Duplexes could be key to solving housing crisis
Australia’s housing supply falls further behind targets as experts urge states to lift restrictions on duplexes and low-rise apartments.
The Australian Economic Development Committee called on Australia on Tuesday to allow more medium-density homes to be built in middle-ring suburbs.
The think tank has published a report which found that if a quarter of detached houses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth were developed as double occupancy, housing supply would increase by nine per cent, or nearly one million homes.
Economist estimates of Australia’s housing deficit range from 200,000 to 300,000 homes.
The federal government’s National Housing Deal has set a target of 1.2 million new homes by mid-2029, but current approvals fall well short of the required operating rate.
Building permits fell 6.4 per cent to 15,832 in October, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on Tuesday.
This is below the 20,000 monthly rate needed to reach the target.
The reason for the decrease was a 39.2 percent decrease in apartment approvals.
Apartment approvals are particularly volatile and fluctuate wildly each month, but the trend line has increased very little over the past 12 months.
Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said the federal government was cutting the red and green tape to speed up approvals.
A “strike team” of bureaucrats to clear a backlog of housing projects due to environmental laws has flagged off 14,000 homes out of a total of 26,000 since the government’s economic roundtable in August.
“There’s a housing crisis in this country because we haven’t built enough homes for 40 years. Speeding up the time it takes to get a housing project approved will make a big difference to that,” Ms O’Neil said.
“It’s really hard to build a house in Australia these days. There are endless layers of bureaucracy at three levels of government to wade through before builders can lay a brick.”
CEDA senior economist Danika Adams said efforts to address housing affordability have focused on extremely high-rise apartments or large homes on suburban edges.
“But ‘soft density’ can deliver more housing in middle-ring neighborhoods where people want to live, while making better use of existing infrastructure and transport networks,” Ms Adams said.
The report called on governments to copy planning reforms undertaken in Auckland nearly a decade ago.
Changes to zoning laws that eliminated single-family zoning and allowed medium-density housing in three-quarters of the city resulted in an estimated 50 percent increase in building permits in five years.
House prices were 15 to 27 percent lower than they would have been without the reforms.
State governments, particularly in NSW and Victoria, have introduced reforms to streamline approval processes and allow for increased density around transport hubs.
But Australian cities are still among the least dense in the world.
CEDA found that allowing double occupancy and flats up to six storeys in a large suburban area in the middle ring would reduce commuting times and increase affordability more effectively than allowing high-density flats in a few selected areas.
On Monday, property research company Cotality revealed that house values rose a further one per cent in November, making Brisbane the second Australian city to break the $1 million median house price barrier.
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