In Melbourne – where Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan recently pledged to encourage a boom in multi-storey apartment buildings across inner-city suburbs – some are fighting the push for density.  

One such person is Toorak Village Residents Action Group president Tony Fialides, who told The New Daily government should develop in the regions rather than trying to “cram everyone into apartments” in the inner city.

Toorak is one of the pricey inner-Melbourne suburbs included in the 50 new ‘activity zones’ earmarked for more development announced by Allan, which the government hopes will deliver 300,000 additional homes near public transport by 2051.

Exact height limits are unknown, but buildings closer to public transport will be taller, while construction near existing homes – which are still walkable distance from transport – will be smaller.

Another storey

If the 50 zones follow the path set by a similar announcement for 10 new zones earlier in the year, the apartment buildings could reach up to 20 storeys.

Victoria’s move follows a similar push to rezone land in several Sydney suburbs, and Brisbane’s decision to allow buildings in South Brisbane to reach as high as those in the city’s CBD.

All are changes made in the face of rising criticism of those cities’ incredibly tight housing and rental markets.

Melbourne is on its way to becoming Australia’s biggest city, with a 3.3 per cent population growth rate as opposed to Sydney’s 2.8 per cent.

Fialides argued no one living in a suburban environment would look forward to “giant structures” alongside them.

“It’s understandable in some countries where they haven’t got the space, but we’re not like that,” he said.

“We have got the room to develop outer [suburbs], and if the transport was adequate to these outer suburbs, people would flock to them.”

Regional cities ignored

Three hours’ drive from Melbourne, the Victorian regional city of Wodonga, along with neighbouring NSW city Albury, was once earmarked as a development centre to take population pressure off Melbourne and Sydney.

It was hoped Albury-Wodonga’s combined population would go from less than 50,000 in the 1970s to 300,000 by the year 2000.

More than two decades on, the current combined population of the cities sits about 100,000.

The cities are by no means stagnant; both have been considered among the fastest-growing regional cities in their states.

But locals think more could be done to reach what was dreamed up decades ago.

Business Wodonga CEO Graham Jenkin said despite seeing a lot of housing development and industrial work, Wodonga often felt forgotten by the Victorian government.

 

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“It has been long said amongst locals here that as far as the Victorian government is concerned, north-east Victoria finishes at Seymour, and … the further you get up the … highway, the less the funding becomes,” he said.

“It would be great to see more Victorian government initiatives … That could be decentralisation of government departments; it has been done before.

“We have a tax office … in Albury that serves a large part of Australia. So there’s certainly opportunities that could be taken up if people had the vision and the funding to do it.”

Building density in and out of capital cities

CoreLogic head of research Eliza Owen said housing development in regional centres should “absolutely” be pursued.

But it did not have to come at the expense of increasing population density in Australian capital cities, which are far less dense than other major cities worldwide, she said.

‘There’s a lot more development potential in our cities which we’re not really tapping into,” she said.

Density increases in both inner cities, their outskirts and regional cities must be accompanied by infrastructure to support good quality of life, said Paul Burton, professor of urban management and planning at Griffith University’s Cities Research Institute.

That means easy access to essentials like groceries, medical services, schools and green spaces – emphasising the requirement for good public transport – as well as healthy dwelling design and construction.

Wrong priorities

But high costs and low profit margins, especially for large-scale apartment buildings, meant those needs are typically not given enough priority.

“They say, ‘We’re building investor-grade apartments’. So the people that are buying these apartments are not going to live in them. [They] know the rental market is so desperate and tight that [renters] take anything, so [they] don’t really care,” Burton said.

“It’s awful, but there’s a lot of that going on … We’ve just finished a study looking at construction standards of multi-storey residential apartments.

“If you just bought an apartment off the plan in Sydney, I’d say there’s a 50-50 chance that you’ve bought something that will have significant defects that become apparent within five years.”

All roads lead to public transport

Australia differs from many countries in that its urban settlement pattern is dominated by “half a dozen major cities”, UNSW City Futures Research Centre professor in built environment Bill Randolph said.

He said the main issue with “suburban sprawl” was continued dominance of CBDs for workplaces and a lack of public transport expansion into fringe suburbs, leading to dependence on cars and ensuing issues with traffic congestion and pollution.

A lack of public transport options also stifles regional city growth.

“Australia has been not very proactive in shifting out to rural regional centres,” Randolph said.

“The problem is transport infrastructure.

“To make it work, you’re not only going to have the transport, but you’ve got to have jobs. So you’ve got to move jobs into places, or encourage jobs to move into places, and that’s difficult.”

Government action needed

He said federal and state governments needed to take the lead and provide the money for significant change, because private enterprise would not do so on its own.

Apart from investing in public transport and service expansion, the trusted method of decentralising government offices by moving them to regional cities – as seen already in areas like Albury – could also help stimulate population and economic growth.

States such as NSW also previously encouraged regional growth through grants for home owners and skilled workers willing to move from metropolitan areas to the regions.

“We should seriously look at our settlement pattern and see if we can’t start to move the concentrations away from Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, particularly into some serious regional centres, and start to build those up,” Randolph said.