Comment

Jacob Saulwick

Jacob Saulwick is City Editor at The Sydney Morning Herald.

NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes in front of a Redfern terrace.

Terrace takeover: coming soon to your suburb

It's the type of message you might read on a poster at the physio: "Visualise the process, not the result." But it might contain some truth. Or at least truth enough to lodge in your mind while you wait on a frayed hamstring. And to return to when you're thumbing through planning laws…

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on a train in Sydney's west.

It's nice Turnbull catches trains; it would be nicer if he built them

In the coming year, Malcolm Turnbull will hopefully start to justify all those pictures of himself catching the train. And when he gets to working out how to justify those pictures, the prime minister will not find himself short of suggestions for things he could do for the city, and particularly for western Sydney.

The shape of development across Sydney remains uneven.

The Sydney suburbs that have avoided change

The release this week of district plans by the Greater Sydney Commission potentially foreshadows a new era in Sydney planning, which may mean a new look and feel for the city's neighbourhoods and for how we move between them. There is that possibility. But it is also apparent that, for all the power of the documents, the district plans at this stage largely imply the continuation of the status quo.

house flag generic US

The US scheme that trumps Sydney on affordable housing

It should be embarrassing that the US has such a better federal scheme for providing affordable housing than we do in Australia – a scheme embraced not just by community housing providers, but by a bipartisan politic.