MB has devoted a lot of time explaining the ‘dis-economies of scale’ attacked to major infrastructure projects in Australia’s large cities, which drives up average costs for existing residents.
These dis-economies of scale arise because in already built-out cities like Sydney and Melbourne, which also happen to be the major magnets for new migrants, the cost of retrofitting infrastructure to accommodate greater population densities can become prohibitively expensive because of the need for land buy-backs, tunnelling, as well as disruptions to existing infrastructure.
