Updated September 8, 2026 — 1:56pm,first published 10:47amThe eastern suburbs skyline would be dramatically transformed with high-rise towers as tall as 34 storeys under NSW government plans to add 9400 new homes.Draft plans revealed on Tuesday show varied building heights of 34 storeys around Edgecliff station and 32 storeys around a to-be-built Woollahra station as part of a state government plan to ramp up housing supply east of Sydney’s CBD.Aerial render of Woollahra and Edgecliff station upzoning.Woollahra Council lashed the proposal as a “disaster”. The housing uplift was supported by the state’s opposition, but the Liberals came out swinging against a plan to slug developers $15,000 per home built within 800 metres of Woollahra train station to help fund construction as a “tax on developers”.The draft plans also include seven new parks, nine kilometres of new walking and cycling connections and a new Woollahra local centre which the government has promised will create more jobs and provide local services.The new homes would be built over the next 20 years over 168 hectares of eastern suburbs land, with 40 per cent of new homes to be delivered within 200 metres of a train station, with the new Woollahra heavy rail station to open in 2029. The aim of the rezoning proposal is to enable private developers to build taller and more dense projects, and there won’t be any government led compulsory acquisition of land.The draft plans also include a requirement for a diversity of studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments in the new developments.Premier Chris Minns said on Tuesday it wasn’t fair to ask the western suburbs to carry the burden of increasing Sydney’s housing stock, but conceded the rezoning was unlikely to combat the affordable housing crisis. The proposal includes a 3 per cent affordable housing contribution in perpetuity, or 15 per cent in selected buildings.“There is affordable housing as a part of this plan, but I’m not going to lie to you – this is not a proposal to solve Sydney’s affordable housing problems, and if this was the only thing we were doing, we’d deserve to be knocked for it, but it’s not,” Minns said.When asked why the 3 per cent affordable housing target was so low, Minns said he had been distressed by the number of projects that hadn’t gone ahead because developers were turned off by a local government affordable housing target.Liberal housing spokesman Chris Rath said his party supports more housing in the eastern suburbs, but said plans to charge developers to help with train station construction costs came at a time when the construction industry could least afford it.“We’ve had Bathla collapse just in the last two weeks, we’ve had the highest number of insolvencies in the construction sector in the last financial year,” Rath said.“We don’t think it’s a good idea to put a new $15,000 tax on every new home that’s built in Woollahra and Edgecliff. It’s not a tax that any other part of Sydney needs to pay.”The rezoning plans will likely trigger local backlash as residential Woollahra streets with mostly two-storey homes and low-density unit blocks are rezoned to accommodate towers as tall as 34 storeys.An artist’s impression of how the Edgecliff Centre would look.