The Age’s Catherine Ford penned a drivelling article over the weekend lamenting the “rogue virus” of sprawling cookie-cutter housing developments proliferating across Melbourne:
The views from the train are now choked with the usual bleak and dystopian housing developments, and I found myself spilling tears.
The “estates” on this land have spread – as they have in countless other places – like a rogue virus… filling them with indistinguishable houses packed together without space or tree between them.
It is a deeply demoralising sight if you believe that housing shapes societies, or that people deserve to live in places, especially newly constructed places, which offer a modicum of progressive urban planning and design – let alone shade – and half a chance of existing happily and sustainably.
Of course, nowhere in the article did Ms Ford bother to mention what is driving this development: the federal government’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy, which has driven an insane 1.2 million increase in Melbourne’s population in just 13 years:
And is projected to expand Melbourne’s population to more than 8 million people mid-century:
Obviously, if you want to add ~100,000 people to Melbourne every year, then you will need a lot of buildings and fast. All these millions of extra people inundating Melbourne will need somewhere to live. And this will necessarily involve a combination of further urban sprawl, increased density through high-rises, and overall smaller and more expensive housing.
This is why Infrastructure Australia projects that Melbourne’s liveability will deteriorate further through worsening traffic congestion and less access to jobs, schools, hospitals and green space, under every build-out scenario:
Besides, it’s not like residents aren’t already being crammed into shoe box apartments, which have become the dominant form of new housing in Melbourne to cater for this growth:
As long as the federal government persists with the mass immigration “Big Australia” policy, then urban sprawl will continue. So if you don’t like sprawl, Ms Ford, then lobby to slash immigration. It’s that simple.
