How we lit the fuse on the population bomb

We’ve been here before – concerns about our capacity to house a large population are not new. But lately, hostility to rapid rates of population growth is gaining traction. There have been calls for a population enquiry and former PM Abbott has called for immigration (and hence population growth) to be slashed. He joins a chorus of other voices, from business to community groups. Voters are pushing back against growth and political leaders are feeling the pressure.

But these pressures are confined to mostly two cities: Melbourne and Sydney (and perhaps to a lesser extent Brisbane). There are other capitals and countless regional cities who covet growth but who find it eludes them. Instead, stupidly (it has to be said) we continue to cram accelerating population numbers – mostly driven by immigration – into a couple of urban centres. 

Melbourne was first settled by whites in 1835 and took 165 years to reach 2.5 million people (by the year 2000). Bernard Salt predicts the next 2.5 million will be added in just 21 years with the city reaching five million by 2021. He thinks it will sail past eight million by 2050. Sydney has a similar story.

According to the Productivity Commission’s 2016 Migrant Intake into Australia report, 86% of migrants settled in major capitals, compared with 65% of the Australian born population. More recent information suggests the trend has grown, with only 6% of recent migrants now settling in regions.

The Government has toyed with the idea of insisting that migrants settle regional areas where there are genuine labour shortages but there seems little determination to back the threats with action, which in itself could be difficult (and possibly illegal) to police.

Outsiders observing Australia’s handling of growth must be incredulous to learn that much of the concentration of growth has not occurred by accident, but is widely endorsed policy. Higher urban densities have since the late 1990s been at the core of urban development policy to handle population growth in the very cities now feeling the most resistance to growth. The benefits promised as a result of increased density were many and the public were assured that they would share in an improved quality of life as a result of these policies. Take this example from the 2013 Draft Metropolitan Strategy for Sydney to 2031:

“A home I can afford. Great transport connections. More jobs closer to where I live. Shorter commutes. The right type of home for my family. A park for the kids. Local schools, shops and hospitals. Livable neighbourhoods.”

And the result? For Sydney and Melbourne especially, housing affordability is as bad as the worst in the world with entire generations locked out of housing. Congestion is chronic. Private and public transport systems are under more pressure than ever. Commutes take longer and housing choice has been compromised. Is this livable? Talk about over promise and under deliver. If these promises had been borne out by the day to day experience of average Australians living in these cities, there wouldn’t be the push back politicians are feeling now.

Even more incredulous is that, confronted with the political challenge of an increasingly hostile public, some suggest (from the comfort of their high priced inner urban enclaves no doubt) that what’s needed is not change, but more of the same. The Planning Institute of Australia recently suggested as much, responding to a challenge from ABC interviewer Ellen Fanning on the 7.30 program that we are ill prepared to cope with “stuff(ing) another three and a half million people into Melbourne and Sydney both”.

The PIA responded that “We’ve got a great challenge to ensure that we don’t end with megacities like Lagos or Manila. We want Tokyos, Parises, and New Yorks – and we can do that by planning well.” (emphasis added).

Really? Tokyo, Paris and New York might be on our bucket list of cities to visit, but how many average Melbourne or Sydney residents would live in hope they’d one day see their own city turn into a version of Tokyo or New York? I can think of no public opinion poll where we Aussies have put up our hands to using Tokyo as a business model for urban development. Any politician suggesting as much would last a nano second before being turfed out.

It serves to illustrate how wide the disconnect has become between public policy makers and the wider community. The “we” word is used when the “I” pronoun is what’s really meant.

Maybe it’s time for a genuine reality check? I’ve always held the view Australia can readily support a larger population but in getting there, infrastructure standards need to keep up with growth, not continuously lag it. Housing and lifestyle choices don’t have to be further compromised to serve a model of urban development which is at odds with broader public opinion. The idea that much of this growth should continue to be concentrated in just a handful of cities already feeling considerable strain while other centres with infrastructure capacity and abundant, affordable housing find growth eluding them is plain crazy.

The answer I suspect is not in forcing people to settle cities and regions that are capable of absorbing growth but in making these cities and regions even more attractive as places to settle. Jobs, industry and economic growth lie at the centre of this. Positive economic attraction strategies, reduced tax or red tape burdens, abundant and low cost utilities (power, gas, water), ‘special economic zones’ – all are elements capable of attracting employers and industries, and with them jobs for workers and their families. And if regional employment was further supported by the type of place making and related infrastructure support more typically only on offer in the centres of major capital cities, there’s no reason at all that centres like Mackay, Armidale, Wagga Wagga, Orange, Casino, Bendigo and plenty of others can’t enjoy growth without the accompanying political pain.

Sadly, even this rather obvious policy option isn’t being explored. According to a recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald: “Inner-city centres on the east coast have amassed the greatest share of Australia's new public service jobs under the Coalition government as outer suburbs, bush towns and Canberra took cuts to their ranks of bureaucrats.” So we not only concentrate our population into a few centres but government jobs as well. This is hardly spreading the load or sharing the benefits.

Stopping growth by rapidly closing down immigration would be disastrous for industries which have come to rely on it but this is increasingly looking like it’s possible. But equally, persisting with our current approach will only further aggravate hostile electorates in the major cities, while electorates in centres with little growth could be equally cranky with governments for failing to produce growth where it’s wanted.  

The fuse on the population debate has been lit. And maybe we are the ones that lit it. 

Why we need more Springfields

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. 

Affordable housing in plentiful supply

Australia’s ongoing (some would say interminable) debate about housing affordability was given fresh impetus last month when Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison weighed in with calls for liberated land supply and planning reform by state and local authorities. Scott’s call closely followed a less edifying observation by demographer Bernard Salt that young people simply needed to change their breakfast preferences to afford a house. 

Predictably, discussion swirled around the excessive cost of housing in the inner city markets of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the declining rate of first home buyers entering the market, the rise of a renting class and the push for higher density apartments of limited size as a means of gaining a foothold in the market. It’s a familiar conversation and one that’s been repeated for a long time now. The same arguments were being thrashed around in the lead up to the 2007 Federal Election: release more land, reduce up front development levies, and free up a notoriously dysfunctional planning system. At the time, I was National Executive Director of the Residential Development Council, and to make the point, we famously sent every Member of Parliament a rubber banana, likening housing to the price of bananas (which when in short supply, rise in price).  The debate got a lot of traction and both then Prime Minister Howard and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd made a number of statements on the issue.

Fast forward ten years and nothing has happened on the policy front. What’s worse, the level of market analysis in the debate hasn’t improved. One of the realities which ought to get serious attention is that Australia has plenty of affordable housing. It’s just not where the jobs are.

That might sound simplistic but if we continue to push for greater concentrations of employment in the inner city areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane we will only make the affordability problem worse. And this is what we are doing. Prime Minister Turnbull’s ‘Smart Cities’ plan has been much celebrated by the inner urban cognoscenti but in reality it is mainly an inner cities plan. Infrastructure priorities by State and Local Governments continue to lavish inner city regions with transport and social infrastructure in a vain but futile attempt to keep up with the pressures of further economic centralisation.

More economic centralisation is the last thing we need. It will create an infrastructure challenge we simply cannot afford and will never win. It will add to competitive pressure for housing near city centres and lead to social and economic inequity as wealth splits into the sort of ‘haves and have nots’ more typically associated with the British aristocracy in the 19^th Century.

Yet in all the debate about housing affordability and urban planning, there is a consistent implication that centralisation is the objective. Governments at all levels (with the partial exception of NSW’s Mike Baird) have centralised their considerable departmental operations in central city locations.  Business is encouraged to do the same – via a planning regime which promotes centralization in high density employment zones. Costly transport investment is focused on servicing the needs of a centralized workforce.  Housing increasingly focusses on limited land opportunities as close as you can get to centralized employment areas which often means dwellings that are both idiotically small for a country the size and population of Australia and prohibitively expensive.

Where in all this is the realization that the affordability problem is confined mainly to the inner and middle ring areas of mainly three cities. (Perth is sorting itself out via the deflation of its housing market bubble, as is Darwin. Adelaide firsts need an economy before seriously worrying about affordability and the same largely goes for Hobart).  There are dozens of larger regional towns and cities where affordability is not a problem. Jobs are.

In an era when digital technology has all but obliterated the tyranny of distance, why continue to live with this tyranny? Why don’t we have a genuine strategy to encourage employment growth and opportunities in regional cities and towns? In the US, this has been happening for years. It’s not the New York’s or San Francisco’s but the middle cities like Austin (Texas), Salt Lake City (Utah) or Denver (Colorado) that are the fastest growing economies. Here in Australia however we seem hell bent on ever greater populations and densities in a small handful of cities while we allow regional centres – many with more than adequate infrastructure, good climates, and plentiful and affordable land for housing – to languish.

Australia does have a housing affordability problem but that problem is largely confined to three or maybe four cities, and then mainly to the inner and middle areas of those cities – because that’s where we insist on putting the jobs. Rather than fretting over this dimension of the problem, perhaps instead our debate could turn to expanding and distributing the economic and employment footprint into outer urban and regional centres, where housing is affordable and land plentiful. What’s needed is a slightly larger share of the economic pie. Not only could this alleviate the affordability problem but it would reduce the impossible infrastructure burden associated with even greater concentration of economic activity in a select handful of inner urban areas.  

Footnote: the property featured in the above image is a current listing, in Orange, NSW. The median house price in Orange is $340,000 so this is representative. Orange has a population of around 50,000 within a region of around 100,000 and has quality educational and health infrastructure plus it's a very scenic city and region. (A video is here if you're curious). 

Just consider the difference between being able to earn $100,000 in the Sydney metro region but paying close to $1million for a house and enduring an irksome commute every day, to having the same income, a house for $340,000 and little congestion in Orange. All that's really missing is the job, which is overly simplistic I know, but all that extra money not going into a mortgage that feeds bank profits would find its way into either household savings or productive non-housing investment in the economy. 

Contagion

Some parts of the real estate market are experiencing a new feeling they haven’t known for some time: fear. Initial outbreaks, based on media reports, seem confined to overheated parts of the Sydney and Melbourne housing markets. The question is whether the fear will be contained or will it spread more widely?

It’s always hard to pick the point at which market confidence turns. Australia started the year with unrestrained exuberance. Auction clearances were at record highs and off plan sales to speculative investors seemed like an ocean of inexhaustible opportunity, particularly with rising interest from foreign (mainly Chinese) buyers. Repeated warnings about the extent of investor activity, particularly in new apartment sales, or warnings about record low affordability relative to incomes, were brushed off.  Then along came APRA’s rule changes, and banks also shifted their risk appetites down a notch or two, reducing their LVRs and raising interest rates for investment property.

Sometime in the second half of the calendar year, rising notes of caution crept into mainstream media commentary on housing. By October, the likes of Macquarie Bank, Credit Suisse and Bank of America Merrill Lynch were warning of ‘hard landings’. (See here for an example of the bearish comments). Add to this some ‘tutt tutting’ from the celebrity TV financial commentators and the mood seems to have quickly turned from unbridled optimism to caution. 

That itself is a good thing. Opportunity and risk should be weighed carefully, not approached recklessly. The question now is how much more bad news can the market expect, will the bad news be confined to certain parts of the market, and will the market have the maturity to respond rationally?

That there is still bad news to come seems inevitable. I heard last week that traditional financiers expect that 20% of investors buying off plan apartments will be unable to settle on completion, based on the revised lending criteria. If that’s true, a lot of developers will be caught and a lot of investors will be in a bind. This is likely to be confined, however, to just some parts of the capital city markets – especially the flood of new stock of one bedroom apartments, not designed for living in but for investor price points. I can’t see projects aimed at owner occupiers suffering settlement risk: intending occupiers tend to be more discerning, and have more equity. Many investors are however highly geared and have less emotional attachment to their investment as it was never intended to be their home.

Then there are markets which were supported by exceptional but temporary economic conditions. The mining town real estate booms were never sustainable and there are plenty of investors ruing that lesson already. But even large cities like Perth, where the sagging resources economy is reverberating through employment markets just as more stock arrives, are already feeling the pinch. Even the ever ebullient Real Estate Institute has adopted a more somber tone.

Parts of Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney do appear at risk of oversupply of a particular type of housing product (particularly very small one or two bedroom apartments). Commentators and analysts will learn that all housing units in commencement or approval data are not alike: some will find a market, others will not. If, as seems likely, there is a surplus of small apartments in concentrated locations, prices and rents must inevitably fall. Some people are going to lose money, and our media loves nothing more than hard luck stories. Expect a lot of these from the nightly ‘current affairs’ shows and tabloid press.

More stable parts of the housing market in these cities – in my view new housing and land, well located medium density projects, quality owner occupied apartment projects and the established housing market generally – ought to be treated separately, because they are working on entirely different dynamics. But will they be?

I know of two banks who are actively gaming this scenario already. They’re asking whether a fall in confidence, led by what’s looking like happening in the investment apartment sector, will spread to other parts of the markets, both by type and location? For example, if inner city apartments in Melbourne become the focus of negative market comment, will that rattle markets in established parts of Brisbane? And will it spread to other types of property?

The answer is that no one really knows - and won't until after it happens. Confidence is a fragile thing. It can go from reckless to reclusive in a very short space of time. Fanned by a tabloid appetite for click bait (bad news gets more clicks on line) and a widespread disregard for accurate or detailed reporting, it’s unlikely that there will be much rational analysis or reporting of real estate or housing markets in the coming year.

Having said that, we should be used to it. There hasn’t been much rational reporting for a long time. Real estate markets have been lumped together as if they’re a homogeneous product, and price movements have been reported on a weekly basis to feed a ravenous media and public appetite for poor quality information. That commentary will likely turn from positive to negative but its quality will remain the same: underwhelming.

On the positive side, most of us know that markets move in cycles and they’re rarely as bad as the media might make out, nor are they as risk free as painted to be in good times. Stability never rates much comment but the reality is that the majority of Australians who have owned or are paying off their home will continue to do through the cycles, both up and down. And if you do need to trade, you tend to buy and sell on the same market. If you are buying for the first time, things might improve.

However the potential of contagion plays out, seasoned players will endure it with cool heads and a rational strategy. Amateurs had neither going into this market and are unlikely to have either of those qualities if they need to head for the exits. 

Three reasons apartments may not deliver on density

A key thrust of higher density development plans for our various inner city areas was that this would lead to a significant increase in population densities. But what if the current wave of inner city apartment development isn’t likely to deliver as many people as the plans presumed? Does this mean we need even more apartments to meet infill population targets? Or do we need to revise the population numbers altogether? Here are three factors I doubt were taken into account when these targets were first devised. 

Many of our prevailing metro wide planning schemes are revisions of similar schemes devised in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A key plank of these schemes was to prevent ongoing ‘sprawl’ (being outward suburban development) and encourage higher densities in established areas, particularly inner city areas. The plans came in for their share of criticism at the time. Tony Powell – an icon of Australian planning – described them as a “sad parade of failing capital city strategic plans” that in some cases were “superficial to the point of ridiculousness.” Professor Brendan Gleeson disdainfully described the wishful thinking of much plan making at the time as “faith-based planning.” 

A key focus of the ‘faith’ and also of the criticism was the belief that population growth could be contained in higher density housing, as opposed to continued expansion of suburban markets. 

Tony Powell put it bluntly in a 2007 lecture to planning students: “The proposition in the latest crop of metropolitan strategy plans that 50 percent or more of future housing development can be accommodated in existing suburban areas of the major cities is patently ridiculous.  These are simply unexamined and unreliable hypotheses, not strategies.” 

Fast forward to today and the sheer volume of apartments now being developed in inner city markets might suggest Powell was wrong: indeed, there is widespread talk of oversupply and bubbles in particular markets. But what if, despite this unprecedented pace of apartment development in inner city markets, the population numbers still won’t materialise? Could we actually have an apartment boom without the people to match?

There are three factors at work which I suspect no one at the time predicted:

1. There are very few owner occupiers in the current wave of apartment development. If it were true as widely claimed that we are witnessing a permanent change in Australia’s housing preference in terms of units over houses, you would expect to see more owner occupiers active as purchasers. But the numbers in some cases are very small. Michael Matusik in Brisbane has looked at a number of newer projects and in many of the larger scaled developments, the percentage of owner occupiers is only 3%. That’s not a typo. Smaller developments show a higher proportion of owner occupiers but across the board, the figure is still only 10% of sales to owner occupiers. Two thirds of investors of inner city apartments are from interstate or overseas. 
2. The apartments are typically small and getting smaller. Again based on Matusik’s research, ten years ago the proportion of one bedroom apartments being developed was just 10%. It is now more than three times that at 35%. And while three or more bedroom stock accounted for some 30% of stock ten years ago, that figure is now just 5%. Plus they’re shrinking: one bedders have fallen from 70 square metres to 50 square metres in that space of time. 
3. Vacancy rates are increasingly unreliable. The most widely quoted vacancy rates are provided by various real estate institutes. These are not audits of vacant stock – they only reflect a survey of member agents: not all agents are members and not all members bother completing the survey. The problem here is that with new apartment projects, the available rental stock is unlikely to be included in real estate institute numbers if being marketed through various investment or project selling channels, or strata managers or others. No one knows what proportion of properties available for rent are not being captured in ‘official’ real estate institute data because of this, but you can simply peruse available rental listings online to see how many are being offered outside of ‘traditional’ real estate agency channels to get some idea. It’s significant. Plus of course, the ‘official’ figures can’t possibly capture the number of apartments that are kept unoccupied for whatever reason. So while ‘official’ vacancy rates for inner city areas might point to a 4% vacancy, the actual vacancy (including those not recorded in ‘official’ data) could easily be double that or higher in the apartment sector. 

This poses a dilemma for planners who equated apartment development with population growth. Back when there were typically more (and larger) three bedroom apartments being developed, and more of these being sold to owner occupiers, the residency ratios were higher. I used to use an average of 1.6 persons per apartment as a rough guide. 

But today, with so many more (and smaller) one and two bedroom apartments being designed for absentee investor appetites, the residency ratios must be smaller. A one bedroom apartment of 50 square metres, for example, will on average not have more than one person living in it. And that’s only if it’s occupied. Take into account vacancy figures, factor in what’s not included in those figures and factor in the number of apartments that are simply unoccupied on a permanent basis and not available for rent, and residency ratios must fall further again.  

If you take a hypothetical 250 apartment project, it may once have housed 300 to 400 people - if those apartments were mainly two and three or more bedrooms, and a high proportion of owner occupiers. But now, with changes in the type of stock and the nature of the market, that project may only house half as many people. No one really knows, which is my point: markets and planners seem to be relying on untested assumptions about the relationship of apartment construction with population growth. 

This low residency ratio could also explain a couple of things. Many shops and businesses associated with new developments, who anticipated high expenditure from residents, have been disappointed. Perhaps the expectation of how many people are actually living in the new projects were based on wrong assumptions?

And the profile of those actually in residence is another factor. One bedroom rental units will equate to a high proportion of students or lower income rental groups. They certainly won’t be consuming like a family of four. Hence the actual discretionary income available from these residents needs to be rethought.

Most interesting though is the proportion of urban population growth that will actually find itself housed in the current wave of development. If the residency numbers are in reality that much lower than planners first presumed, this could mean we need more apartments per 1000 of population to achieve identified targets, or we need to rethink the targets.

Either way, it’s a fascinating question with significant implications.

High density housing’s biggest myth

Advocates of higher density housing development in Australia’s major cities – inner city areas in particular - are fond of pointing to a range of statistics as evidence of rising demand. Dwelling approvals, dwelling commencements, tower crane counts and various other sources, both reputable and dodgy, are referenced and then highly leveraged to support claims that our housing preferences have fundamentally changed in favour of high density apartments. But what’s the one inescapable fact that these advocates are missing?

“Higher density living on the rise” is typical of the light weight PR puffery that passes for market analysis these days.  This piece is typical of the boosterism: 

“Since 2008/09 multi-unit housings’ share of dwelling approvals in Queensland has jumped from 31 per cent to 46 per cent. Much of the increase can be attributed to an increase in approvals for high-rise apartments, with the sector’s share of dwelling approvals doubling between 2008/09 and 2013/14, from about 12 per cent to approximately 24 per cent.” So far, correct.

But it goes on to draw this unjustified but widely supported conclusion: “the popularity of apartment living in the larger capital cities had been driven by a number of factors including decreasing housing affordability and the changing lifestyle of baby boomers and young professionals.”

Or how about this piece of PR chasing nonsense pumped out by a bank no less: “Australians are favouring smaller, more affordable homes, with approvals for the construction of flats, townhouses and semi-detached houses nearing their highest level in 20 years.”

What’s wrong with these conclusions? Simply this: rising dwelling starts for apartments in inner city areas do not necessarily reflect ‘changing lifestyles’ or any ‘popularity’ for this product by home buyers. What it does reflect is a (so far) ravenous investor appetite for the product. This is entirely different to an owner occupier appetite. If owner occupiers were buying these apartments in large numbers, you could then conclude that inner city apartment living was becoming more and more popular. But speculative investors have no intention of living in the product they’re buying.

Owner occupiers in the main aren’t looking for tiny one or two bedroom units. Some developers have targeted the owner occupier unit market, and their designs feature more three and even four bedroom units, spacious in design and with features designed for living in as adults or families. The price points are vastly different. This is so far a niche market which is performing strongly, but it’s completely different to the cookie-cutter apartment stock which is driving the stats.

What is happening in Australia now, and which is being reflected in the dwelling stats for apartment construction, is a nation-wide frenzy of speculative investment in inner city apartments, fuelled by negative gearing, SMSFs, foreign buyers and the search for returns in a very low yielding market. For many apartment projects, more than 80% or 90% of the stock is sold to investors, not to people with the intention of living there. This includes a significant proportion of first home buyers as investors, as Michael Pascoe recently pointed out. 

To meet the investor market, apartments are getting smaller and smaller – to meet the price points demanded by investors. Typically, most projects offer a mix of one and two bedroom units only – and these are designed to squeeze every square inch of efficiency out of them. Construction economics and pricing is all about size, features and finishes and every dynamic is put under the microscope and cut from the project if it means the unit offering can be sold for less without sacrificing margin. Many continue to be offered through project selling agencies or “investment channels” in order to achieve a certain level of pre-sales. ‘Rental guarantees’ from developers provide investors with some certainty that their investment will perform predictably for the first year or two. A successful project is one that is sold out, preferably pre-sold. Actually being occupied is another thing altogether.

What this is doing is creating a large pool of rental units of similar size and design and in similar locations. And contrary to the sort of froth and bubble many commentators attach to the ‘rising popularity’ of apartments, many are vacant: simply locked up and not used by their owners (often overseas buyers). Others are looking for tenants, but can’t rent for what investors need to get. Inner city apartment vacancy rates are rising, and rents are starting to fall: a sure sign of market where supply is beginning to exceed demand. 

‘Official’ vacancy stats produced by Real Estate Institutes only count the properties actively being marketed for rent. The ones that are simply unoccupied and not available for rent don’t form part of the figures. A recent study in Melbourne reviewed water consumption in a number of Docklands Towers and concluded that those apartments with next to no water consumption were effectively empty. They put the vacancy at nearly one in four. Or you can simply look at these towers at night, and count the lights that are on, and draw your own conclusion. Or maybe ask some restaurant or shop owners who took leases in new projects on the promise of “a bustling inner city café society” what the trade is really like.

Increasingly, smart developers are selling sites with approvals in place but before a sod has been turned. In some cases they’re selling even before the approval has been obtained. Why go through the grief of developing something when someone else is happy to pay you a premium many times what the site cost you? 

I don’t actually see anything wrong with any of this. Property markets going through booms and busts are not a new thing. Just ask industry people on the Gold Coast. Or have a look at CBD office markets. Plus, if it weren’t for the frenzy of activity we’re seeing in the apartment market now, there’d be precious little else going on. So it’s keeping an industry alive, and all those whose jobs depend on it. Investors are entitled to take risks and they are just as entitled to lose money as make it. There are no guarantees. 

But please, stop suggesting that what we’re seeing is anything but a case of investor-fueled activity. Investors are buying a financial product, not a lifestyle choice. To suggest it means Australian society is surrendering a three or four bedroom home in favour of a one bedroom apartment is stretching the conclusions that can be drawn from the stats way way way too far. 

Parking

Australian cities have some of the highest carparking costs in the world. Why? Can anything be done about it? And what might happen if it gets any worse?

It’s hard to fathom but the cost of parking a car for a day or even a couple of hours can apparently cost you more in an Australian CBD than downtown Manhattan, or London, or Paris. The latter are  global centres of commerce, with populations that dwarf that of Australian cities. New York City’s 8.4 million residents are the almost the equivalent of our three major capitals - combined. Ditto London, with its 8.4 million residents or Paris with 10.5 million residents.

Manhattan Island alone has 1.6 million residents, plus it adds another 1.6 million commuters, every day, swelling daily to over 3 million people. By comparison, the City of Sydney (the CBD plus surrounds) is roughly equivalent in area to Manhattan Island but home to only around 190,000 residents and a daily influx of workers and students of around 450,000. Yet it can cost more to park in Sydney, or even smaller cousin Brisbane (under 200,000 employees in the inner city), than Manhattan. 

Why? 

On the supply side, there has been a history of anti-car planning culture in many Australian cities for some time. Sydney was the first to impose a parking tax on CBD car spaces, in a bid to force up the price of parking and divert people to public transport. It forced up the price alright, with a number of subsequent increases in the tax over the years (the tax is now around $2000 per car space), but it made no real impact on public transit. 

Here’s an example of the thinking from then NSW Transport Minister David Campbell back in 2009: 

"The parking space levy is all about encouraging people to leave their car at home, and take public transport," he said. 

In the same story, it took someone from the Nature Conservation Council (the irony is delicious) to point out the bleeding obvious:

“I don't think it will have too much of an impact on congestion… Any increase in parking levies probably isn't going to make too much of a difference to the people who can afford it right now, what it will make a difference with I suppose is the people who really don't have any other options and are currently driving in."

Incredibly - and idiotically - the South Australian Government is trying the same thing with Adelaide, where a $750 per annum parking tax takes effect this July. You’d think they’d be desperate to bring any economic life they could find into Adelaide, but evidently if that economy arrives in a car, they don’t want it. Great place Adelaide. All it needs is an economy to go with it.

The punitive policy stance on CBD parking visits itself in other forms too. Restrictions on building new CBD parking spaces has had the effect of limiting supply as the cities grew. New multi-deck parking stations could alleviate the supply-side problem, and there seem to be enough sites suited to them in most cities, but the policy stance doesn’t support them. New commercial towers are also limited in terms of the numbers of additional basement spaces they can deliver into the pool, in a bid to limit the supply of additional parking. 

This public policy view is connected to deeply held faith (and the operative word is ‘faith’ because there’s little evidence to support the view) that by pricing or policing private vehicles out of Australian CBDs, the same people would be forced to use public transport, and we’d all be better for it. “We just need to get the cars out of the city” is the sort of view you’ll hear often on talk back radio (particularly the ABC; sorry Aunty but your listeners have been drinking way too much Kool-Aid). 

The problem is simple: if you take the cars out of the city, you’ll take the people too. And then the businesses will follow. 

Bear in mind is that parking is not just about commuters. CBDs and inner cities are places for business to interact with other businesses, and with government. They also interact with customers, clients and suppliers. They have restaurants and retail shops that rely not just on the CBD worker but also visitors to the CBD, for the retail dollar. Many of these people invariably rely on the private vehicle to get there. Casual parking costs – at up to $55 for a couple of hours – have long passed the point where they’re a deterrent: they’re a real disincentive to visit the CBD for casual business meetings. Permanent parkers with paid company spaces won’t notice this. But they may begin to wonder at the number of meeting requests for out-of-centre meetings, where the parking cost isn’t ten times the cost of the coffee. 

If the intent is to ‘punish’ the private vehicle in the belief that this will encourage higher rates of public transit patronage, the irony is that the consequence could see more businesses relocate to outside city centres, where parking regimes are more favourable and occupancy costs lower. If that happens, the numbers of office workers for whom train and bus services are a convenient option will actually fall – because public transport options in non-central locations are notoriously difficult to service and often require mode or route changes for a single trip. 

Centralised employment is what works for public transport so it ought to be in the interests of public transport advocates to support more CBD employment and more widely available parking (both in supply and pricing) than to argue for punitive agenda-based policy positions which may deter businesses from city centres. In short, if you succeed in chasing cars out of the inner city, you may also chase business out and end up with more private vehicle transit for work journeys than if they had stayed in the CBD.

The reality too is that public transport will only go so far. In Australian cities, the highest patronage of public transport by CBD workers is by people who live close to the city in the first place. Travel beyond a 5 klm or 10 klm ring and the mode share by public transport drops quickly to below 10% (see here for an excellent analysis). 

The reason is that – contrary to popular opinion – only around 10% to 15% of metro wide jobs are in the CBD and inner city. If you have a CBD job, you tend to earn more, and will want to live closer to your work. Ironically, this makes you also more likely to take advantage of very generous taxpayer subsidies for your train or bus fare to work, than the suburban worker who gets no such subsidy for commuting by private car to their lower paid job in a suburban location. And because most employment is distributed throughout suburban locations of our metropolitan areas, these are always going to be more suited to private vehicles than public transport. 

To get our public transport usage up to even half the rate of somewhere like New York – where 55% of commuters use public transport - we would need to see employment concentration in our CBDs quadruple to 40% of metro wide jobs while suburban employment didn’t grow at all. 

Hardly even a remote possibility. 

On the demand side, we seem to have a capacity to pay when it comes to parking that is allowing operators to charge what they do. However expensive the spaces may be, they do seem consistently full. Arguably, for many there is little choice. There is also little competition, with only a couple of operators seemingly controlling the market. But it is fair to question whether the exorbitant rates now being charged – especially for short term parking – won’t in time begin to change behaviour. If that behaviour begins to lead an exodus of activity to non-central locations, prices should fall as demand weakens. But that may create other, larger problems as suggested above.

So how should we deal with congestion and parking policy and public transport? 

There is no easy answer here but I’d suggest that reliance on proven failures like parking taxes or similar pricing policies in the Australian context is not a good option. It might be helpful instead to get a solid grasp on all the factors driving the high cost of parking – including oligopoly pricing by a small handful of operators. 

We also need to understand clearly the benefits of city parking before treating it like a disease and trying to eradicate it, or the patient will suffer. And we also need to be very clear on what alternatives exist and the genuine likelihood and extent to which public transport can replace the private vehicle, given our urban scale and the nature of our urban economies. 

Send in the clowns

Cue Barbara Streisand singing ‘Send in the Clowns’ and tune into Youtube for a piece of viral public policy which plumbs new depths of sentiment over substance, of faith over fact. As a piece of propaganda, it scores well, but as a piece of reasoned, evidence-based policy, it’s a disgrace.

“Brisbane, don’t be a NIMBY [Eye on Milton]” is the title of a Youtube slideshow which bears every resemblance to something interests associated with current high density housing proposals for Milton in Brisbane might underwrite. You can view it here but be sure to have some tissues handy to dab at the tears. The authors have also setup a Facebook page (here), but with only 20 members so far, it’s got a long way to go before Corey Worthington (that brat child of the Y Gen with the white sunglasses) gets worried.

Perhaps I shouldn’t find it so objectionable – we live in a free society and expressing opinions is, after all, what this site is all about. But I can’t help but recoil at the overtly moral rectitude of the tone. The sentiment (it fails as an argument) is that residents who reject moves for much higher urban densities are doing the wrong thing by society, because the alternative is ‘sprawl’ outwards (always a pejorative term).

And why is sprawl bad? The slideshow’s answer is simply “Urban sprawl is bad, VERY bad.” Yes, it’s very bad. Better stop it, or you’ll go blind. Not that some reasons aren’t offered in support: “It’s bad for both the environment and society as a whole” it says.

There you go, surely you don’t need more proof than that?

So having ‘proven’ that sprawl is bad, very bad, we are asked to conclude that density, lots of density, is good, very good.

The video makes a few more claims, including the assertion that the taller the buildings are, the more open space there will be. It then goes on to say that “it is proven to create more sustainable, social environments whereby people don’t need cars” (without offering any of that ‘proof’).

The masterful conclusion would make Goebbels proud: object to these developments or question the density dogma and you are therefore anti environment and pro sprawl. You’re a NIMBY, and that’s bad, very bad.

Now before you start shooting the messenger here, I am not opposed to infill nor to transit friendly development. But I do object to ‘silver bullet’ arguments which claim moral right on their side, and propose that only one form of housing development is sustainable while another is clearly evil. I object to the lack of evidence and, more to the point, worry that we’re becoming so caught up in this emotional clap trap that the facts are fast becoming irrelevant.

What is the available evidence saying about the density dogma then? Here’s a snapshot:

· Urban land boundaries which seek to prevent so called sprawl and enforce higher density have created a chronic land shortage and an uncompetitive market, which is driving housing prices to preposterous highs relative to average incomes and average families’ ability to pay. We have a serious problem with housing affordability in this country and in this region. This fact is rarely commented on by density advocates, let alone a solution suggested.
· As a region of just 3 million and growing to 5 million, alleged problems of sprawl on the scale experienced globally are simply not there. What we have done is to short change our infrastructure investment which is now below capacity, creating issues of congestion and infrastructure pressure not attributable to ‘sprawl’ but to under investment in transport and related infrastructure over a 20 year period.
· Suggestions that high density living is more environmentally sustainable don’t concur with the evidence. No less than the Australian Conservation Foundation showed (in its Consumption Atlas) that residents of inner city, high density housing created a larger carbon footprint through energy use than suburban alternatives. They also showed that inner city residents were generally no more likely to use public transport than suburban alternatives. The reason? They’re wealthier, with less need to turn off the lights and conserve power.
· This was reinforced in studies by Professor Bob Birrell of Monash University, who showed that high density dwellings were typically more energy intensive. Stands to reason if you think about it: lighting and air conditioning of common areas, lack of cross flow ventilation, use of electric clothes driers rather than a (solar) clothes line in the backyard. The list goes on.
· Additional studies by Professor Kevin O’Connor, Professorial Fellow of the Architecture, Building and Planning School and the University of Melbourne suggested that suburban locations with treed footpaths and vegetated backyards actually provide more ‘green’ space and leaf cover than high or medium density housing can. Pot plants on the verandah don’t quite cut it.
· The suggestion that more high density will mean more open space is counter intuitive. We are not opening more public parks in inner city or middle ring neighborhoods. More density will invariably mean more people wanting to use the existing open space. That in itself may not be a bad thing but in high density cities (and I grew up in one in Hong Kong) available open space is more crowded. Kicking a football or playing cricket in the community park might become a thing of the past the moment some jogger gets clocked on the noggin from a good drive to deep cover.
· The suggestion that high density housing will mean that people won’t need cars is also not supported by the available evidence. An interesting paper by Paul Rees of RMIT suggests that the nexus between urban density and types of transport “show little or no relationship to transport modes share, which seems more closely related to different transport policies. These findings are very different from those on which current urban policies are based, and suggest the need for a radical rethinking of those policies.” You can read the paper here. It’s called evidence, don’t worry, it might be unfamiliar but it won’t hurt you.
· A similar conclusion was reached by David McClockey, Prof Birrell and Rose Yip in a paper entitled “Making public transport work in Melbourne” published in ‘People and Place’ which you can read online here. In it, they concluded that the proportion of residents living in TOD style housing only rose as TOD locations were closer to the city, where (ironically) people are wealthier. And even then, public transport rates of use were not that much higher than in alternate locations.
· A final nail in this ideological coffin is the obvious: between and 8 and 9 out of every 10 jobs are in the suburbs. Nurses, teachers, tradies, shop workers, industrial workers, suburban professionals – all located in suburban commercial centres which are not serviced by public transport. You could find yourself living in an inner city TOD and still be reliant on your car because your place of work is not in the CBD, or for other reasons of convenience (eg the children aren’t in a CBD school). Even a heroic public transport assumption of 30% public transport use in high density areas (triple current rates) would mean that 70% of high density housing residents will still use their cars. And that will inevitably mean more cars on existing road space, not less.

So the truth is being crushed by the anti density zealots on one side and pro-density zealots on the other, while the evidence itself is infrequently consulted, if at all.

There are very good reasons why planned new suburban communities, if done well, can achieve the environmental, social, community and economic benefits claimed for high density housing. There are also very good reasons why higher density, if done well, can become an asset for the community and build a better city. Witness the quality of urban form outcomes in the New Farm and Teneriffe areas, achieved under the watch of Trevor Reddacliff and his Urban Renewal Task Force.

But in doing so, it’s worth recalling that Trevor fought vehemently against proposals for 20 and 30 storey towers throughout the area. And thank goodness he did – the picture today of the New Farm-Teneriffe area would be ghastly had he not. Trevor also didn’t fall for slogans or policy dogma. He was a pragmatist who valued good urban design and relied on evidence.

I wonder what Trevor would make of this debate were he still alive today?