Meanwhile, in the inner-city, the most affordable rental properties are demolished and replaced with overpriced high-rise apartments at a startling rate. The Murris, migrant families, musicians and artists who contributed to the special character of suburbs like West End and Woolloongabba can no longer afford to live there. Low-income families are denied the many benefits of inner-city living, relocated to the outskirts, away from public transport, key social services, and job opportunities.
Politicians often tell us that if you increase the supply of apartments, prices will fall. But in Brisbane, prices have risen while wages stagnated. There’s already a major oversupply of one and two-bedroom apartments, yet off-the-plan investors keep buying them. In many cases, they don’t even rent them out – brand new apartments sit empty while the number of rough sleepers on park benches increases.
It’s increasingly clear the housing boom is unsustainable. But if the property market collapses, everyone will suffer. The best we can hope for is a soft landing.
If we want to make it easier for young adults to find stable, affordable homes, while at the same time averting a property market collapse, we need to go back to treating housing as a human right, rather than a commodity. We must increase the supply of public and community housing, not in sprawling outer-suburban projects that become hubs of social disadvantage, but in inner-city developments alongside privately-owned apartments. This should be funded through increased infrastructure charges on developers, higher rates on empty properties and unused land, and reduced spending on vanity mega-projects like stadiums and casinos.
We can and should be building medium-density apartments that are designed so that residents can get to know their neighbours and forge connected communities. Many prospective residents desire three-bedroom apartments with shared open space and community facilities, but developers are building to suit the tastes of overseas investors, not future occupants.
Commonsense design elements like renewable energy, passive cooling, grey water recycling and green waste management are now mandatory in cities around the world, but sadly not in Brisbane. Unlike older housing forms, many new apartments are difficult to adapt and renovate, discouraging ageing in place and making it difficult to retrofit and redesign residential apartments for other uses.
There’s a lot of talk about how these high-rise projects create jobs, but the creation of temporary construction jobs does not justify saturating the market and increasing the risk of a collapse. Many developers also try to claim credit for creating post-construction retail and service sector jobs. But building empty shops doesn’t create jobs – it’s the small businesses who fill these retail properties (and pay through the nose to do so) that are the real job creators.
Planning Minister Jackie Trad should call in mega-projects like West Village, not only because to do otherwise would be economically irresponsible, but because the ‘masterplan’ for the site is not sufficiently detailed. An $800 million development of seven 15-storey apartment towers ought to be the subject of a participatory community design process, and deserves greater scrutiny than Brisbane City Council originally gave it.
I support densification of the inner-city. But it must be accompanied by investment in infrastructure, community services, open green space and public housing. Those who mischaracterise Brisbane’s development as a binary choice between skyscrapers or unsustainable outer-suburban sprawl are failing to engage with legitimate concerns that the current construction boom is not delivering well-designed, affordable, liveable housing that meets the needs of future residents, rather than investors.
Brisbane has amazing potential to develop as a sustainable, affordable city. We mustn’t waste the opportunity.