There needs to be larger and better-designed apartments. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
The push for higher-density housing, particularly along transport routes and in commercial centres close to where people work, raises the question of just who they will be built for.
The ACT Government wants to see more people living in the CBD. It is planning housing development along the light rail route and supports more residents in the town centres to avoid urban sprawl.
It also wants a greater diversity of housing types – the so-called ‘missing middle’ between high-rise apartments and freestanding suburban houses – and continues to reform the planning system to encourage this.
But what it isn’t talking about is the mix, size and design of apartments within most of the big developments coming on stream and how they do not cater to families.
Everybody from government to developers talks about building communities, but does a population of singles and childless couples add up to a community?
Most developments contain few family-sized apartments of three bedrooms or more. Nor would you call the design especially family-friendly or homely.
High ceilings and spacious living areas tend to be labelled luxury features, not necessities for comfortable living.
Talk to developers, and they will tell you they are simply meeting the market.
But good intentions to provide more family-sized apartments also collide with the cost of delivering a project.
The result is a preponderance of one and two-bedroom units, some of which are very small.
Scentre Group’s ambitious and radical plan for its Westfield Woden site, released this week, references Canberra’s growing population and the need to avert urban sprawl.
It wants to build 17 towers, one 55 storeys tall, that would deliver almost 4000 new homes to the Town Centre over 20 years from 2030.
A big part of its pitch is plans for supporting those thousands of residents with entertainment and hospitality areas, sporting and cultural facilities and a connected people-friendly ground plane.
The CBD has been facing an existential crisis due to the public service flight to Barton and the impacts of working from home.
The answer is to build a viable residential population. Again, it is not enough to simply have dormitory silos; the services and activities around them are essential to create, yes, community.
Yet if government and industry are serious about building complete communities, they will somehow have to work out how to deliver a mix of housing that can achieve that.
Every new suburb that is added to the million-dollar club puts the dream of the traditional home further out of reach, even if only to rent.
Nor does every family want to live in the outer reaches of the ACT.
So they will be looking at the new medium to high-density housing closer to the city or even in the CBD itself to meet their needs, to buy or rent.
So there’s the challenge to the property industry: to make good on their promises of delivering the homes the Territory needs and building new communities.
Just don’t let these communities be without children; instead, make them multi-generational and truly reflect an inclusive society.
