Australia’s worsening housing affordability
problem is a largely self-inflicted: we first restrict and then tax the supply
of new land needed to accommodate people, while at the same time accelerating
population growth and then compounding the problem by applauding as most of
that growth is focussed on just two or three cities. There are official
policies in many States that encourage a concentration of both jobs and housing
in finite inner city areas – which can only exacerbate an already chronic
problem.
It’s not just housing affordability that is
the problem, although this gets much of the attention. The entire point of
inner urban renewal in the first place – dating back to the Better Cities
program of the Hawke-Keating Government – was to harness spare capacity in
inner urban areas through selective infrastructure upgrades. We wanted to avoid the ‘donut effect’ common
in US cities at the time, where inner urban areas were hollowed out leaving
behind empty schools and other underutilized community assets. The opposite is
now the reality: urban infrastructure is not keeping pace with population
growth. We are in the throes of committing tens of billions more of taxpayer
dollars to invest in inner urban infrastructure from schools to public
transport in the Sisyphean belief that this can be fixed, while we continue to
pump yet more people into limited spaces.
You wonder why we are so slow to identify
problems and grasp solutions in this country. As Donald Horne wryly observed
way back in 1964, “'Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who
share its luck." Those second rate people are still there driving public
policy but our luck may be running out in terms of housing affordability and
urban infrastructure unless there is some change of direction.
Part of the answer is, as always, under our
noses even if we refuse to acknowledge it. The Springfield master planned
community in South East Queensland this year celebrates a 25 year anniversary
since its first humble housing lots were released. Occupying over 7,000 acres
(2,860 hectares) it has clocked up some $13.6 billion in project investment to
date, from housing for some 34,000 residents to education (including a
University) to health (including a new hospital) to recreation, shops, aged
care, industrial, offices, private and public transport connections. That $13.6 billion investment to date is
predicted to reach $85 billion on completion, by which stage there will be over
2 million square metres of mixed use space in its town centre and a population
of 138,000 people.
Of critical importance is that the $13.6
billion investment to date is a multiple of many times the amount of Government
support the project has received. In an era where ‘nation building’ or ‘city
transforming’ infrastructure projects struggle to achieve much better than a
1:1 cost benefit ratio (and where massive leaps of faith in expert predictions
are usually required to get them there) the Springfield example needs no such empirical
gymnastics. The evidence in this project is that every dollar of government
support spent there generates many multiples in private investment, and builds
a complete community in the process. This is not just a dormitory development,
but one which aims at generating its own employment from trades to highly
skilled technical workers and everything in between.
Springfield is also a model of community
development that has been quietly (and sometimes publicly) derided by advocates
of increasing inner urban concentration. It fits what some would pejoratively denounce
as ‘sprawl’. Everything here is new.
Though obviously very popular with residents (otherwise they wouldn’t be living
here) it doesn’t conform with the approved group-think which attaches great
virtue to old world urban models reliant on foreign cities like Copenhagen or
Paris for their inspiration – many of them first laid out in the medieval
period. Being new and suburban is heresy
to much of the new urbanist and smart growth faiths that seek to recycle established
communities into ever higher density communities.
Density for some has become the end in
itself, not the means to an end. Despite the mounting evidence of worsening
affordability, increasing congestion, a growing wealth divide between inner
urban residents and the rest, the problems of lagging and prohibitively
expensive infrastructure to support higher inner urban densities, mounting lists
of projects which struggle to achieve even a marginally credible 1:1 cost
benefit ratio – proponents continue to defy the evidence in pursuit of their
faith.
Yet Springfield offers more than a solution
to our emerging urban crisis: it also offers the business model. The experience
gained in developing this community to this stage should, logically, be
embraced by policy makers the country over. We should apply our minds to how
this was achieved with only equivocal public policy support (at the time) and
limited public funds, and imagine what could be achieved with just a little
more of both. Interpreting, studying and then applying this model of urban
development as part of a solution designed to alleviate excess pressure on just
a few urban centres isn’t just an idea, it’s a hugely compelling one.
Much of what has been achieved in the name
of “urban renewal” in Australia has been exemplary but increasingly the signs
are that excessive concentrations of employment and housing in narrowly demarcated
inner city areas are counterproductive. The opportunity to use the Springfield
model of urban development to house an increasingly bigger Australia is one
that deserves to be explored, and sites identified for many more Springfields
to emerge in the future. The peripheries of those cities where worsening
affordability and excessive congestion are just two painfully obvious signs of
policy and market lag are the places to start looking.
