The ABC has published an interesting article calling for developers to build more three bedroom apartments in order to provide families with ‘affordable’ inner city housing options and reduce urban sprawl:
On Tuesday, Lochlan Sinclair, an architect and design manager at Neometro, will join a panel of experts at MPavilion to discuss High Density Happiness: In Defence Of The Three-Bedroom Apartment.
Mr Sinclair said he believed that in order for Melbourne to maintain its reputation as one of the world’s most liveable cities, the design of apartment buildings must be reviewed.
“As a city, we need to start considering better housing for families in apartments,” he told ABC Radio Melbourne.
“We’re going through an unprecedented housing boom at the moment and we need to really start looking at apartment living as a bona fide option to ensure that we keep Melbourne’s footprint at a reasonable size and a sustainable size, that doesn’t put a heavy onus on our infrastructure.”
Mr Sinclair said while there was a lot of discussion around the oversupply of apartments in Melbourne, the problem actually lies in the design of many of the buildings.
“I think it’s probably a fair comment to say that we’re building too many of the wrong type of apartments”…
“We need to be building good apartments and appropriately sized apartments so they’re able to be lived in as a family home for a long duration”…
Mr Sinclair believes larger apartments could be a cheaper alternative to a standalone house.
All fair points.
Few would deny that the boom in shoe-box apartments across Melbourne has failed to deliver affordable housing options for our most important demographic: young families.
Instead of creating a sustainable economy that works for Australian families, the city has built a whole bunch of expensive shoe boxes in the sky that are marketed for quick profit to investors (both domestic and foreign) and entirely inappropriate for resident families.
Meanwhile, those families seeking established homes are having to compete for entry level stock against a never-ending army of negatively geared investors, thus either forcing them to take on jumbo-sized mortgages or becoming long-term renters.
Alternatively, families seeking a new detached home on the fringe are having to pay exorbitant sums for a postage stamp-sized lot, courtesy of the artificial restrictions on land supply and the hyper-inflation of lot values experienced over the past 15 years.
That said, building more three bedroom apartments will only work to ameliorate housing stress if they are priced at ‘affordable’ levels.
Last year, The AFR produced the below table showing the average price and size of apartments being built across various parts of Melbourne:
As you can see, apartments in the CBD were being priced at more than $10,000 per square metre, with surrounding areas only slightly below this level.
The average price of a tiny one-bedroom apartment ranged from $410,000 to $506,000, which rose to more than $580,000 for a two-bedroom apartment and $800,000 or more for a three-bedroom apartment.
Paying over $800,000 for a modest three bedroom apartment hardly qualifies as ‘affordable’, especially when ongoing body corporate fees are added into the mix.
Melbourne (and Australia) needs cheaper housing across the board, period.
