The Prime Minister, in announcing $2 billion for social housing on June 17, said that they would produce “affordable, well-located housing” for the future of Australians. This is a much-needed addition to the housing market, and it is desperately needed to be in the right locations. But how do we make that happen?
There is no strategy or administrative process presently at Federal level to guide this. So, it must be the states and local governments, where spatial planning has been traditionally based, to show where affordable housing should go. But states are still essentially opening up new land on the urban fringe.
They don’t appear to have a good model for how to integrate new, affordable housing into public transport and places where urban activity (like jobs, shops, health, education, and recreation) would suggest are good locations.
The one time that a Federal intervention with affordable and well-located housing was Better Cities in the early 1990s under the Hawke Government. This was a highly successful program as it essentially reversed urban sprawl through enabling inner city regeneration using poorly utilised government land.
The program developed a partnership approach between state agencies, local governments and private sector development all assessed using an integrated framework of planning and urban design outcomes.
Community engagement was not a big part of Better Cities but the integration of all three levels of government and the tripling of Federal money through partnerships with private developers, was a model that has continued to be tried (like City Deals) but not as effectively.
Public housing was a Better Cities driver but not the only housing, and today these places remain icons of good, walkable development in well-located areas: Subi-Centro and East Perth Redevelopment in Perth still remain examples of quality urbanism with good equity outcomes that built around something other than more automobile usage. The same can be said for Fortescue Valley in Brisbane, for Ultimo-Pyrmont in Sydney, for Honeysuckle in Newcastle, and the Southbank area in Melbourne.
These places all became gentrified but the 10-20 per cent of existing social housing remains and the reality is that Australian urban developers learned for the first time that urban development did not have to mean car-based urban fringe development.
At the time that East Perth was being planned a real estate consultant Paul Conti said that the East Perth medium density development “would never sell” as people in Perth always prefer big houses on the fringe. That changed forever, but now we can’t provide anything like enough houses that are well-located.
Australian cities have slipped back into believing urban fringe development is the only way to provide affordable housing, despite many global examples showing otherwise. Its time to dust off Better Cities and create a new way of doing affordable, well-placed urbanism. Adding net zero and nature-positive to the outcomes will bring it into the 2020’s.
The ideas from Steve Glackin, recently outlined in the Fifth Estate on Greening the Greyfields, should become a model for such Better Cities urban regeneration with its partnership approach and the focus on large precincts that are not necessarily just public land. This time around we need to bring communities much more into the process so that their neighbourhoods can be revitalised as part of the “affordable, well-placed housing”.