Last night, Martin North from Digital Finance Analytics appeared on 60 Minutes where he warned that “Australia has built a generation of properties that could become slums in just 20 years”:
Mr North criticised developers and the housing industry for “throwing up” high-rise buildings at such alarmingly fast rates.
He warned viewers that significant defects and safety concerns are imminent.
“We have so many properties across Australia which are being thrown up, or have been thrown up, with significant defects in them,” Mr North said.
“I think we’ve built a generation of properties that frankly could become slums in 20 or 30 years”…
Former NSW Treasury Michael Lambert weighed in on the report, telling 60 Minutes there is a high risk developers and builders are cutting corners in order to get properties on the market as quickly as possible.
“I think you’ll find that there’s a large number of projects where there are defects occurring… there’s thousands,” Mr Lambert said.
The proliferation of poorly build high-rise apartments is really a symptom of Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ policy.
With cities like Sydney and Melbourne growing so rapidly (see next chart), lots of dwellings needed to be built very quickly. This inevitably meant that build quality was compromised, aided by poor regulation and oversight as well as urban planners’ infatuation with in-fill development and opposition to ‘sprawl’.
The proliferation of shoddy high-rise is likely to continue, too, as Sydney’s and Melbourne’s populations balloon to a projected 10 million each in around 50 years:
Such manic immigration-fuelled population growth will necessarily require the rapid construction of high-rise shoe boxes, resulting in compromised quality.
In fact, the Urban Taskforce projects that Sydney will transform into a high-rise ‘battery chook’ city mid-century, with only one quarter of homes being detached houses, down significantly from 55% in 2016:
The bottom-line is that if you want better quality apartments to be built, stop feeding the construction industry hundreds of thousands of migrants every year.
Slashing immigration will allow developers to take their time on construction, forcing them to compete on quality over quantity.
