Developers have praised the Victorian Liberal Opposition promise to release land for 290,000 homes from within Melbourne’s existing growth boundary in a bid to ease the city’s housing affordability crisis:
The Urban Development Institute of Australia has long blamed planning inefficiencies in Victoria’s greenfield market for driving up prices. The median lot price surged more than 30 per cent in the year to March, according to a recent report.
The institute’s chief executive Danni Addison said Mr Guy’s plan to streamline processes “will be music to the development industry’s ears”.
“Melbourne’s greenfield suburbs are incredibly desirable to homeowners, but the median lot price is rapidly increasing simply because new lots cannot be produced fast enough,” she said.
Developers have also criticised under-resourced council planning departments, and other authorities such as sewerage, water and power companies, for ballooning title timeframes…
Meanwhile, urban planners have attacked the move, claiming that there are insufficient resources to bring new homes to market in a timely manner:
One senior planner, Bill Forrest, was damning of the Opposition’s plan saying it would worsen existing problems rather than solve housing affordability.
“The affordability problem is not a $500,000 McMansion on the fringe,” he said. “It’s finding a three-bedroom detached house, however small and rundown, within 10 kilometres of the CBD for less than $1 million.”
He said the most unnecessary delays to new housing were not in the planning process but in the provision of schools, trains, buses, police stations, health centres and arterial road duplications.
Mr Forrest, a former director at the outer urban Wyndham Council, and for many years chief executive of Nillumbik Shire Council, said releasing “two to three decades of land supply only spreads the problem wider”.
“The state cannot service so many growth fronts – precinct structure plans are not infrastructure implementation plans and only collect 15 per cent of the funding required.”
Laura Murray, president of the Planning Institute’s Victorian chapter said the opposition needed to urgently commit to significant funding for public transport, roads and infrastructure for Melbourne’s outer areas.
“There are already a number of lots currently waiting to be delivered that are on hold due to the delays in the required infrastructure to these areas,” she said.
And she warned that, were Mr Guy to fast track every metropolitan precinct plan in a bid to reel in land prices, the sudden rush in building would push up construction costs.
“We already know the demand for construction workers [such as] civil engineers is at capacity, and there is a shortage of town planners across the state to deliver these decisions,” Ms Murray said.
The latter is an explicit acknowledgement that Melbourne’s insane immigration-driven population growth, which has seen the city’s population balloon by 1.2 million (33%) in just 13 years:
Has outrun housing supply, thereby destroying affordability.
And with Melbourne’s population projected to balloon to more than 8 million people mid-century:
The solution to the problem is clear: lobby the federal government to slash Australia’s immigration intake back to the historical average of 70,000 people a year from more than 200,000 currently:
None of this is rocket science.
