We all want a village “feel” to our city and we like green, leafy suburbs. We want our family to live close by. We want housing to be affordable. We say so at every planning event. What we actually get is expensive, boring, concrete cubes for homes, shops and offices. Our families live in the outer suburbs. We feel constricted. Commuting is slower every month. Where do we go wrong?
Land, especially near city centres, has become very expensive. This rise in land prices is not because land is scarce in Australia; it’s just scarce in the places where we need it. Our low-rise homes and offices lock up the surface and the air space above them. The price of land has become a silent, non-productive tax on living and on doing business.
Building height and density restrictions deter growth in knowledge industries. Across the world we see that innovation thrives on the exchange of ideas when people live and work in well planned cities where people are close together. Lots of research shows a link between our skills base and the tendency to create new kinds of work. New job categories appear where there are more highly skilled workers. There is ample statistical evidence to show a link between population and productivity. Workers build knowledge faster in cities with lots of idea industries. People clustered together boost each other’s employment opportunities and potential income. We need more of this in WA to take us beyond mining.
It’s easy to see why we began imposing building restrictions. The crowded slums of the last two centuries showed how crime, disease, polluted air and filthy water reduced our quality of life. Such regulations expanded, bringing unintended consequences that limited our potential. We saw the shoulder to shoulder towers of New York and the featureless towers of the Gold Coast and didn’t like what we saw. What we got was short, squat office blocks and neighbourhoods without amenity; just heaps of plain offices here and houses without community there.
Looking to the future, if limits on height and density were relaxed less land would be needed to satisfy accommodation and commercial demand. This would take pressure off prices, meaning that we could allow more land for public space and our families could afford to buy a home. The greatest effect would be felt by those on low to middle income, whether they were buying or renting their homes. Thomas Piketty showed in “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” that house prices contribute to rising inequality.
The greatest effect of relaxing laws would be on boosting the whole economy. As worker productivity increases, the whole community benefits. This extends even to those not living in the effected near-city areas. At present many workers take jobs in lower-paying areas just because they can’t afford to live where the good work is located. Stamp Duty on house sales acts as a further disincentive to move to more productive locations. Labour allocates itself to low-productivity markets and the whole economy suffers.
Defining the problem is easy. Getting individual Councils to change planning schemes is the difficult bit. The results would benefit everybody. Rich land owners with a narrow self-interest are likely to be the chief opponents. Since the State Government would benefit by larger tax revenues from a growing economy they could move to compensate the affected nearby landowners on a reducing scale over a few years.
This is a big picture view for a better future. We can extend this theme to better transport, a cleaner environment and a stronger community. What are your thoughts?
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7 comments:
I agree Pete.
People are scared of change.
High quality highrise in South Perth is nothing like highrise slums in other countries.
I also think there is a fair amount of snobbery. People who live in South Perth want it to themselves. People in back row apartments don't want their views blocked. The answer to that is ..... buy in the front row.
I fully agree as well. We have become so conservative and resistant to anything unfamiliar that all change is seen as a threat. High density living is exciting and productive, and the social interaction it promotes is beneficial. And frankly, Perth can't continue to expand laterally to infinity.
These ideas will prove to be incorrect as time goes by. 29 stories in South Perth REALLY? Who would want to live in a building of that size, not people who can afford a better option. Good quality high rise is not 29 stories but yea that is what they will be building and before you know it they will be slums, because anybody who can afford it will not want to live there. Where are these so called affordable high rise going to be built, South Perth, Nedlands, Cottesloe etc, what a joke, these will be million dollar apartments, who benefits? The property developers that is who. Even if you build these high rise in further out suburbs and make them cheap enough to accommodate all of the low socioeconomic people, drug takers, criminals, no hopers, dole bludgers, migrants from cultures that do not fit with ours, causing racial problems, fights etc. This all equals more crime for those that live there. Why should Australian people have to have their lifestyle changed to such an extent to accommodate more people from overseas? Why are we not working to SAVE the wonderful lifestyle that Western Australia is so well known for. Why are we allowing the place to become OVERPOPULATED, why do WE have to follow what so many other western countries have done, most of which has turned them into places where people are leaving in droves to come and live here. Why should our kids have to live off the ground, where they cannot learn to ride a bike, where they cannot build a cubby in a tree house. Where they can no longer go barefoot. No where to play for kids breeds bad kids, breeds poor kids, breeds discontented adults. You just have to look at the big cities around the world to see it, but you will need to take your blinkers off. Why should we have to be squashed in like sardines in a sardine tin? Living in one another's pockets should not be something that we subscribe to. WHY is this idea of squashing everybody up such a good one, because it means more money for the property developers. BIG business. WHY?
If you're right and I have no doubt you've sincerely studied the opinions of others and their studies which were sponsored by????? the real need was, is and remains a new city somewhere north - take the Eastern seaboard, say we start at Melbourne - you've got Melbourne itself, Sydney, Brisbane and in between places like Newcastle, Cairns and so on. We have Esperance to Albany, Bunbury, Perth and so on, collectively not even the population of one of the major Eastern cities and that is the planning failure. WA has just had the greatest opportunity to develop blown to pieces because, I believe of vested interests who sponsored studies to come to conclusions like yours. The Greens want to set animals free but cage humans, developers love high rise they make fortunes, councils and government love them because it multiplies rates and taxes etc on single land areas.
Infrastructure will become less affordable is you shrink the city - government has to supply services where people live, shrink the city less people live on the outer, same services for less people = less revenue. No need to explain that.
I suspect many are the victims of cleaver marketing, just like the company that wanted to bottle water and sell it, yes water, the same as comes out of a tap at home, engaged a PR company who convinced people that's tap water was bad for them and there you have it. Want to be a developer of high rise, convince governments and certain parts of the community of the so called benefits and there you have it.
So please stop promoting the future crime ridden slums and hot houses and start promoting decentralisation of the population so that our state rather than our city gets developed for the benefit of its people and not vested interests.
Far better to be "poor" with space than poor and locked up.
Peter, would you mind declaring what you do for a living and whether you have some past or present professional relationship or connection with or reliance on the development industry? I have no such connections.
Where did we go wrong? I don’t think “we”,ie the wider community have gone wrong. I and most of the community is not responsible for the current state of planning and development in WA. The planning bureaucrats and top decision makers have got this wrong for years and have created and allowed developers to exploit every loophole and having discretionary powers and standards is part of the problem.
The system is now totally in favour of and about promoting development rather than about fulfilling its original and proper purpose – to protect the community and local amenity from inappropriate development. We need to get back to that original rationale. When that is achieved, IMO people will be more inclined to accept change because they will trust the process is set up to look after their interests too and not just of developers.
Outcomes have got worse since the implementation of the DAPs and the newish discretionary powers bestowed on the Minister to spot rezone on the application of developers and to impose local planning schemes on any area, with even less real say tnah previously by the local community and councils. Councils are responsive to the local community directly affected by any individual development via their elected status while DAPs and the Minister are not.
The community is justifiably suspicious of change because of the way it has been done and the many poor outcomes. Redevelopment of parts of Subiaco is an example and is an acknowledged failure. The larger redevelopments approved by the SRA and majority Government appointed DAPS since 2011, are cheap looking, poor quality, soulless and at street level are alienating and do not promote lingerability. They have not added to the amenity, they have taken away from it IMO. The redevelopment has not created the vibrancy promised and there is less sense of community in those areas than elsewhere in Subiaco.
The call for less regulation is simplistic and is what developers and the Property Council always demand, understandably out of self interest. The community’s interest is not represented by those groups. Strict prescriptive regulation and standards are necessary to protect residents, property values , the community and the amenity of our City and suburbs from rapacious developers who do not take no for an answer and have no care for the local area and long term impacts of their developments.
I have tried in my own small way to get better outcomes by being involved in local council and DAP decision making in the very limited way that any individual can but the community is now effectively powerless to influence DAP decision making ie on non-single residential development over $3m in value ( soon to be reduced, to $1.7m?). Such decision making is may only be appealed by developers. Properly interested members of the public such as neighbours and community organisations have no right to appeal any decision or even be heard (at SAT appeals/reviews). Worse, DAP decisions are often made in secret.
In the eastern states, affected parties have a right of appeal about bad planning and development decision making. It is undemocratic and against the principles of a free society that the State’s (delegated) planning and development decision making is not able to be challenged on the merits by properly interested third parties.
It is galling to be told that “we”, in so far as this refers to the wider community, have got it wrong when the community over the last 25 years in particular, has been increasingly sidelined and disempowered and have had little to do with what has gone on over that period.
Good heavens! I was about write in a simple, "Very well said, Peter", until I read "Anonymous said..." x2 and "Bill Blake said..." who have reminded me, somewhat rudely, about the depths of antipathy out there, somewhere in Anonland. No introspection, no hint of those three commenters thinking, "Maybe it's me who is out of touch, not them (developers, Ministers, town planners, DAPs, architects, civil engineers, the real estate industry, builders, Peter Best, etc)?"
It's all very good and easy to say that cities need to be built in a certain way, but cities like Perth and the major business centres that have been around for centuries, you can't raze things to the ground just to rebuild it more efficiently. We have to make do with what we have.
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