Buying storeys: how Anzac Parade developers pay for height, and the affordable-housing return is banked as cash

On the Randwick City Council planning-agreements portal, exhibited between 16 March and 13 April 2026, a single line sets a price. For a development at 16-18 Rainbow Street, the affordable-housing contribution is recorded not as a number of dwellings but as a sum of money: A$1,607,613.75. Not homes. A figure.

That line is the mechanism this section exists to document. Along Anzac Parade, a developer can build higher than the base planning controls allow. In return, the public is meant to receive a benefit. The open question, the one the public record does not resolve, is whether the benefit that comes back is worth as much as the height that is sold.

01The corridor with a height dial

Anzac Parade runs south from the city through Kensington and Kingsford, past the University of New South Wales and toward the light rail. In December 2019, Randwick City Council released the outcome of a rezoning for this stretch, known as Kingsford to Kensington, or K2K.

Read that as a dial. The base setting is 7 to 9 storeys. At three points on the parade the dial can be turned up to 18. Turning it up is not automatic. It is negotiated, and the vehicle for the negotiation is a voluntary planning agreement.

A voluntary planning agreement, or VPA, is a contract between a council and a developer. The developer wants something the standard rules do not give freely: extra height, extra floor space, extra yield. The council can agree, on the condition that the developer provides a public benefit in return. Community infrastructure. Public space. Affordable housing. The agreement is put on public exhibition before it is signed, which is why the numbers on the Rainbow Street file are visible at all.

The 5 per cent affordable-housing target is the public's stated share of the deal. When a project is granted extra density, a slice of that density is meant to come back as homes let below market rent, a policy space governed at state level by the Housing SEPP. The target is the promise. What follows is how the promise is being settled.

02Cash instead of keys

There are two ways to deliver an affordable-housing obligation. The first is homes: the developer builds the dwellings, or dedicates them, and they exist as physical apartments on the site, tenanted below market rate. The second is money: the developer pays a cash sum, a monetary contribution, into a fund the council holds for affordable housing to be delivered elsewhere, or later.

The Rainbow Street file shows the second path.

The distinction is not academic. A home on the site is a home a person can live in, at that address, for as long as it stays in the scheme. A contribution is a number that enters a fund. The homes it is meant to become depend on where and when the council can spend it, on land prices at that future point, and on construction costs that do not fall. The obligation is discharged the moment the cheque clears. The housing is deferred.

The obligation is discharged the moment the cheque clears. The housing is deferred.

None of this is unlawful, and none of it is hidden. Monetary contributions are a standard, permitted way to satisfy a planning obligation, and the applicant here is exercising a lawful option that the council itself offers. The point is not that a rule was broken. The point is what the choice does to the public's 5 per cent: it converts a promise of homes into a promise of money that must later be turned back into homes, at a price nobody has fixed.

03The Kensington number, marked estimated

Further along the parade, a second agreement shows the same shape at a larger scale, and shows the council being careful about its own figures.

Two things on that line matter. First, the council calls the sums estimated. They are not settled totals; they are projections that can move before the agreement is executed. We carry the word forward because the record does. Second, and this is the detail a reader should hold onto: 177-197 Anzac Parade is a 655-bed student accommodation development, not general housing.

Student accommodation is a legitimate land use, and student beds are homes to the students in them. But a bed in a managed student block is not the same public good as an affordable apartment a family can rent on the open register. When the return on a large uplift is a contribution attached to a student-housing project, the public's 5 per cent is being met in a form quite different from the one most residents picture when they hear the words affordable housing.

04The number nobody has published

Here is the gap in the record, stated plainly, and stated as a question rather than an accusation.

Extra height has a value. Two more storeys, or nine more, on a site on Anzac Parade is extra floor space, and extra floor space is extra apartments to sell or beds to rent. That value can be estimated. Valuers do it routinely, and it is the reason a VPA exists at all: the developer is paying for something worth paying for.

The contribution also has a value. A$1,607,613.75 at Rainbow Street. Around A$4.6 million, estimated, at Kensington. Those are the numbers the public gets back.

We are not asserting that the money is worth less than the height. We do not have a figure for the uplift's value, and the exhibited agreements do not carry one either. That is exactly the point. The one comparison that would tell the public whether the deal is fair, the value of what was sold set against the value of what came back, is the comparison the documents do not make. The price of the storeys is visible. The value of the storeys is not.

When a decision route lets a public benefit be converted into cash whose adequacy is never tested on the record, it belongs to the pattern this masthead files under The Democratic Bypass: outcomes that are lawful, documented, and yet arranged so that the public's share is settled without the public ever being shown the sum that would let it judge the trade. A deemed refusal appeal to the Land and Environment Court, or a determination by the Sydney Eastern City Planning Panel, would each generate its own paper trail. A negotiated contribution, banked as money, need not.

The corridor is being built. The heights are being turned up. The contributions are being recorded to the cent. What is not recorded, anywhere the public can read it, is the one line that would close the loop: is the cash worth the sky it buys. Until that line exists, the return on Anzac Parade's height is a promise held in a fund, and the value of the height is a private figure the public record leaves blank.

If it's a rort, we cover it.