Katie Roberts-Hull, a member of YIMBY Melbourne, penned an article in The Guardian claiming that heritage laws are preventing the provision of housing supply.
“Our fondness for nostalgic aesthetics and preserving character should not overshadow the need for more housing”, Roberts-Hull says.
“Often, the loudest voices against new development come from a privileged few who already own property in these neighbourhoods”.
“Any policy that limits development in established suburbs promotes unsustainable outward sprawl”.
“Our cities are not museums. As our population grows, our built environment needs to adapt and change”.
“Unfortunately, our heritage policies aim to keep many parts of our city trapped in a moment in time, no matter the cost of doing so”, Roberts-Hull argues.
Why is it that people like Katie Roberts-Hull only look at the supply-side of the equation?
Australia builds nearly double the number of homes per capita than the OECD average:
Yet we always find ourselves short of housing because of the federal government’s extreme immigration policy, which has seen Melbourne’s population grow by nearly half this century alone.
Ongoing extreme immigration is also predicted to nearly double Melbourne’s population by 2060 – something almost no resident actually wants.
If our politicians didn’t grow our population like a science experiment via extreme immigration, housing wouldn’t be needed so desperately and we wouldn’t need to bulldoze our heritage into high-rise.
Why won’t YIMBY crusaders like Katie Roberts-Hull acknowledge the obvious fact that Australia’s housing problem is really an extreme immigration problem?
YIMBY Melbourne sounds like another astroturfing campaign from property developers, who want open slather development across the city so they can make like bandits from the immigration ponzi.
If there is a housing crisis, why is the government kowtowing to corporations to foist upon us record levels of immigration into perpetuity?
And why does YIMBY Melbourne support this policy rather than rally against it?
