When less is more: cutting regulatory overkill

The failure of the Queensland Government’s ‘building boost’ to stimulate much activity in the housing construction market proves how hopelessly distracted and flawed policy making has become. This paltry and temporary $10,000 grant to buyers of new housing was supposed to make up for stamp duty hikes and more than a decade of rising regulatory, planning and tax burdens on development which have pushed new home prices skyward. It was never going to work. But the question is, what will?

It’s increasingly looking like a Liberal National Party Government will take the reins at the end of March, and when they do they’ll likely be under considerable pressure to cut taxes in a range of areas - property development and construction included. But the state of the economy and Queensland’s finances are unlikely to permit anything much in the way of big tax reduction measures. The state budget has in the last decade become increasingly dependent on property for revenue to the point that a now weakened property sector (itself the result of over regulation and excessive taxation) is having a magnified effect on the state’s finances. This makes it harder to offer immediate tax relief, however deserved that might be.

There is another lever, though, and one I suspect could have a significant and immediate impact on stimulating development and housing construction, and injecting some mojo into the lacklustre economy generally. A quick and severe curtailment of the regulatory shemozzle that passes for development assessment in Queensland today might just do the trick. 

As The Pulse has noted before, it’s hard to point to anything positive that’s been gained over the last 15 years as regulatory and process-driven paroxysm enveloped the entire domain of planning and urban development.  It now costs much more and takes much longer to do the same thing, in a much less certain (indeed now highly confused) policy environment, than it did 10 or 15 years ago. Simply knowing what can and can’t be done on a particular piece of land is a harder question to answer than it used to be.

This extends even to people’s houses. Relatively simple modifications can now be deemed ‘impact assessable’ under the Sustainable Planning Act, requiring applications to Council and public notification.  The prescribed form of public notice actively invites people to ‘Have your say’.  There’s one of these in my neighbourhood right now – a homeowner wants to knock down part of their house for an extension. I am invited, under SPA, to ‘have my say.’

But is it any of my business? It’s their house on their land, not mine. Provided they comply with whatever building codes apply, why am I being invited to comment on their proposal? Consultation on the planning scheme, when originally drafted, and the codes that make it work, would have been my opportunity to ‘have my say’. It’s absurd to think we have some right to have our say at every stage of the process – from regional planning to local planning and even to individual applications. Little wonder we’re in the mess we’re in.

Here’s what The Act says about public notification:

The purpose of public notification processes is to inform the community and relevant stakeholders of the proposal and to give them the opportunity to:

• make submissions, including objections, that must be taken into account before the application is decided
• secure, for those that make a properly made submission, the right to appeal to the court about the assessment manager’s decision if they disagree with part or all of the decision.

Maybe we’ve been lulled into some sense of entitlement that we have the right to object to pretty much anything people propose to do on their land, even if it complies with the intention of the planning scheme. This is just one example of where processes within processes make outcomes so much harder, and costlier.

Cutting red tape in planning and development assessment is virtually a no-cost way to stimulate the development and construction sector. It’s also been identified by the LNP as a priority, should they win the election in March. In theory, it should be relatively simple. We could start, for example, with a charter of plain English, such that planning schemes will spell out in simple, clear language what is intended in defined areas in the community. The tortured syntax which requires the expensive assistance of a planning consultant or lawyer to decipher can go the way of the waste bin. But doing things in theory is easier than doing things in the real world.

How would the community react, for example, if we committed to our planning schemes in plain English terms, setting out, unambiguously and up front what’s intended and what’s not? The community has their say, but once enacted, the scheme and its regulations are no longer subject to ‘have your say’ (again) opportunities on individual applications. If land has been ‘zoned’ (an old term, which ought to make a comeback in our plain English charter) for townhouses, for example, and someone wants to develop townhouses on their land, then they can get on with it. You can’t have two bites at the cherry. If you don’t like the plan and what it’s producing, or you change your mind, exercise your vote at the next election.

The UDIA recently released a paper “Planning for Queensland’s Future,” the first recommendation of which said pretty much that:

“Recommendation 1 – Front load community consultation at the point of plan making and remove impact assessment for all Class 1a (single detached home, row house, terrace house, town house, villa) and Class 2 buildings (units) where those uses are encouraged under a planning scheme.”

This might sound to some like a great leap backwards to the sort of regulatory environment that prevailed in the late 1980s to early 1990s. But surely, if you’ve just gone through 10 or 15 years or so of the dead hand of bureaucracy and find yourself with an unworkable, expensive and hopelessly cumbersome system that isn’t producing better outcomes, why not revert to something that actually worked better?  It could be as simple as dusting off copies of the old State legislation at the time, and local government planning instruments of the time, and using these as guides for designing a more workable system.

But taking away this sense of entitlement that the community has been led to believe is theirs in terms of objecting to pretty much anything (they call them BANANAs  - ‘build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything’) is going to hurt. The NIMBYs won’t like it. The anti-progress, neophobic  preservationists who seem to think the current urban form is nirvana and nothing should change (neither grow, nor shrink but just stay as it is) will protest. They’ll argue their ‘rights’ to have a say over what someone else can do on their own property have been taken away. There’d be vocal protests about ‘rampant development’ and ‘environmental destruction’ and ‘attacks on democracy’ - all bywords for self interest.

Protests may also come from the legion of planning bureaucrats and policy makers who have slowly but inexorably grown attached to the current system and feed handsomely off its processes. For example, the 270 (approximately) staff of the Sunshine Coast Planning and Development Directorate (who evidently outnumber the ratio of doctors to the general population), might have less to do if the process became much simpler. There might only be a need for 50 of them along with a number of building inspectors. Jobs would be lost.

This sort of thing is the inevitable outcome of cutting red tape. Less red tape must mean fewer bureaucrats administering it. It must logically mean fewer processes, fewer opportunities to ‘have your say’ at every step of a process; fewer opportunities for political or protestor interference in perfectly legitimate developments. It also means that any new systems put in place needs to be vastly more efficient, transparent, and accountable. (Despite the labyrinthine processes of the current approach, you could never accuse it of being either transparent or accountable, and certainly not efficient).

Plain English plan making and community consultation at the plan making stage will mean using a language the community understands – something which might prove difficult for a generation trained in the language of obscurity. (Mark Twain allegedly once wrote: “I did not have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead.”)

It might mean moving (finally) to more visual and sensory platforms for plan making, reducing previously complex arrangements to simple, transparent and readily understood plans. Simply knowing what can and can’t be done on particular blocks of land can’t be too much to expect?

Footnote. I was recently swapping notes on this subject with some contacts spread around the globe. I asked if anyone could actually identify a jurisdiction where the burden of overly complex regulatory environments had been collapsed, and where markets had responded and the economy expanded. Their answer?  ‘How about the former Soviet Union?’ they said. How’s that for a comment about the command and control environment we now live in - that it’s seen as comparable to the sorts of excessive controls that existed before perestroika.

Some New Year Resolutions

In no particular order, here’s a bunch of ideas for resolutions for 2012. Some are a bit tongue in cheek, some are impossible, but maybe one or two just might be worth trying?

We live in a democracy. Consumer preference should lead public policy, not the other way around.

Market forces and consumer preferences are now not just largely ignored, but too frequently the subject of public policy disdain.  Where consumer preferences don’t align with some ideologically driven position, they become the subject of attempts to ‘re-educate’ the public.  Stalin would be proud of how far we’ve come. Instead, in 2012, let’s have some public policy settings that actually ask the question: “what do the majority of people actually want?”  You can’t - and shouldn’t in a free and democratic society at least – impose unwanted ‘solutions’ onto an unwilling public just because someone in a position of power has deemed it’s good for them.

The suburbs are fine, thank you.

If you live in a suburb of one of our cities you could be forgiven for thinking you’re the root of all problems from traffic congestion to obesity to rising seas and falling skies.  Anti-suburban intellectual snobbery isn’t anything new but lately perhaps it’s been getting a bit too much air time? So in 2012, let’s hear a bit less from the anti-suburban elites, and perhaps celebrate the fact that our suburbs have proven remarkably successful as places to live, work and play. There’s a lot that’s right about them, they’re popular with the community, and most of our suburbs were delivered before highly deterministic planning schemes were thought of. (How could that be?)

We can handle the truth!

Gathering impartial evidence and examining the facts are increasingly out of favour in public policy, at least it seems that way.  It’s become quite trendy to recite slogans and ‘truisms’ without asking for the evidence of whether they’re true and can be readily substantiated, or whether they’re just some new form of urban myth.  Maybe myth-busting and healthy scepticism should be taught in schools and universities, as opposed to the slavish adoption of public policy fashion. So how about in 2012, evidence and impartial factual analysis makes a comeback?

A bit less dogma?

‘Four legs good, two legs baaad.’ So bayed the sheep at Napoleon the pig’s insistence in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm.’  Dogma is not a good thing. But much of what passes for public policy is often little more than dogma, designed to push, cajole or direct people toward some outcome that they’re otherwise not fond of. The private car, for example, is not a bad thing, but we are frequently told it is (or at least that’s implied). The detached home is not a bad thing either. The backyard, likewise, is something we can ‘afford’ to have. The truth about dogma of course is that’s often a willing bed partner of hypocrisy. ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’ was where dogma led to in Animal Farm. In public policy, it means ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ And there are plenty of examples of that. Maybe in 2012, we could have much less of that?

Let’s give the word “appropriate” a rest.

A pet hate of mine is the way the word “appropriate” (or more often “inappropriate”) is used in justifying public policy assertions. Just what do people mean, for example, when they say ‘this form of housing is no longer appropriate’?  Appropriate? You mean it’s something you disagree with on a personal or philosophical level, and you want to impose your thinking onto others by suggesting there’s something fundamentally wrong with it? If that’s what’s come to be meant by the word in the public policy context, let’s give it a rest in 2012. If you just don’t like something, just say so and express that as your opinion, but don’t load it with a value judgement by telling me it’s not ‘appropriate’. 

A few less study tours to mediaeval towns or frozen metropolises

In 2012, maybe we could question the relevance to Australian cities of town planning study tours to Copenhagen, Venice, Paris, Portland, or Vancouver (just some of the places cited as ‘cities we should be more like’). For starters, the town centres of most Euro cities were designed and laid out in the middle ages. Transport economics was unheard of. Private transport was mainly by foot because most people were too poor for a horse.  And they were all created before the advent of ‘town planning’ as we know it. And as for more modern centres like Portland and Vancouver, why choose some of the world’s least affordable cities as benchmarks for Australia to study? We’ve got enough problems on that front already. Then of course there’s the climate issue - cities designed for freezing winters and very brief summers may not be the most logical case studies to use? Why not instead visit cities in regions of similar climate, and where affordability and quality of life and economic opportunity are all in a healthy state? Maybe the junket factor for Houston, USA, just isn’t quite as appealing as Hamburg? Or at the very least, if it’s simply impossible to resist the latest planning study tour to Paris, try at least getting out of the ancient and touristy centres of town, and away from the 5 star hotels and conference rooms, and visiting the suburbs where the majority of Parisians live and work.

It’s OK to count heads and ask what they do

I was surprised to be corrected about a recent article which guessed that the $17million budget for the planning and assessment ‘directorate’ of the Sunshine Coast Council might indicate some 200 people working in that department. I was wrong:  the figure I’m told is more like 270 staff. Just what do 270 staff do in a planning department for a local council with a population of just over 300,000 people? That’s almost 1 planning department employee to every 1000 residents. According to the Australian Medical Association of Queensland, the ideal ratio of GPs to population is one to 1000, but we’re currently experiencing a shortage of GPs such that the ratio is closer to 1:1500. Surely planners haven’t become more important that doctors? These large planning bureaucracies spend a lot of taxpayer funds, and have grown exponentially in size and power in the last decade. But for what outcome? It is fair to question bureaucracy wherever it’s found, and town planning bureaucracies are no different. The solution isn’t more bureaucrats, it’s less red tape. Let’s start asking some questions in 2012?

When it’s not ‘our land’– it’s private property

The legal rights and protections afforded to owners of private property have been whittled away to the point that some landowners must wonder why they bother. It might be timely in 2012 to start reminding NIMBYs, bureaucrats, academics and sections of the media who make pronouncements about what should and shouldn’t be done on someone else’s land, that it’s not ‘their’ land make decisions about: it belongs to the person holding the title, and paying the taxes. Owners’ views ought to hold substantial sway.

Hyprocrisy on affordability

Another little resolution for 2012 would be to ask that local, state or federal governments simply stop pleading their concerns about housing affordability if at the same time they continue to raise taxes, add regulations, limit or delay supply and add to the complexity of construction for simple housing development. You can’t have it both ways. If you are concerned about affordability, cut the taxes, free up the constraints, and fix what the industry’s been identifying as a huge problem for more than a decade.

‘Yes you can’ cut levies

On the subject of taxes, it is of course quite possible to cut taxes on property and new development in particular. Upfront per lot or per application development fees are tightly focussed on new supply, to the point where new supply becomes prohibitively expensive. But at the same time, the justification for these development levies seems to be that rates and other general taxes can’t rise beyond inflation. Surely though if the community as a whole benefits from a certain activity or infrastructure investment, the community as a whole should pay? And if you want to provide new libraries and pools, and cultural facilities for the community as a whole, it’s unfair to expect only new development to pay for it. Cutting levies is possible, as is raising rates, or reducing the scale of promises. It just requires more political will. Maybe 2012 will provide some?

Demand some KPIs

A simple measure, easy to put into effect in 2012, would be for new planning schemes, initiatives or regulatory mechanisms to have attached some very clear and measureable KPIs. In short, if the regulation is intended to produce a certain outcome, how will you measure that outcome? And if it fails to measure up, scrap it.

Realism not heroism

Heroic assumptions are fine in their place, but maybe not in public policy. Realistic, evidence-based approaches are far superior. For example, I still don’t know (nor can anyone tell me) how we are going to create 138,000 infill dwellings in Brisbane, or 374,000 infill dwellings in south east Queensland, in 20 years.  Just where will they go? 374,000 infill dwellings is the equivalent of 4,675 twenty storey apartment buildings, or 212 such towers per year for 20 years. Sound stupid? But that’s exactly the target contained in the SEQ Regional Plan. And if it realistically just can’t be done, is it time to revisit those assumptions with something more realistic?

Forecasting the future?

Is something best left to gypsies. Some developers now complain that it can take 10 years from site acquisition to the first sale, and in that time, much changes. Ten, twenty or 30 year plans are OK for stimulating the mind and provoking debate, but locking in public policy inflexibility for something that may happen in 20 years’ time based on what we know today and the assumption that things won’t change, seems odd.

Take a helicopter view (we’re not running out of land)

To all those ardent believers of the view that we’re fast running out of land, or at risk of ‘LA type sprawl’ my wish for you in 2012 is a helicopter ride over south east Queensland. Look down. There are trees and open land everywhere. We are so far from ‘running out’ that to suggest otherwise is to refuse to believe what your own eyes are telling you.

Private enterprise pays for public services

Basic economics 101 is the lesson that a healthy and profitable private sector generates the wealth (taxes) that pay for the public sector. Cripple the private sector and the public sector fast runs out of money (or has to borrow it). This is something the Greeks and Italians forgot. Let’s not forget the lesson here in 2012. Governments (dare I harp on but planning departments included) could spend a bit more time on the ‘how can we help you make money’ line of thought rather than the ‘making money from economic or urban development is wrong’ culture. Without money, without the profit motive, the music stops and tax revenues that pay for all public services dry up.

Developers create things. Plans don’t.

Look around. Most of our region was developed and built before modern town planning , as we now know it, came to such prominence.  Developers made this happen. People who took risks.  Almost every house in every suburb, every shopping centre, factory, office or workplace was created by a developer taking risks to develop the land on which these things now sit. There are some notable exceptions – SouthBank being one – where public sector planning and development, using taxpayer funds, has created something positive. But even here, it could not have been done without developers. They are not the enemy. They create value. They create jobs and places for people to live, to work and also to play. Planning regulations and brightly illustrated planning documents or policies don’t create these things.

No more ‘initiatives’ that add cost

Here’s a wild idea. Every time some new ‘initiative’ designed to save the planet or achieve some public policy objective is raised, the costs involved in doing so are subject to an affordability test. If mandatory building code changes are going to add several thousand dollars to the cost of a new project home, that test should ask “can young families afford this extra cost on their mortgage.” If not, the proponents ought to have to work much harder to get their ideas up. At the very least they ought to get a thumbs up from the people who are ultimately being asked to pay.

The city is not a museum

We’ve become very protective of our urban form, to the point that NIMBYs have become replaced with BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). It’s almost as if we now have some collective desire to see nothing much change. But that’s a strange way of thinking, because it suggests that nothing we have today can’t be done better tomorrow. Our city can evolve, grow and develop, improving the lives of its residents and meeting their changing needs during their lives. But if we are being asked to place a giant glace dome over the region and declare it all a museum piece to be preserved for all time, then evolution won’t be possible and the quality and standard of life will decline.  It would be nice for the positives of change to get some more air time in 2012, as opposed to this sense of wanting to cling to everything as it now is.

Hope that lot got you thinking, please feel free to suggest a few more.

Happy New Year!

Time to rethink this experiment?

The famous physicist, Albert Einstein, was noted for his powers of observation and rigorous observance of the scientific method. It was insanity, he once wrote, to repeat the same experiment over and over again, and to expect a different outcome. With that in mind, I wonder what Einstein would make of the last decade and a bit of experimentation in urban planning and development assessment? 

Fortunately, we don’t need Einstein’s help on this one because even the most casual of observers would conclude that after more than a decade of ‘reform’ and ‘innovation’ in the fields of town planning and the regulatory assessment of development, it now costs a great deal more and takes a great deal longer to do the same thing, for no measureable benefit. As experiments go, this is one we might think about abandoning or at the very least trying something different.

First, let’s quickly review the last decade or so of change in urban planning and development assessment. Up until the late 1990s, development assessment was relatively more straightforward under the Local Government (Planning and Environment) Act of 1990. Land already zoned for industrial use required only building consent to develop an industrial building. Land zoned for housing likewise required compliance with building approvals for housing. These were usually granted within a matter of weeks or (at the outset) months. 

There were small head works charges, which essentially related to connection costs of services to the particular development. Town planning departments in local and state governments were fairly small in size and focussed mainly on strategic planning and land use zoning. It was the building departments that did most of the approving. Land not zoned for its intended use was subject to a process of development application (for rezoning), but here again the approach was much less convoluted that today. NIMBY’s and hard left greenies were around back then, but they weren’t in charge. Things happened, and they happened far more quickly, at lower cost to the community, than now.

In the intervening decade and a bit, we’ve seen the delivery and implementation of an avalanche of regulatory and legislative intervention. It started with the Integrated Planning Act (1997), which sought to integrate disparate approval agencies into one ‘fast track’ simplified system. It immediately slowed everything down.  It promised greater freedom under an alleged ‘performance based’ assessment system, but in reality provoked local councils to invoke the ‘precautionary principle’ by submitting virtually everything to detailed development assessment. The Integrated Planning Act was followed, with much fanfare, by the Sustainable Planning Act (2009). Cynics, including some in the government at the time, dryly noted that a key performance measure of the Sustainable Planning Act was that it used the word ‘sustainable’ on almost every page. 

Overlaying these regulations have been a constant flow of land use regulations in the form of regional plans, environmental plans, acid sulphate soil plans, global warming, sky-is-falling, seas-are-rising plans  –  plans for just about everything which also affect what can and can’t be done with individual pieces of private property.

But it wasn’t just the steady withdrawal of private property rights as state and local government agencies gradually assumed more control over permissible development on other people’s land: there was also a philosophical change on two essential fronts.

First, there was the notion that we were rapidly running out of land and desperately needed to avoid becoming a 200 kilometre wide city. Fear mongers warned of ‘LA type sprawl’ and argued the need for densification, based largely on innocuous sounding planning notions like ‘Smart Growth’ imported from places like California (population 36 million, more than 1.5 times all of Australia, and Los Angeles, population 10 million, roughly three times the population of south east Queensland).  The first ‘South east Queensland Regional Plan 2005-2026’ was born with these philosophical changes in mind, setting an urban growth boundary around the region and mandating a change to higher density living (despite broad community disinterest in density). It was revisited by the South East Queensland Regional Plan 2009-2031 which formally announced that 50% of all new dwellings should be delivered via infill and density models (without much thought, clearly, for how this was to be achieved and whether anyone particularly wanted it). Then there was the South East Queensland Regional Infrastructure Plan 2010-2031 which promised $134 billion in infrastructure spending to make this all possible (without much thought to where the money might come from) and a host of state planning policies to fill in any gaps which particular interest groups or social engineers may have identified as needing to be filled.

The significant philosophical change, enforced by the regional plan, was that land for growth instantly became scarcer because planning permission would be denied in areas outside the artificially imposed land boundary. Scarcity of any product, particularly during a time of rising demand (as it was back then, when south east Queensland had a strong economy to speak of) results in rising prices. Which is just what happened to any land capable of gaining development permission within the land boundary: raw land rose in price, much faster than house construction costs or wages. 

The other significant philosophical change that took root was the notion of ‘user pays’ - which became a byword for buck passing the infrastructure challenge from the community at large, to new entrants, via developer levies. Local governments state-wide took to the notion of ‘developer levies’ with unseemly greed and haste. ‘Greedy developers’ could afford to pay (they argued) plus the notion of ‘user pays’ gave them some (albeit shaky) grounds for ideological justification. Soon, developers weren’t just being levied for the immediate cost of infrastructure associated with their particular development, but were being charged with the costs of community-wide infrastructure upgrades well beyond the impact of their proposal or its occupants. 

Levies rose faster than Poseidon shares in the ‘70s. Soon enough, upfront per lot levies went past the $50,000 per lot mark and although recent moves to cap these per lot levies to $28,000 per dwelling have been introduced, many observers seem to think that councils are now so addicted that they’ll find alternate ways to get around the caps.

So the triple whammy of ‘reform’ in just over a decade was that regulations and complexity exploded, supply became artificially constrained to meet some deterministic view of how and where us mere citizens might be permitted to live, and costs and charges levied on new housing (and new development generally) exploded.

At no point during this period, and this has to be emphasised, can anyone honestly claim that this has achieved anything positive. It has made housing prohibitively expensive, and less responsive to market signals. Simply put, it takes longer, costs more, and is vastly more complicated than it was before, for no measureable gain.

[An indication of this was given to me recently in the form of the Sunshine Coast Council’s budget for its development assessment ‘directorate.’ (How apropos is that term? It would be just as much at home in a Soviet planning bureau).  Their budget (the documents had to be FOI’d) for 2009-10 financial year included a total employee costs budget of $17.4 million.  For the sake of argument, let’s assume the average directorate comrade was paid $80,000 per annum. That would mean something like more than 200 staff in total. Now they might all be very busy, but it surely says something about how complexity and costs have poisoned our assessment system if the Sunshine Coast Council needs to spend over $17 million of its ratepayer’s money just to employ people to assess development applications in a down market.]

If there had been any meaningful measures attached to these changes in approach over the last decade, we’d be better placed to assess how they’ve performed. But there weren’t, so let’s instead retrospectively apply some:

Is there now more certainty? No. Ask anyone. Developers are confused. The community is confused. Even regulators are confused and frequently resort to planning lawyers, which often leads to more confusion. The simple question of ‘what can be done on this piece of land’ is now much harder to answer.

Is there more efficiency? No. Any process which now takes so much longer and costs so much more cannot be argued to be efficient.

Is the system more market responsive? No. Indeed the opposite could be argued – that the system is less responsive to market signals or consumer preference. Urban planning and market preference have become gradually divorced to the point that some planners actively view the market preferences of homebuyers with contempt.

Are we getting better quality product? Many developers will argue that even on this criteria, the system has dumbed down innovation such that aesthetic, environmental or design initiatives have to fight so much harder to get through that they’re simply not worth doing.

Is infrastructure delivery more closely aligned with demand? One of the great promises of a decade of ‘reform’ was that infrastructure deficits would be addressed if urban expansion and infrastructure delivery were aligned. Well it’s been done in theory via countless reports and press releases but it’s hardly been delivered in execution. And when the volumes of infrastructure levies collected by various agencies has been examined, it’s often been found that the money’s been hoarded and not even being spent on the very things it was collected for.

Is the community better served? Maybe elements of the green movement would say so, but for young families trying to enter the housing market, the answer is an emphatic (and expensive) no. How can prohibitively expensive new housing costs be good for the community? For communities in established urban areas, there is more confusion about the impact of density planning, which has made NIMBY’s even more hostile than before.

Has it been good for the economy? South east Queensland’s economy was once driven by strong population growth – the very reason all this extra planning was considered necessary. But growth has stalled, arguably due to the very regulatory systems and pricing regimes that were designed around it. We now have some of the slowest rates of population growth in recent history and our interstate competitiveness – in terms of land prices and the costs of development – is at an all time low. That’s hardly what you’d call a positive outcome.

Is the environment better served? If you believe that the only way the environment can be better served is by choking off growth under the weight of regulation and taxation, you might say yes. But then again, studies repeatedly show that the density models proposed under current planning philosophies promote less environmentally efficient forms of housing, and can cause more congestion, than the alternate. So even if the heroic assumptions for the scale of infill and high density development contained in regional plans was actually by some miracle achieved, the environment might be worse off, not better, for it. 

All up, it’s a pretty damming assessment of what’s been achieved in just over a decade. Of course the proponents of the current approach might warn that – without all this complexity, cost and frustration – Queensland would be subject to ‘runaway growth’ and a ‘return to the policies of sprawl.’ The answer to that, surely, is that everything prior to the late 1990s was delivered – successfully - without all this baggage. Life was affordable, the economy strong, growth was a positive and things were getting done. Queensland, and south east Queensland in particular, was regarded as a place with a strong future and a magnet for talent and capital. Now, that’s been lost.

Einstein would tell us to stop this experiment and try something else if we aren’t happy with the results. To persist with the current frameworks and philosophies can only mean the advocates of the status quo consider these outcomes to be acceptable.  Is anyone prepared to put up their hand and say that they are?

Will you still house me, when I’m 64?

In the song by the Beatles, the worry was about being fed and needed at 64. Things have changed. If the Beatles wrote those lyrics today, the worry instead might be about housing.

Australia’s ageing population is an inevitability.  As our replacement rate falls (we’re having fewer children per family) and life expectancy extends, the proportion of over 65s will double in 40 years. In raw numbers, there were 2.5 million over 65s in 2002, and this will rise by 6.2 million in 2042. That’s an extra 4 million in this demographic. Have we given enough thought to where they’re going to live, and what styles of housing they might prefer?

There have been a number of developers who have understood the looming significance of Australia’s ageing population, and who have sought to supply the ‘retirement living’ market with product that suits. At one end have been the glitzy apartment style residences in inner city locations, while at the other have been the aged care ‘homes’ provided for those in need of access to nursing care or medical assistance, or at least the reassurance of it being present.

Running parallel with the provision of retirement living or seniors living projects has been an assumption that, once ready to abandon the family home of many years, seniors will be happy to move across town and relocate to the facilities that are available. (Perhaps this is hangover from the days when retirement or aged care living was provided on Stalinist lines: our oldies were forcibly shuffled off to some retirement centre well away from the rest of the community they grew up in. A sort of gulag for grumpies?)

But what if seniors simply want a change of housing style within their community? What if they don’t want to move across town to the only available accommodation because they would prefer to continue to live in the neighbourhood and community they have spent a large part of their lives living in? They may want to continue to shop with ‘their’ local butcher, visit their local supermarket, newsagent, bank branch (if it still exists) and generally remain connected to the people and places that they’re familiar with – including (quite possibly) members of their family, children and grandchildren.

Meeting that need in the future is going to be close to impossible unless planning schemes (old fashioned zoning laws) adopt a more flexible approach. Flexibility will be needed because most of the existing suburbs of our major population centres are largely built out and will require retrofits and redevelopment of existing stock to accommodate senior’s housing preferences. Generally, the only tracts of undeveloped land capable of meeting seniors housing needs tend to be on the outskirts and while there’s nothing wrong with fringe development, it seems unfair to expect seniors to relocate across town to regions they’re unfamiliar with and to alienate themselves from their community simply because supply side mechanisms (controlled by planning schemes) don’t permit choice.

Further, the built out status of our ‘established’ suburbs – as they now stand – is something that much planning law seems to want to preserve for time immemorial. It’s a little bit like imagining that someone has declared the existing housing mix and styles a fixture of permanency: let’s put a giant glass dome over it all and call the city a museum – because we don’t (it seems) want anything to change.

But if we are to allow Australia’s seniors to ‘age in place’ and to ensure our markets provide choice, it’s going to mean some things will need to change, given the likely levels of future demand. The fastest growth of aging populations will be around our ‘middle ring’ suburbs and given the overwhelming preference to ‘age in place’, it is these suburbs that are going to have to change if those needs are to be met.

What will that change look like? The psychology of seniors in years to come – even today – is going to be different to those of previous generations. They’ll likely be more active rather than sedentary. The family home that’s served them to this point may now be simply too big for their needs, or contain too many stairs (the artificial hip or knee doesn’t like too many stairs). Their future housing needs will vary widely - some will be happy with apartments in high to medium density developments (elevators to their level of living means no stairs) while others (generally the majority) will prefer smaller, detached or semi-detached, single level dwellings. Many may want a small yard or garden (or at least a large balcony or terrace if in a unit), and perhaps want to keep a small pet dog or cat. They may want a spare bedroom for visitors or for babysitting grandchildren. They will probably prefer to be close to shops and near to public transport. And the majority will want to find something of that nature generally within the same community they’ve been living in. It is unlikely they’ll be searching for the ‘retirement home’ style of assisted care living until they’re well into their later years when their choices will be more limited.

Their problem will be that developers will struggle under current planning schemes to get approval for semi-detached housing designed with seniors in mind, if it means amalgamating some detached residential dwellings near local shops, because that land use is highly protected. They will struggle to gain approval to convert a large single site into medium or high rise in areas near local shops or transport, because the community will likely object – particularly if it’s in a neighbourhood where low density prevails (typical of most of suburban Brisbane). Advocates of TOD style development might now be shouting at this article that ‘TODs are the answer.’ That might be so, if only one single TOD had been delivered during the past 15 years we’ve been talking about them. Plus, the majority of proposed ‘TOD’ style development areas largely surround inner city transport nodes. Not much use if you’re in Aspley and want to stay there. And of course there’s the reality that multi level apartments are much more costly to develop and construct than the cottage building industry’s approach to single level, small detached housing.

The changes needed need not be dramatic, and subtle changes to land use surrounding existing retail or service centres in middle ring suburbs ought to be able to be achieved with minimal planning fuss. (It is still possible to imagine something being done with minimal planning fuss, but very difficult to point to any actual examples. Still, hope springs eternal).

The changes could allow (for example) for some amalgamations of larger lot, detached post war homes into higher density cottage-style dwellings on a group title, still single level and with low construction costs. A 2000 square metre amalgamation could in theory provide 10 such cottages, with private garden space and minimal likelihood of community objection. The key would be to keep regulatory costs down, so punitive development levies would be out of order. After all, the infrastructure already exists and seniors tend to be much less demanding on utilities or services than young households. (Have a think about how little garbage they generate, or how little water they use as an illustration. It would surely be unfair to tax seniors in this type of housing for infrastructure upgrades under the circumstances?).

The traditional ‘retirement home’ or ‘aged care’ model of seniors housing is still going to be needed, especially as people require more frequent or acute care in their later years, and become less and less independent. But there will be a good 10 to 15 year period for people for whom the family home no longer suits, and who aren’t yet ready for ‘God’s waiting room.’ How we accommodate this coming bubble of seniors who want to age in place and continue to live independently, and how planning schemes will allow markets to provide choice and diversity, is something that perhaps should be a policy focus now.