Hopefully Minister Meaghan Scanlon is able to maintain their stance on pushing for higher density housing.
Around our area they are cutting up ex-farming blocks (including a heap of trees and scrub) in to housing estates with 250m2 blocks. Its absolute insanity to convert that much land in to dwellings that are so useless - they can’t fit many people per house, and there’s so much wasted space with “backyards” you can’t use, walls so close you get no privacy (less than units in fact due to the lack of insulation and sound proofing!), and seperate services being run to every block which is super inefficient compared to centralised services.
I would love to see these ridiculous estates being done in medium to high density housing with a big park in the middle instead.
Also I like the idea of blocks of units being subsidised by the Government, but then containing x% of public housing. The building is less risk for a builder to take on because of the financial backing, the building is of better quality because it has to meet Government standards, and it integrates public housing with private housing to prevent “slums”.
We definitely need to be looking at how to provide the increased services and ameneties required for higher density housing. This is often easier in new estates where it is possible to mandate something like parkland and shops be included, but a lot of areas are undergoing renewal of individual blocks and it is much harder to do there. Maybe a system for Councils to aquire some blocks to create public facilities is needed.
Where I am a lot of older housing, generally housing for one older person or couple, is being sold and redeveloped to create townhouses for families - generally two to four families are replacing one or two people. Which means the area is very quickly outstripping the capacity of local ameneties, especially parks. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, but having somewhere within walking distance that people can go to kick a ball around or sit and chat makes a huge difference to the quality of life. We need to replace individual back yards with shared equivilents, not just remove them and leave people sitting inside air conditioned boxes playing with social media.
Yeah absolutely. We can’t just upzone. We need to also make sure the State Government is building the schools necessary in the local area, Council needs to build public parks, as well as other amenities like libraries, public pools, etc. They also need to enable local businesses like shops to exist to serve that density through mixed-use zoning. Those parks themselves need to have a mixture of amenities, too. Small pocket parks, parks with playgrounds, parks with facilities for various different sports, larger rewilded spaces, skate parks, maybe some tiny street playgrounds.
We also need to start rethinking how we design our roads. To encourage taking public and active transport, and to make people safer to play and get around in their local streets, we need to reduce the ease with which people ratrun through local streets by reducing permeability and designing them to discourage higher speed driving (think: 30 km/h as not only the speed limit, but the speed you feel comfortable driving at), without reducing permeability for pedestrians and cyclists. Because higher density just cannot be feasible if we continue our current insane levels of car dependency.