The Greater Sydney Creative Spaces Affordability Study
Client: City of Sydney
Partners: CBRE and Property Council of Australia
Location: Greater Sydney, Australia
Year: 2025
Screenshot of the report’s executive summary Source: Left Bank Co.
Brief
Following years of working closely with both the property and the creative sector, the City of Sydney and Left Bank Co knew that affordability was a slippery concept and that lacking a definition for it in the context of Greater Sydney was leading to misunderstandings and missed collaboration opportunities. The brief for this study was to define and qualify affordability of creative space to mean something more specific than ‘below market’ and to understand whether affordable spaces are attainable through the market, without intervention.
Approach
Left Bank Co worked closely with the City of Sydney, CBRE and the Property Council of Australia to do a major review of all factors impacting affordability and international precedents that attempt to define affordability of creative spaces. The methodology primarily relied on the collection of quantitative data via two surveys (one directed at creative workers, the other to creative space operators) and a series of in-depth interviews with workers, operators and property owners. This enabled us to understand ‘what people pay’ but to qualify that with an understanding of the workarounds and sacrifices made to stay in the creative workspace market. Based on the results, policy sprints to explore market-led to policy interventions were conducted with a range of stakeholders at local and state government level and private sector players. This has led to detailed recommendations for intervention and the creative of a ‘Creative Spaces’ scheme that defines and protects this unique use in our cities.
Impact
This study has helped us understand that affordability of creative spaces (whereby a creative worker or business can pay for workspace without impacting the sustainability of its business) is a threshold that was crossed long ago for most workers and operators. With low to very low confidence as to whether they’ll be able to stay in their spaces in the next 12 months, this study shows that Sydney’s creative space supply is under unprecedented threat and that intervention to slow the disappearance of these spaces is needed.
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