Urban Renewal and Strata Scheme Termination: Balancing Communal Management and Individual Property Rights

A debate is taking place in Australia regarding potential changes to the legislation governing what proportion of owners must agree before apartment buildings can be redeveloped and whether a collective sale model should be adopted in order to facilitate urban renewal. To date, urban renewal has proven challenging because of difficulties of coordinating renewal within a planning system that relies on the market to deliver housing. This challenge is amplified by the governance framework created to promote multiunit housing—strata title—and associated tensions between communal management and individual property rights. This paper makes particular reference to the implications of this debate in the greater Sydney metropolitan area, which raises universal issues regarding tensions between the government and the market and between individual rights and the collective good. This paper argues that there is a case for changing the legislation, with government involvement required to respond to the significant social issues raised, to guarantee the needs of existing owners and tenants are met, and to ensure that high-quality, economically viable, buildings result.