open.
The risk to the future
A rezoned map that never becomes a built city
The risk is not that the Minns government chose the wrong lever — planning reform is, on the evidence, the correct one for a state to pull. The risk is a widening gap between rezoned capacity and completed homes, as councils litigate exemptions, builder insolvencies and trade shortages keep construction capacity below the Accord's run-rate, and financing conditions make marginal medium-density projects unviable even where now legally permitted. If that gap persists to 2029, NSW arrives at the deadline with a transformed planning map and a completions record much like this article's chart — and a 12.6-year deposit timeline that lengthens rather than shortens.
The deeper stake is generational. Home ownership underpins the retirement-income system's core assumption — that most households own outright by the time they draw the pension — and every year added to the deposit-saving timeline pushes more Sydneysiders toward retirement still renting, with less capacity to absorb the cost shocks of old age. It also concentrates ownership in households with property to lend against through family help, turning a once broadly achievable marker of a fair go into something closer to inherited privilege. The test of this reform program is whether it is still possible, before this decade closes, to prove that trajectory wrong.