You can have as many people as you want living in your palace, park as many cars as you can, and fully complete the backyard. It’s your home after all. Those familiar with suburbs such as Balwyn will have experienced this rapid replacement of old houses with new mansions with imitation European facades.
However, if you want to build a two-story apartment building with six or more apartments inside, this automatically requires a planning permission. No matter if the outer envelope is identical to a single dwelling, any apartment building must go through this process.
We should not treat two, eight and 30 buildings in the same way. Credit: Jessica Shapiro
This may seem like proper oversight, but the process adds a minimum of six months to the development process and opens the application to a VCAT challenge that could add another 12 months and tens of thousands of legal fees.
In the planning process, the family-sized apartment building will be evaluated for aspects such as the character of the neighborhood and the visual mass, tests that simply do not apply to individual homes. These tests are vital for more intensive developments, but we need to be much more nuanced with the idea of what an apartment building is. We should not treat two, eight, and 30 buildings in the same way. It is clear that the two-story version has much more in common with our suburban homes than residential towers, and should be treated as such. .
If the two-story suburban apartment building in the established suburbs of the middle and inner ring were exempt from planning in a similar way to single-family homes, the risks and costs associated with providing this type of housing would be reduced. Additional public interest guarantees, such as compliance with better apartment design standards, could be assessed at the licensing stage and therefore do not add risk or time to development. This will ensure that we do not sacrifice habitability for accessibility.
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This regulatory change would also help curb the worst excesses of NIMBYism. While it is clearly appropriate for people to express their views on the development of tower-type apartments in their immediate vicinity, we need to be realistic about the fact that all neighborhoods will have some change over time.
We should correct the imbalance between the rights of individual landlords to restrict change and the public good to allow some changes to offer more diverse housing options for the community.
What should matter is the overall height, intensity and quality of the design of a proposal, not that the proposed homes are apartments. In fact, if soft density were adopted more widely, the need for and demand for denser apartment towers would be significantly reduced.
The benefit of empowering this increase is that it will keep families and communities together. Your children will have the option of living in the same community without necessarily living under the same roof.
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The diversity of suburban housing options also benefits those looking to downsize. Politicians love to talk about offering financial incentives for older people to downsize, but if there are no smaller homes in their suburb, it becomes a non-starter.
So more than just throwing young families on the edge of the city and getting older people to feel trapped inside their aging family homes, we need to give people real choices about where and how they live.
This is the prize for habitability that we must not let go of. It is more important than being able to oppose a two-story proposal next door and it is more important than allowing the suburbs to remain fixed on the time or dominant habitat of the French provincial mansion.