Is the key to ending our housing woes really just “Supply”? And will the Albanese government’s new $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund solve that problem?
The federal government says its new fund will provide $500 million a year to build much-needed social housing.
To meet our housing targets, we need to find new ways of building more with less.
Reusing existing and obsolete buildings for new housing - adaptive reuse - is another way to provide more housing.
A final challenge to government: As we prepare to spend billions on building housing across the country, is it too outlandish to imagine we could invest a mere 1% of those vast sums in innovation programs? Innovation can deliver the increases in building productivity and capacity that Australia so badly needs.
Apartments are extremely small already so I’d argue they need to be bigger for people to even consider having families in. 1 bedroom apartments are like 60-70m2 which is terrible for 1 person, and 2 bedroom apartments are like 70-80m2 ish. There’s no space for even a dining table and a couch. You have to choose one or the other. Who would pick apartment living as a long term option, rather than just a stepping stone home, in these conditions?
There’s a reason I said “homes with smaller footprints” and not just “smaller homes”. To use some unrealistic but easy numbers, an apartment building with 100 m2 of land area and 10 storeys, each with one apartment on it, means each apartment only takes up a footprint of 10 m2, which is tiny. The same principle applies if you use more realistic numbers.
Or you can go for standalone homes in the form of row houses, which might very realistically have a land area of 70 m2 and be two storeys, and so have a very comfortable 2-bedroom 140 m2 of floor space.
You’re absolutely right that a lot of what we currently build is not good quality outside of rentals to uni students. We need more diversity of housing options, including good apartments and row houses.
I mean if you take that to the extreme you’re arguing for very high density living, which I’m not opposed to, but councils seem to be against that by default.
If you only look at this aspect, that’s true, with an asterisk*. But there are other factors that make medium density really good compared to both low density and high density. Factors I’m happy to get in to and have done many times in the past, though it’s a little off topic for this thread.
* the asterisk is that depending on how you build the very tall towers, their density can end up being quite comparable to that of medium density. The so-called “tower in a park” layout, where you have large towers with a good amount of green space (or other open space) surrounding them ends up not too much greater in density than straight-up medium density.