The Victorian state government released a statement yesterday that they were to increase the amount of available land in Melbourne to 90,000 extra blocks in three signalled growth corridors on the outskirts of Melbourne. This has been in response to an escalating problem of housing affordability in the city itself, something that is affecting the two largest cities in Australia. Both Sydney and Melbourne are suffering from a scarcity of available properties, which has seen the price of housing increase at an unheard of rate. Home buyers have had to endure a continuous rise in the price of dwellings, while there has been no corresponding increase in wages, coupled with rising daily living expenses and increasing interest rates on borrowing money. Indeed, this is a complicated part of economics that would warrant extensive analysis of causes and effects, and this author is ill qualified to make statements on what would be a way to cut what is appearing to become an even more tightly bound Gordian knot.
However, this piece is more about the problematic nature of announcing the land release to alleviate the problem of unaffordable housing. There are inherent problems with governments that automatically react in a knee-jerk manner to such crises, and it creates for even more long term problems than the short term issues that it promises to solve.
Firstly, the land releases are on the fringes of the city. That is not a problem, as they have been designated growth corridors for some time, and there is a distinct lack of land anywhere closer in that could be released for residential use. However, while it is early days, the problems that have occurred with other areas that have been released for residential housing highlight some problems of poor planning that has plagued Melbourne.
If people live within a 10 – 12km radius of the city, then they are still within a zone where there is good public transport and a road network that, while probably slow, still allows a good variety of flows across and in and out of the city. Beyond the 12km radius, you reach what this author has dubbed “Commuter hell”. This is where traffic is funnelled along a number of major arterial corridors, and there is a lack of good public transport infrastructure (reliant on low density, non-renewable resource-using dependent transit services), inefficiently planned neighbourhoods where there is excessive resource usage. The list goes on.
There are so many examples of this problem across the board in Melbourne. From Doncaster, where there has been a serious need for some sort of mass transit service for years, yet it remains serviced by buses along, Rowville, another example of a boom suburb in Melbourne that is heavily dependent on cars due to a lack of serious infrastructure, to the newer suburbs such as Tarneit, Caroline Springs, etc.
The facts are these: The developed world has to seriously reconsider a massive redevelopment of how it builds cities and makes them grow. This is especially prevalent in cities in young countries, such as Australia and the USA, where cities sprawl to the size of small countries in Europe. The age of the vehicle as the primary form of transportation is over, and the development of mass transportation systems (e.g: rail) should be paramount. Rebuilding and reconstructing cities to increase population density should be the norm rather than the exception, along with embracing environmentally sustainable design using renewable resources. Further to this would be designing and constructing buildings and their facilities so they last, for say, over 100 years. New housing estates should be built to increase population density per square km, and have proper services in place (such as a good shopping centre, health services, good public transport), through smaller and more efficient housing, smaller land plots, better design of road structures, and forward planning.
This is just a teaser of what this author recommends as a path to city development. Australia is not a country of infinite resources, and neither is it a country that has a lack of intellect, wisdom or ability. However, the government needs to recognise that this announcement needs to come with a strong plan on how to move forward, see the past mistakes and their flaws, and not make the same mistakes again. Also, righting some of the wrongs of the past and fixing existing holes in infrastructure will improve the overall liveability of the city itself.
