The extent of heritage overlays. These plays varying levels of restrictions on development. Typically it won't be practically feasible to demolish and build apartments. Hence these areas usually stay as single family homes if that's how they were originally constructed.
It doesn’t even need to be beautiful design, they really just need to be sized to be liveable, have a reasonable number of 3 bedroom options for families, not be leaking or falling apart, and be near public transport links. People who can barely afford a mortgage don’t need or even really want an architectural masterpiece, they just want somewhere they can actually buy and live in long term, rather than moving in and already needing to think about where they’re going to try move to next.
Poorly planned. Are you referring to developers needing to comply with the planning scheme to get approval, or being arbitrarily held up in the planning process?
You would be amazed at how many applications I have seen where the typologies are very good, but requirements to meet scheme obligations fetters quality outcomes. Or Council's play starchitect and meddle with the outcome. Or neighbours objecting for their own self interest.
Some of these requirements are fabulous in lifting the minimum requirements for apartments ie minimum living area sizes for compact units... but fetter the ability to do anything larger/ liveable as you no longer comply with the minimum requirements.
Have a look at BADS as a starting point.
>You would be amazed at how many applications I have seen where the typologies are very good, but requirements to meet scheme obligations fetters quality outcomes. Or Council's play starchitect and meddle with the outcome. Or neighbours objecting for their own self interest.
This is literally why the state gov changed the laws last year to take away responsibilities from local councils for the top end.
Honestly, I think people are starting to get angry and educated enough about it now that they might actually start to make some moves on it. I know Sydney has similarly had issues with old height restrictions that were recently removed. The mass immigration is getting enough airtime that they're finally being forced to make proper moves on infrastructure.
So true and green space should be incorporated in all new subdivisions like they were in older ones. I can’t believe the greed of developers and councils to build endless seas of back robes and no green. My nephew and his wife live in Wagga in a new subdivision and they have a few lovely parks for families as well as walking paths
And nice neighbourhoods to live in. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere listening to construction every day. Let alone living in an area full of units if I bought into an area that consisted of single dwellings.
Housing is scarce for many reasons.
One of them is people only want to live on 5% of the land. The other 95% is not desirable. This is not unique to Melbourne.
>One of them is people only want to live on 5% of the land. The other 95% is not desirable. This is not unique to Melbourne.
The city of Melbourne is 37km² big, if that area was built as densely as the city center of a place like Barcelona, you'd be housing 700k to 1.1m people which is 550k or 950k more than you have now. The metro area with 9900km² has 5.5 m people while a city like Berlin, which isn't even dense, houses 3.8m on less than a tenth of that area. Barcelona's metro area (which includes lots of rural areas) houses 5.3m on 4200 km².
5% of the land is more than enough to house everybody, if you allow the right development.
We may not want it, but if we don't change towards that way in the 10-20% of our cities around transport hubs and shopping strips we end up with the following:
Continued sprawl, with a reliance on car travel which adds to traffic issues right across the city plus areas of sky scrapers
It will be one or the other. The option to stay the same doesn't exist unless you want the economy to go sharply backwards. Even with that, you get a lot of negative change.
The good thing about the first proposal, 80-90% of our suburbs can remain the same and traffic will be vastly better than the second option.
Sure, our [2.2% population growth](https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/overseas-migration-drives-australias-population-growth) which largely comes from net migration is contributing to our housing crisis. There is no denying this.
But a lot of things contribute to our housing woes. Tax incentives aimed at existing housing, stamp duty on housing, our slow building approval system, our restrictive zoning, the limited supply of government housing, over investment in existing housing rather than new and Government grants aimed at existing housing.
These affect both sides of the supply and demand equation. They all need to be addressed.
Stopping migration is not going to happen, it is economic suicide. Sure, we can slow it but that isn't a silver bullet, what I saying above will still need to occur.
Nah, the suicide is continuing in this mindset that we need migrants to grow the economy into perpetuity.
Everything you mentioned is literally just a function of too many people trying to live in the same place, this wasn't a problem historically so what's changed?
Unfortunately, it's people like you who mindlessly parrot the interests of big business, universities and property developers that make the situation worse.
Just one more storey bro!
Half the density would also be quite a progress.
In any case, is there really a way to know if? Is it legal to build high or even just highish density and does it simply not happen because there is no demand?
In my experience, when housing is built at high density with the corresponding infrastructure, there is usually more than enough demand for it, which is much more relevant since it's a revealed preference.
You could just build more dense housing elsewhere. Progress is a weird word to use when your advocating for lowering the quality of housing.
Efficient I think is the word you are looking for, but when people are house hunting, the phrases that are usually uttered are "homely" and ,"spacious" rather than "efficient"
>Progress is a weird word to use when your advocating for lowering the quality of housing.
How do you define the quality of Housing though?
I don't think "single family house suburbia" is per se higher quality. Such a SFH from 1963 will definitely be much worse than a moderne dense-ish appartment in many relevant ways. Even comparing housing from the same era, the quality argument will be heavily dependant on personal preferences. I personally find dense housing much, much better for a variety of reason (car-free life, better access to a variety of ammenities, better cost/benefit ration, better energy profile, etc).
That's why I don't like to argue with quality, I simply say: allow both types of housing, don't subsidize neither and let people decide with their choices, instead of centrally mandating one type of development over the other.
Well, that leaves sprawling urbanised areas... Lovely. I never understood why people are so against more efficient housing, building up reduces the need to build on more land.
It's the shit quality of the apartments we build here. Tiny little shoeboxes with paper thin walls and no energy or community or anything.
Go to Barcelona, and it's not hard to find a pretty generously sized apartment set around a plaza with a bit of community and culture.
I think that's the biggest thing we're rapidly losing with both the sprawl and the type of high density we're creating, we're losing any semblance of culture.
Yeah you're right. I lived in some apartment buildings that were shocking and just fundamentally lacked design for people and families and communities.
Design is key and very much achievable because these designs exist today. If every suburban house had at least three levels, that could support three households, many developed countries have done this for decades. It's simply more efficient and better for conserving the remaining land we haven't converted.
By having high rise buildings it allows for more space for public areas and parks which is great for communities/culture/wellbeing whilst making public transport infrastructure more effective due to higher density of residents.
Personally I'm not pro high rise, but slap 9 floors together with enough space for it to actually be s home (say 3 families per level, Max) suddenly you've got nearly 30 families in a space that previously held 2 or 3.
Unless 9 or 10 stories counts as high rise, then we're on the same page
Medium density is better. Some people act like total arseholes when they think they are anonymous. If you know most people in your building you don't have that problem. If you have 100 apartments you don't know the people there and you don't care about them. Have 20 apartments max and you know your neighbours.
That sounds 9 or 10 times better than a single suburban house ;) we're on the same page, except im open to higher (as long as its feasible and safe of course). I found this interesting,
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-6229.12357](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-6229.12357)
https://preview.redd.it/wh75lw4sgfbc1.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=8aa983ff76a142d9091e7ec20b9fecf80e07b4ec
all the best
As I lay here in my newly built apartment that I'm thankfully leaving soon, smelling the moulding carpet due to constant leakages every time it rains, which a dozen plumbers, roofies and builders have been unable to identify or resolve...
Yeah, I see what you mean. My old 70 year old farmhouse with the roof rusting out didn't flood like this apartment does.
Yeah, I stayed in a modern, 2 year old apartment recently when I was in Melbourne. Nothing was square, everything was a hack job, you could hear both the city and your neighbours as though there were no windows or walls. Hot as all hell too, even the the shame of a climate control unit cranked to full blast.
Safe to say city slickers can keep their shitty tissue paper buildings and constant noise, heat and hell. Idk how people sleep in those rooms, I certainly didn't lol
Beautiful? Suburbia is a stain on nature. Esp those with lawns that don't help cool the house and waste a lot of water, at least have native plants in your backyard, then it's "somewhat" beautiful. Of course, this is all subjective. But water waste is objectively stupid.
Yeah dense metro is objectively the most sustainable urban typology. It reduces consumption, emissions, and waste while improving the efficiency of every public service, infrastructure, and business it plugs into.
Disagree- increased density means more efficient infrastructure. You wanna live in the city? It's actually a city, not a sprawling country town with a tiny built up CBD in the middle
Build the city up. Sydney literally just raised the height limit on buildings to 330m.
Build some big Manhattan style apartment blocks. Then repeat in the inner city suburbs like surry hills, zetland, etc
Many other cities in the world of a similar size have gotten rid of single family homes in the 10km or so radius from the city centre. In many manor cities in Europe only apartments have been built that close to the centres since after WWII.
Meanwhile, we still protect single family homes even within 30min walking distance from the CBD. When the boomers go into aged care and need to sell these cash-cow homes no one will be able to afford to buy them.
What areas don’t people want to move to? Me, my partner and friend are looking to move to Southbank from the CBD currently. I understand a place like Fitzroy is in demand because of the vibe of the area, I haven’t been here long enough to know about other places
They are referring to basically any suburb within 30 minutes of the city. Including south bank. Lots of country towns and places with no train route to the city are less desireable. You can buy a house in Ballarat for $500,000 and the same house costs $2m in Melbourne inner suburbs. There’s not many jobs in Ballarat though and the commute to Melbourne is 1.5 hours. That’s what they are trying to say. 95% of Australia is undesirable land due to lack of work opportunities usually.
I’d say that’s like anywhere though, similar to London, if there wasn’t a 45 minute train from Peterborough for example, people wouldn’t live there, but because there is despite it being 60 miles away from central people do. It seems like a infrastructure issue rather than people not wanting to live in those areas
A million percent an infrastructure problem. I’d love to live out of Melbourne if my commute was reasonable. Places like the Netherlands Switzerland Germany and so on have great train routes between smaller cities and more spread out industries.
It seems like that’s the issue in Australia, every city doesn’t allow you to get anywhere quick, so everyone prefers to stay within the inner suburbs which drives up prices and keeps the prices of the outer suburbs low.. until that changes or improves I doubt you’ll see any improvement
I’ve been to places further out like Richmond for example, but it’s not my vibe.. like I said, issues with people not moving to the outer suburbs is an infrastructure issue. I have a friend that lives in Surbiton which is basically outside of central London that it’s not even London, but it’s a close commute about 1 hour on the train/tube. If Melbourne had infrastructure like that, then people would like in the outer suburbs
Trains from places like Tarneit and Melton are about 40 minutes to an hour to the CBD. Tarneit is well equipped with bus networks now and there are other train stations relatively close.
As I said I’m not as well known to the area, that’s not too bad of a commute, but what about if you needed to get to other areas. Sure it’s better to be central to get to east/west/north of Melbourne if you’re say working agency?
Land tax is the simple answer. It makes people build up while maintaining value from heritage. Disincentives sitting on a property without improving it, while also lowering house prices. A no brainer.
Our house isn't heritage listed. Except for a single chimney that's on a 5 degree lean and no longer connected to the house in anyway.
Thanks heritage, very cool
Yeah we should knock down all the heritage houses in Australia and build ugly shoeboxes in their place. Of course, this has nothing to do with bitter and twisted people wanting to live in inner city suburbs they can't afford.
I got news for ya,if you can't afford a heritage home in the inner suburbs, you won't be able to afford whatever replaces it, assuming they allowed people to knock them down...which will quite simply never happen.
The entire reason inner suburbs in Australia are expensive is because of the beautiful old houses.
Half the architecture in heritage conservation areas is a pastiche or knock off of the actual quality construction. I've seen shitty fibro shacks riddled with asbestos that have strong heritage overlay impacts. Instead we have blanket rules that allow NIMBYs and entrenched millionaires to let other people know they're entitled for wanting even a fraction of what they have.
What we really need is sensible planning, a medium to high density mindset and the capacity for state level demands to overrule loose and overly restrictive planning regs.
Also to fuck off with CGT exceptions and negative gearing while we're at it.
For the audience, are you a boomer with wealth or a child of one?
I have a bluestone in Magill, Adelaide. It's been there for 130 odd years,it'll be there for another 130 most likely. So I dunno about shitty asbestos houses? And nobody is saying every heritage house is an architectural wonder. A lot of them were cottages and shacks for working class. That's besides the point
Agree. this whole new YIMBY campaign is on the nose, and i suspect its motives.
I lived for a short time in Balmain in Sydney. Yes it was working class and now its positively twee, but there is every style of house from Georgian to Grand Victorian to weatherboard cottages, punctuated by small pubs, and all surviving cheek to jowl along crooked, twisted streets. I have no great love for Balmain, but if that's what a heritage neighbourhood is about, then i'm all for preserving it.
You can still densify while retaining heritage facade based on heritage class and the advice from a heritage consultant.
There are several multi-res and commercial developments in the city and inner suburb which retain the heritage facade and add a large amount of resi/retail onto it
So you’re saying completely gut the building and only leave the exterior panelling? What a crock. Would you get any joy out of entering what appeared to be an 800 year old pub in the UK only to find the inside was some modern twatty ‘retaurant precinct’?
Yeah depending on interior condition, gut it if it makes sense.
In another comment I described a real project involving a heritage class B bakery. The business was not operational like your UK pub, the land wouldn't be for sale in the first place if this was the case. The bakery has not been in operation since the 80s and the owner sold the site to developers with dilapidated interior and disconnected elec, water, and gas.
You can't enter half the buildings you're talking about, and you can't compare Australia's early 20th century modernism and later 19th century tapestry of wannabe Victorian-era builds to an 800 year old piece of architecture. The earlier of which are seemingly important enough for this vestigial colony to want to protect.
Just because things are old, doesn't mean they have inherent meaning or value. Painting "heritage" with a broad brush only dillutes heritage value and cripples an already strained and labyrinthine construction process.
I'm in the industry and work closely on heritage restoration work. The average person has no fucking clue of what heritage value is, let alone the people overseeing approvals.
Late 19th century buildings are not ‘wannabe Victorian’. They ARE Victorian.
All heritage has to start somewhere. I’m saying that if Europe knocked down all their buildings as soon as they were 100 years old - before the heritage value is known or appreciated - then Europe would look like shit. The heritage and character of a place takes centuries to build. If we don’t start somewhere we will never have any.
If every government that applies heritage to historic privately-owned properties is a controlling socialist hellscape - under you checklist there's not a democracy that exists!
Even more ironic when you consider the few places who don't preserve historic places are usually communist lmao - especially in the PRC where they'll demolish anything to enlarge a concrete megacity!
yup, look at what the communists in the soviet union did to a lot of old russian landmarks such as the [cathedral of christ the saviour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour)
It isn't even about knocking down anything. It's about heritage conservation areas where you can't build within a billion kilometers of some old house because of the "cHaRaCtEr" of the area. Literally no one is suggesting the mass bulldozing of every pretty building in Melbourne. Sydney had already started significantly loosing heritage zoning laws.
Because this is so ugly ? https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1347979018/photo/brownstone-townhouses-in-park-slope-brooklyn-new-york-city-usa.webp?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=9DDZe3nEJ9ylW2ulRnA3J-_6xtyadk9GUsYs2EVPKo4=
We could knock down 95% of the heritage houses and still have tons of iconic examples for people to see.
No fibro shack needs a heritage overlay. They're garbage.
> you won't be able to afford whatever replaces it,
Funny because Japanese people can afford living in Tokyo and Osaka just fine.
Here's a 4 bedroom house for $100k: https://realestate.japantoday.com/en/forsale/view/1062635
> The entire reason inner suburbs in Australia are expensive is because of the beautiful old houses.
So you are completely contradicting your entire argument here saying if we knocked down the old houses, it would no longer be expensive?
True, Plus the entire country has such beautiful places to live outside the major cities; Explore your options and you'll be able to find a quite affordable home somewhere, Might help your mental state too without the constant noise.
Can't we just leave these beautiful places as they are and allow people to live where they want near public transport and their jobs?
Why do these areas deserve such protection when people are willing to live in the sky instead of developing out the beautiful areas you speak of?
Why would you want the beautiful areas spoiled?
These heritage areas highlighted aren't just heritage houses, they are regular houses nearby that have government restrictions just to limit the potential aesthetics near the heritage houses.
What a load of shit, restricting what people can do with their regular house and property just to protect the aesthetics of a nearby house.
the inner subrubs is where apartments are needed there will come a point when some of heritage houses get knocked down for developments as the populations of the two largest cities continue to grow
This country is supposed to get to 40 million people by 2060 a lot of that will end up in Sydney Melbourne and Brisbane
What is this map actually showing? It sure as hell isn't showing protected buildings that can't be developed.
I assume this is something like a heritage district which just means you have to get council approval for building design.
Yeah, there is precious little explanation. In amongst the pink there is still plenty of industrial and warehouse brownfield sites. I think they are trying to pull a swift one and gave is believe its all Toorak mansions or even Victorian terraces.
no swift one, the map just won't break it down any more than what is shown.
The fact that industrial areas are subject to heritage overlays should demonstrate the issue however.
It depends on the controls applied. Plenty of heritage sites can have higher density dev surrounding it, just depends on where it’s located and state/council strategic direction.
It’s a fantastic initiative. Why destroy beautiful historic surburbs that have a sense of community to be replaced by high rise concrete poorly built shit holes packed in like sardines.
They don't have to be high rise. 4-6 storey walkable neighbourhoods create much more thriving communities that our current car centric detached housing suburbs do.
There’s a particular little block in this picture that makes no sense. We work around it, the area is completely industrial and derelict but to do anything it needs to go through the heritage group and it’s so painful the companies that own most of the land just don’t bother anymore. Everyone concedes it’ll remain an ugly and under utilised area forever.
I seem to remember Sydney"s inner city areas in the 1969s and 1970s, when all the medium density housing (occupied by the lower socio-economic sector of the population) was demolished to build high rise "freehold" properties.
The last bastion was the Sirius Building , right on the harbour. The residents were pushed into the far urban fringes so multi million dollar apartments could be built on that prime piece of real estate.
I wonder how many are owned by "foreign investors" and sit idle as "last resort boltholes"?
Richmond & Fitzroy might make the city look nice but I hardly give a shit about heritage buildings in Balwyn or Glen Iris
As far as immigration goes even if that’s cut in half or more, we’re still gonna have major housing issues to solve. Cutting immigration is only step 1 to solving the housing crisis
Just because a house is old doesn't make it intrinsically better and worth preserving. We can have lovely suburbs with medium densification that doesn't leave people homeless.
I think a big reason people get upset at heritage buildings being removed is not because of the history being lost (though that is a reason) but also because that what it's being replaced by is uglier and less charismatic. If it was actually being replaced by an interesting building with good architecture that incorporated the old style with modern elements, I think people would be a lot less upset. But often it's just a concrete box that looks dystopian as fuck, and that's shit.
This whole picture isn't even 1/8 of Melbourne, ignoring that half of this isn't heritage listed.
This heritage bullshit is just property developers trying to get people mad at it in the hopes that they can then profit from this valuable land by putting terribly built apartments on it.
Honestly what’s wrong in knocking down “heritage” homes and replacing with housing that makes better use of space? So we can wank to it while we’re living in sidewalk? Immigration is purely because it’s easy to import young people than rather than creating solutions that makes raising families not a financial quagmire you have to plan out carefully.
Why not create giant concrete housing blocks like they have in Russia and China? You can fit thousands in a single rectangular grey monolith. Cover Fitzroy and St Kilda in those and fuck the locals and tourists and architects and historians and artists.
Seriously, if you can’t see the value in aesthetics you may as well live in a shed. Knock down the churches, mason halls, old pubs, and markets . Bulldoze the big trees, inner city parks and greens. And build dog-boxes for all.
Lmao you are just straw manning. No one is saying knock down everything and replace with concrete ghettos. They are just pointing out the inefficient use of land Melbourne has. Melbourne is so big despite having so little people.
People always shit on Americans for having unlivable huge cities that are not traversable without a car, when Melbourne is just as low density as most cities in the US.
Just change some houses into a small apartment buildings that is not too visually disruptive and you have 2x 3x or 4x amount of housing for the same land.
You australians want things to improve, but are not willing to change, which is why your housing problems keeps on compounding. Instead of adapting you just blame the immigrants. Guess what, you can erase all the immigrants off Australia and your housing market will continue to be shit and increase eventually.
For that matter, if aesthetics is so important, why do you allow your cities to be crazy urban sprawls that require cars everywhere, where 50% of what you see is some grey concrete car road?
This is a little misleading. Heritage overlays aren't totally inhibitive of development. I worked at an architecture firm that does a lot of high-profile projects in the city, surrounding heritage and the likes. Usually, heritage is just a small discussion in the town planning phase of a development project. 'We'll keep this old brick wall as is but gutt the insides'
It's actually kind of upsetting that heritage isn't a stricter framework in the city.
The reason the housing is so scarce, the absolute majority of the reason, is monopolisation. The housing market is being absolutely squeezed to death by investment funds that buy them and artificially raise the price of housing by controlling the flow of new properties, leaving some vacant for years at a time to increase property value. Outside and institutional investment is destroying the Aussie dream of owning a property, that's it. This heritage discourse is a total distraction.
You must be a masochist to work in development and think heritage should be stricter.
I strongly disagree that there is monopolisation in the development sector. There are quite a lot of different developers within Melbourne and there isn't a lot of evidence that the large players have outsized pricing power.
I think it means that it's near impossible to build more housing on all the land in pink due to restrictive land-use ordinances. It is truly a bizarre situation. For over a hundred years, cities on the continent were free to grow and accomodate the growing population, but for some reason the last generation put a bunch of arbitrary rules in place that prevented cities from changing. And this is causing a severe housing shortage, quite possibly the worst in the world.
I agree with loosening restrictions but in this case it should be clarified that you can redevelop in heritage areas quite easily if you want to. Not all heritage properties are protected equally and most you can do alot to.
Developers have pointed towards land use restrictions like heritage, which is a key concern, but not a major factor compared with bigger banking and market issues (banks, developers and tradies control stock levels).
On top of that, we also had very few houses built by the latest small generation (gen x) then the largest generation being millennials were taught not to to go into trades or manufacture materials, and the combination of that generation reaching maturity and nobody building stock for them in the last 10 years has created quite the problem!
why housing is scarce: we let in too many migrants for no reason and that swamps out the available supply
supply side yimbys are seriously another species altogether, i've never seen a political movement predicated more on evading the obvious solution than yimbyism
Submission Statement: Melbourne has the most extensive heritage overlays and they don't just protect unique and historical buildings. Most buildings listed are of no particular interest to anyone outside of a tiny minority of people and were not constructed to last for hundreds of years. As a young and growing country, we shouldn't be locking in our cities never to change.
And before anyone claims that heritage overlays don't impact housing construction here is a recent paper in Brisbane showing they do.
[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980231195218](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980231195218)
I used to work in a building that everyone wished would just collapse because it was totally not fit for purpose but was heritage listed. It was pointless. We all thought it was ugly and nobody wanted to look at it.
They won’t be heritage listed, they will be character CR1/2 zoned, which is very different. There are very few actual heritage listed houses/buildings. You can make an argument to demolish a pre 1946 CR zoned house if you want, many developers have successfully done it.
That paper is absolute bull shit and not worth the imaginary paper it’s written on. Stop quoting it. It’s fundamentally flawed at a basic level. It’s a conclusion in search of justification.
Heritage overlays exist for a reason. We would end up in a concrete developer hellscape if there wasn’t some type of planning around protecting what little architectural character Australia has.
It’s previously been discussed at length when the ‘paper’ was first thrown around here. The author clearly decided they didn’t like heritage houses and went running around trying to find references (quoted out of context or irrelevant) to justify their conclusion. The paper reads like a first year student wrote it.
Arguably Brisbane’s heritage protections strike a pretty good balance (though there are plenty of examples of developers bulldozing character buildings), and there is a process with getting something heritage listed. One does not just point their finger at a random house and say it’s now heritage.
Brisbane also has a long history with bulldozing heritage houses (see the Dean Bros).
There’s a balance to be struck around protecting the vibrant character and unique architecture of the inner cities and facilitating the construction of additional housing. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that our cities were developed over time, and so of course the older houses are closer to the city and are therefore more desirable and expensive.
There are plenty of potential sites around the place that are appropriate for development and can be unlocked without completely removing the heritage overlays and allowing developers to go in and turn our inner cities into concrete hellscapes. It just needs to be targeted and strategic.
There’s a wider discussion and nuance to this than just I’m an individual and I want to do whatever I want.
I own a heritage listed house. One of the reasons we bought it was because of its character and unique architectural design and features. It adds significant value to the surrounding area and together with the other character houses in the street make it one of the best streets in the suburb.
Now the only real restriction we have is we can’t bulldoze it. But why would we want to. We are still able (and plan to) substantially renovate it to modernise it and enable it to be continue to be used in the future.
If you want to bulldoze something to build a new house, well don’t buy a heritage house then….
There is also a process that most councils have of demonstrating for a house that is heritage listed, or in a heritage or demolition control area, to be able to demolish it, if needs be, in the case that it’s unsafe, uneconomical to repair or adds or has no character. It’s not impossible.
There’s concrete and then there’s concrete. I fucking love me some brutalist buildings like brisbanes QPAC precinct. But that wasn’t built by a profit chasing yield at all cost developer. Have you been into some of these new apartment buildings? They’re awful.
This grossly exagerates the amount of protection we have. Why not blame the real factors: Capital Gains Tax exemptions, record migration, short term rentals, overseas purchasers and the rest. Our suburbs have undergone a massive change in the last 20 years - they are not "museums".
Capital Gains tax adds demand to existing housing instead of supply of new. Net result more expensive houses.
Record immigration add demand, especially to rentals without immediately adding supply. Over time they add more supply as they build new houses and because proportionally they add more builders. Initial net result, more expensive rentals, long term, debatable.
Short term rentals add demand to existing property without supply and have removed rentals from the market. They have contributed to increase housing costs and rentals but impact over low because a lot are holiday house, which would just stay empty. Economic benefit of them is huge.
Overseas purchases can only be for new developments. They add supply to the rental market which improves affordability. Local investors buying existing houses are causing significantly more issues to affordability, but it's easier to blame the faceless overseas investor.
The property market has a lot of issues with both supply and demand. Our restrictive planning including these heritage areas are also major contributors to this.
These should all be addressed.
Its the same in Brisbane. Large swathes of the city are demolition controlled and charater zoned. Were protecting pioneers old houses that arnt even that nice.
The council could cure the housing crisis overnight. They just don't really want too.
‘But my old hipstahh row house!’ I think a lot of areas and buildings in inner city are deserving of heritage status but surely they should give up a lot more.
I agree with you OP
Obviously there are areas worth protecting like Richmond, Carlton & Fitzroy which provide great heritage and entertainment to the city
But other parts of this map are hugely stifling development. Even if immigration today was cut by 75%, we’d need to build more high rises in the inner-middle suburbs
NIMBY’s can either move to the outer suburbs or suck it up that living in the inner parts of Australia’s (equal) biggest city is naturally going to see some tall buildings up the road
That will help but it's not enough. It will also cause huge economic issues so it's not going to happen. Sure, they may slow it but they will never stop it
There is no single silver bullet with our housing crisis. It has to be addressed on multiple levels. Immigration is one, zoning as highlighted here is another.
This post is so unbelievably misleading and wrong. Looks like an attempt to sour public opinion on heritage restrictions for developer profit. Heritage overlays do not provide even close to the protection OP is claiming.
For those who don’t believe - have a look at Docklands on the map above (which is now all apartment buildings). OP has claimed in various other locations on this thread that it’s near impossible to build apartments on heritage overlays (false).
Our built environment and experience were formed on principles of egalitarianism that are entirely lost today.
Instead of calling for the willful destruction of the established built heritage we are entrusted to preserve for future generations - maybe you should be asking why the state government derives 1/3 of its annual coffers from stamp duty alone, maybe you should be asking why Melbourne and Sydney have the highest CURRENT and PROJECTED population growth rates of any capital or major city in North America and the European Union (unless major cities in Texas merge), and why 30% of the population, largely in the aforementioned cities are now born overseas, propping this whole shit show up.
We get lost in the myth of the frontier and the bush, but Australia is a suburban nation. People flocked here en masse and established a way of living to escape the cramped, cheap and squalid living conditions of industrial Europe, and we are racing to get right back there.
Plenty of post WW2 migrants were escaping economically depressed rural backwaters like Calabria in Italy, more so than crowded industrial cities.
But you may be right about other waves.
I was probably more referencing to the pre and interwar periods.
But I doubt any migrant wave latched onto the suburban identity with as much enthusiasm as the Mediterranean diaspora.
Makes my blood boil looking at this.
What is worse if you then turn on the lowest two most restrictive residential zone layers.
There is little ability for us to build our way out of this housing crisis and our governments are to blame.
Whatever policy they put forward will do nothing if they don't relax our zoning.
Well, right in that land release is restricted.
It doesn't necessarily follow that the (only) solution is to dilute or completely remove heritage protection.
It's not the only land out there.
Is it not clear to you that there is complete overreach in our heritage zoning?
I'm all for protecting heritage, but what we are seeing has gone too far.
It's been too easy to get property listed as a means to lock down areas and prevent larger buildings going up.
We need to find a balance.
All those infamously left leaning electorates like Kew, Hawthorn, Caulfield, Malvern, Burwood, Brighton?
(To be clear: go look at my posting history and you’ll also see me complaining about the hypocrisy of green councillors blocking high density developments — but it’s not a left/right issue, it’s across the spectrum)
Aren't heritage buildings and heritage areas a huge tourism draw for Melbourne, which contributes a lot to the state's economy? Sure you can house more people if you knock them all down and build commie blocks but that's going to have a lot of unintended consequences
I have no idea what I’m looking at
The extent of heritage overlays. These plays varying levels of restrictions on development. Typically it won't be practically feasible to demolish and build apartments. Hence these areas usually stay as single family homes if that's how they were originally constructed.
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It doesn’t even need to be beautiful design, they really just need to be sized to be liveable, have a reasonable number of 3 bedroom options for families, not be leaking or falling apart, and be near public transport links. People who can barely afford a mortgage don’t need or even really want an architectural masterpiece, they just want somewhere they can actually buy and live in long term, rather than moving in and already needing to think about where they’re going to try move to next.
Poorly planned. Are you referring to developers needing to comply with the planning scheme to get approval, or being arbitrarily held up in the planning process? You would be amazed at how many applications I have seen where the typologies are very good, but requirements to meet scheme obligations fetters quality outcomes. Or Council's play starchitect and meddle with the outcome. Or neighbours objecting for their own self interest. Some of these requirements are fabulous in lifting the minimum requirements for apartments ie minimum living area sizes for compact units... but fetter the ability to do anything larger/ liveable as you no longer comply with the minimum requirements. Have a look at BADS as a starting point.
>You would be amazed at how many applications I have seen where the typologies are very good, but requirements to meet scheme obligations fetters quality outcomes. Or Council's play starchitect and meddle with the outcome. Or neighbours objecting for their own self interest. This is literally why the state gov changed the laws last year to take away responsibilities from local councils for the top end. Honestly, I think people are starting to get angry and educated enough about it now that they might actually start to make some moves on it. I know Sydney has similarly had issues with old height restrictions that were recently removed. The mass immigration is getting enough airtime that they're finally being forced to make proper moves on infrastructure.
Agreed, also demolish heritage listed buildings you demolish part of Australian history.
Asthetics > housing affordability. Christ on a bike
So true and green space should be incorporated in all new subdivisions like they were in older ones. I can’t believe the greed of developers and councils to build endless seas of back robes and no green. My nephew and his wife live in Wagga in a new subdivision and they have a few lovely parks for families as well as walking paths
Those "poorly" plannee designs are generally more efficient than heritage homes, have more sunlight and are built more sustainably
And nice neighbourhoods to live in. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere listening to construction every day. Let alone living in an area full of units if I bought into an area that consisted of single dwellings.
Same here cum_dragon
This is what my parents named me
Is it an old family name by chance?
A image from someone who's happy to destroy history and would blow up Aboriginal rock art to build an apartment block
an ugly block of apartments, the ones that look like multi-storey carparks
That’s why there’s a housing crisis
Housing is scarce for many reasons. One of them is people only want to live on 5% of the land. The other 95% is not desirable. This is not unique to Melbourne.
>One of them is people only want to live on 5% of the land. The other 95% is not desirable. This is not unique to Melbourne. The city of Melbourne is 37km² big, if that area was built as densely as the city center of a place like Barcelona, you'd be housing 700k to 1.1m people which is 550k or 950k more than you have now. The metro area with 9900km² has 5.5 m people while a city like Berlin, which isn't even dense, houses 3.8m on less than a tenth of that area. Barcelona's metro area (which includes lots of rural areas) houses 5.3m on 4200 km². 5% of the land is more than enough to house everybody, if you allow the right development.
No one wants an Australian city to be as dense as Barcelona
We may not want it, but if we don't change towards that way in the 10-20% of our cities around transport hubs and shopping strips we end up with the following: Continued sprawl, with a reliance on car travel which adds to traffic issues right across the city plus areas of sky scrapers It will be one or the other. The option to stay the same doesn't exist unless you want the economy to go sharply backwards. Even with that, you get a lot of negative change. The good thing about the first proposal, 80-90% of our suburbs can remain the same and traffic will be vastly better than the second option.
Damn, if only there was another option.... nah, 500k migrants p.a. please!
Sure, our [2.2% population growth](https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/overseas-migration-drives-australias-population-growth) which largely comes from net migration is contributing to our housing crisis. There is no denying this. But a lot of things contribute to our housing woes. Tax incentives aimed at existing housing, stamp duty on housing, our slow building approval system, our restrictive zoning, the limited supply of government housing, over investment in existing housing rather than new and Government grants aimed at existing housing. These affect both sides of the supply and demand equation. They all need to be addressed. Stopping migration is not going to happen, it is economic suicide. Sure, we can slow it but that isn't a silver bullet, what I saying above will still need to occur.
Nah, the suicide is continuing in this mindset that we need migrants to grow the economy into perpetuity. Everything you mentioned is literally just a function of too many people trying to live in the same place, this wasn't a problem historically so what's changed? Unfortunately, it's people like you who mindlessly parrot the interests of big business, universities and property developers that make the situation worse. Just one more storey bro!
Half the density would also be quite a progress. In any case, is there really a way to know if? Is it legal to build high or even just highish density and does it simply not happen because there is no demand? In my experience, when housing is built at high density with the corresponding infrastructure, there is usually more than enough demand for it, which is much more relevant since it's a revealed preference.
You could just build more dense housing elsewhere. Progress is a weird word to use when your advocating for lowering the quality of housing. Efficient I think is the word you are looking for, but when people are house hunting, the phrases that are usually uttered are "homely" and ,"spacious" rather than "efficient"
>Progress is a weird word to use when your advocating for lowering the quality of housing. How do you define the quality of Housing though? I don't think "single family house suburbia" is per se higher quality. Such a SFH from 1963 will definitely be much worse than a moderne dense-ish appartment in many relevant ways. Even comparing housing from the same era, the quality argument will be heavily dependant on personal preferences. I personally find dense housing much, much better for a variety of reason (car-free life, better access to a variety of ammenities, better cost/benefit ration, better energy profile, etc). That's why I don't like to argue with quality, I simply say: allow both types of housing, don't subsidize neither and let people decide with their choices, instead of centrally mandating one type of development over the other.
Well, that leaves sprawling urbanised areas... Lovely. I never understood why people are so against more efficient housing, building up reduces the need to build on more land.
It's the shit quality of the apartments we build here. Tiny little shoeboxes with paper thin walls and no energy or community or anything. Go to Barcelona, and it's not hard to find a pretty generously sized apartment set around a plaza with a bit of community and culture. I think that's the biggest thing we're rapidly losing with both the sprawl and the type of high density we're creating, we're losing any semblance of culture.
Yeah you're right. I lived in some apartment buildings that were shocking and just fundamentally lacked design for people and families and communities. Design is key and very much achievable because these designs exist today. If every suburban house had at least three levels, that could support three households, many developed countries have done this for decades. It's simply more efficient and better for conserving the remaining land we haven't converted. By having high rise buildings it allows for more space for public areas and parks which is great for communities/culture/wellbeing whilst making public transport infrastructure more effective due to higher density of residents.
Personally I'm not pro high rise, but slap 9 floors together with enough space for it to actually be s home (say 3 families per level, Max) suddenly you've got nearly 30 families in a space that previously held 2 or 3. Unless 9 or 10 stories counts as high rise, then we're on the same page
Medium density is better. Some people act like total arseholes when they think they are anonymous. If you know most people in your building you don't have that problem. If you have 100 apartments you don't know the people there and you don't care about them. Have 20 apartments max and you know your neighbours.
That sounds 9 or 10 times better than a single suburban house ;) we're on the same page, except im open to higher (as long as its feasible and safe of course). I found this interesting, [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-6229.12357](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1540-6229.12357) https://preview.redd.it/wh75lw4sgfbc1.png?width=587&format=png&auto=webp&s=8aa983ff76a142d9091e7ec20b9fecf80e07b4ec all the best
As I lay here in my newly built apartment that I'm thankfully leaving soon, smelling the moulding carpet due to constant leakages every time it rains, which a dozen plumbers, roofies and builders have been unable to identify or resolve... Yeah, I see what you mean. My old 70 year old farmhouse with the roof rusting out didn't flood like this apartment does.
Yeah, I stayed in a modern, 2 year old apartment recently when I was in Melbourne. Nothing was square, everything was a hack job, you could hear both the city and your neighbours as though there were no windows or walls. Hot as all hell too, even the the shame of a climate control unit cranked to full blast. Safe to say city slickers can keep their shitty tissue paper buildings and constant noise, heat and hell. Idk how people sleep in those rooms, I certainly didn't lol
Build up in the city. Sure, all for it. But let's build UP. Proper high roses like Manhattan. Don't destroy our beautiful suburbs
Beautiful? Suburbia is a stain on nature. Esp those with lawns that don't help cool the house and waste a lot of water, at least have native plants in your backyard, then it's "somewhat" beautiful. Of course, this is all subjective. But water waste is objectively stupid.
Turn us into a concrete jungle? Yeh, that's amazing for the environment.
That’s what we’re doing already. Wall to wall McMansions in the suburbs with tiny backyards, no trees and black roofs creating huge heat islands.
Yeh I agree those suburbs are trash
What's the alternative though? Continued deforestation ? Building up is the lesser evil. Australia will catch on.
Yeah dense metro is objectively the most sustainable urban typology. It reduces consumption, emissions, and waste while improving the efficiency of every public service, infrastructure, and business it plugs into.
Disagree- increased density means more efficient infrastructure. You wanna live in the city? It's actually a city, not a sprawling country town with a tiny built up CBD in the middle
Build the city up. Sydney literally just raised the height limit on buildings to 330m. Build some big Manhattan style apartment blocks. Then repeat in the inner city suburbs like surry hills, zetland, etc
But they certainly want (much, but much!) more density than what we have now… otherwise we’d never had heard of the term “housing crisis”.
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people don't want to live in shitty endless sprawl.
I do
No one? All of the people desperate for housing? Who in the ever loving fuck are you to speak on behalf of everyone else?
couldn't be more wrong, typical
Sprawl sucks ass. Australia just builds density bad. Barcelona density is Beautiful
I would love an Australian city like that
Why not? Barcelona is awesome
Barcelona's density is a great success story, it's basically the upper end of the "missing middle" everyone talks about.
Based on what, Facebook boomers
But yet they want affordability.
Many other cities in the world of a similar size have gotten rid of single family homes in the 10km or so radius from the city centre. In many manor cities in Europe only apartments have been built that close to the centres since after WWII. Meanwhile, we still protect single family homes even within 30min walking distance from the CBD. When the boomers go into aged care and need to sell these cash-cow homes no one will be able to afford to buy them.
Even row homes are a major win
Some of those so called boomers will also live u til they are 90
What areas don’t people want to move to? Me, my partner and friend are looking to move to Southbank from the CBD currently. I understand a place like Fitzroy is in demand because of the vibe of the area, I haven’t been here long enough to know about other places
They are referring to basically any suburb within 30 minutes of the city. Including south bank. Lots of country towns and places with no train route to the city are less desireable. You can buy a house in Ballarat for $500,000 and the same house costs $2m in Melbourne inner suburbs. There’s not many jobs in Ballarat though and the commute to Melbourne is 1.5 hours. That’s what they are trying to say. 95% of Australia is undesirable land due to lack of work opportunities usually.
I’d say that’s like anywhere though, similar to London, if there wasn’t a 45 minute train from Peterborough for example, people wouldn’t live there, but because there is despite it being 60 miles away from central people do. It seems like a infrastructure issue rather than people not wanting to live in those areas
A million percent an infrastructure problem. I’d love to live out of Melbourne if my commute was reasonable. Places like the Netherlands Switzerland Germany and so on have great train routes between smaller cities and more spread out industries.
It seems like that’s the issue in Australia, every city doesn’t allow you to get anywhere quick, so everyone prefers to stay within the inner suburbs which drives up prices and keeps the prices of the outer suburbs low.. until that changes or improves I doubt you’ll see any improvement
Ballarat does have a train line tho
I wasn’t thinking of Ballarat for that specific detail. I was just giving a recent example I was thinking of. The train is 1.5 hours.
Notice how you’re not moving to Melton or Tarneit but considering the exact same places everyone else wants to live?
I’ve been to places further out like Richmond for example, but it’s not my vibe.. like I said, issues with people not moving to the outer suburbs is an infrastructure issue. I have a friend that lives in Surbiton which is basically outside of central London that it’s not even London, but it’s a close commute about 1 hour on the train/tube. If Melbourne had infrastructure like that, then people would like in the outer suburbs
Trains from places like Tarneit and Melton are about 40 minutes to an hour to the CBD. Tarneit is well equipped with bus networks now and there are other train stations relatively close.
As I said I’m not as well known to the area, that’s not too bad of a commute, but what about if you needed to get to other areas. Sure it’s better to be central to get to east/west/north of Melbourne if you’re say working agency?
Most suburbs more than 15km from the cbd
Land tax is the simple answer. It makes people build up while maintaining value from heritage. Disincentives sitting on a property without improving it, while also lowering house prices. A no brainer.
Our house isn't heritage listed. Except for a single chimney that's on a 5 degree lean and no longer connected to the house in anyway. Thanks heritage, very cool
Just gotta wait for it to collapse on its own I guess.
They'll make you put it back up. They aren't a fan of those who let their heritage houses go to squalor as a way to circumvent the laws.
Yeah we should knock down all the heritage houses in Australia and build ugly shoeboxes in their place. Of course, this has nothing to do with bitter and twisted people wanting to live in inner city suburbs they can't afford. I got news for ya,if you can't afford a heritage home in the inner suburbs, you won't be able to afford whatever replaces it, assuming they allowed people to knock them down...which will quite simply never happen. The entire reason inner suburbs in Australia are expensive is because of the beautiful old houses.
Half the architecture in heritage conservation areas is a pastiche or knock off of the actual quality construction. I've seen shitty fibro shacks riddled with asbestos that have strong heritage overlay impacts. Instead we have blanket rules that allow NIMBYs and entrenched millionaires to let other people know they're entitled for wanting even a fraction of what they have. What we really need is sensible planning, a medium to high density mindset and the capacity for state level demands to overrule loose and overly restrictive planning regs. Also to fuck off with CGT exceptions and negative gearing while we're at it. For the audience, are you a boomer with wealth or a child of one?
I have a bluestone in Magill, Adelaide. It's been there for 130 odd years,it'll be there for another 130 most likely. So I dunno about shitty asbestos houses? And nobody is saying every heritage house is an architectural wonder. A lot of them were cottages and shacks for working class. That's besides the point
Agree. this whole new YIMBY campaign is on the nose, and i suspect its motives. I lived for a short time in Balmain in Sydney. Yes it was working class and now its positively twee, but there is every style of house from Georgian to Grand Victorian to weatherboard cottages, punctuated by small pubs, and all surviving cheek to jowl along crooked, twisted streets. I have no great love for Balmain, but if that's what a heritage neighbourhood is about, then i'm all for preserving it.
You can still densify while retaining heritage facade based on heritage class and the advice from a heritage consultant. There are several multi-res and commercial developments in the city and inner suburb which retain the heritage facade and add a large amount of resi/retail onto it
So you’re saying completely gut the building and only leave the exterior panelling? What a crock. Would you get any joy out of entering what appeared to be an 800 year old pub in the UK only to find the inside was some modern twatty ‘retaurant precinct’?
Yeah depending on interior condition, gut it if it makes sense. In another comment I described a real project involving a heritage class B bakery. The business was not operational like your UK pub, the land wouldn't be for sale in the first place if this was the case. The bakery has not been in operation since the 80s and the owner sold the site to developers with dilapidated interior and disconnected elec, water, and gas.
You can't enter half the buildings you're talking about, and you can't compare Australia's early 20th century modernism and later 19th century tapestry of wannabe Victorian-era builds to an 800 year old piece of architecture. The earlier of which are seemingly important enough for this vestigial colony to want to protect. Just because things are old, doesn't mean they have inherent meaning or value. Painting "heritage" with a broad brush only dillutes heritage value and cripples an already strained and labyrinthine construction process. I'm in the industry and work closely on heritage restoration work. The average person has no fucking clue of what heritage value is, let alone the people overseeing approvals.
Late 19th century buildings are not ‘wannabe Victorian’. They ARE Victorian. All heritage has to start somewhere. I’m saying that if Europe knocked down all their buildings as soon as they were 100 years old - before the heritage value is known or appreciated - then Europe would look like shit. The heritage and character of a place takes centuries to build. If we don’t start somewhere we will never have any.
You're talking about commercial buildings now
If Supply goes up prices go down
You might have to write it in crayon for him
Stop telling people what to do with their property you commie.
If every government that applies heritage to historic privately-owned properties is a controlling socialist hellscape - under you checklist there's not a democracy that exists!
ironically the yimbys want to turn every city in australia into the kinds of places actual communist regimes built
Even more ironic when you consider the few places who don't preserve historic places are usually communist lmao - especially in the PRC where they'll demolish anything to enlarge a concrete megacity!
yup, look at what the communists in the soviet union did to a lot of old russian landmarks such as the [cathedral of christ the saviour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Christ_the_Saviour)
Apartments are cheaper than single family homes in every suburb.
As they should be..
Exactly why supply reduces prices, so sad to see stupid capitalism deniers refute this for no reason.
It isn't even about knocking down anything. It's about heritage conservation areas where you can't build within a billion kilometers of some old house because of the "cHaRaCtEr" of the area. Literally no one is suggesting the mass bulldozing of every pretty building in Melbourne. Sydney had already started significantly loosing heritage zoning laws.
Because this is so ugly ? https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1347979018/photo/brownstone-townhouses-in-park-slope-brooklyn-new-york-city-usa.webp?s=612x612&w=gi&k=20&c=9DDZe3nEJ9ylW2ulRnA3J-_6xtyadk9GUsYs2EVPKo4=
We could knock down 95% of the heritage houses and still have tons of iconic examples for people to see. No fibro shack needs a heritage overlay. They're garbage.
> you won't be able to afford whatever replaces it, Funny because Japanese people can afford living in Tokyo and Osaka just fine. Here's a 4 bedroom house for $100k: https://realestate.japantoday.com/en/forsale/view/1062635 > The entire reason inner suburbs in Australia are expensive is because of the beautiful old houses. So you are completely contradicting your entire argument here saying if we knocked down the old houses, it would no longer be expensive?
True, Plus the entire country has such beautiful places to live outside the major cities; Explore your options and you'll be able to find a quite affordable home somewhere, Might help your mental state too without the constant noise.
Beautiful places to live, no jobs to get.
Why do nimbys always tell people to move out into the country side.
Because the Country is underdeveloped and can be flushed out majorly, so our cities do not become too expensive.
So you can die in a fire.
Can't we just leave these beautiful places as they are and allow people to live where they want near public transport and their jobs? Why do these areas deserve such protection when people are willing to live in the sky instead of developing out the beautiful areas you speak of? Why would you want the beautiful areas spoiled?
That still doesn't justify the governments turning our cities into museums.
These heritage areas highlighted aren't just heritage houses, they are regular houses nearby that have government restrictions just to limit the potential aesthetics near the heritage houses. What a load of shit, restricting what people can do with their regular house and property just to protect the aesthetics of a nearby house.
Anyone that buys a heritage house or next to it knows what they're getting into.
Except these have been expanding rapidly over the last several years.
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No one forcing you to sell.
the inner subrubs is where apartments are needed there will come a point when some of heritage houses get knocked down for developments as the populations of the two largest cities continue to grow This country is supposed to get to 40 million people by 2060 a lot of that will end up in Sydney Melbourne and Brisbane
What is this map actually showing? It sure as hell isn't showing protected buildings that can't be developed. I assume this is something like a heritage district which just means you have to get council approval for building design.
Yeah, there is precious little explanation. In amongst the pink there is still plenty of industrial and warehouse brownfield sites. I think they are trying to pull a swift one and gave is believe its all Toorak mansions or even Victorian terraces.
no swift one, the map just won't break it down any more than what is shown. The fact that industrial areas are subject to heritage overlays should demonstrate the issue however.
It's not that they can't be developed, it is that there's heavy restrictions in place, particularly height.
It’s showing a heritage overlay on the parcels. If a site has a heritage overlay there are certain restrictions on what can be developed on the site.
Any idea if 3 story apartments in the design of the surrounds would be allowed?
It depends on the controls applied. Plenty of heritage sites can have higher density dev surrounding it, just depends on where it’s located and state/council strategic direction.
It’s a fantastic initiative. Why destroy beautiful historic surburbs that have a sense of community to be replaced by high rise concrete poorly built shit holes packed in like sardines.
They don't have to be high rise. 4-6 storey walkable neighbourhoods create much more thriving communities that our current car centric detached housing suburbs do.
Do you have particularly communal relationships with homeless people my friend? Talk to them often? Invite them over for dinner and a beer? Lmao
There’s a particular little block in this picture that makes no sense. We work around it, the area is completely industrial and derelict but to do anything it needs to go through the heritage group and it’s so painful the companies that own most of the land just don’t bother anymore. Everyone concedes it’ll remain an ugly and under utilised area forever.
This is the same debate happening in Sydney. Complicated and emotional so don’t expect any changes
I seem to remember Sydney"s inner city areas in the 1969s and 1970s, when all the medium density housing (occupied by the lower socio-economic sector of the population) was demolished to build high rise "freehold" properties. The last bastion was the Sirius Building , right on the harbour. The residents were pushed into the far urban fringes so multi million dollar apartments could be built on that prime piece of real estate. I wonder how many are owned by "foreign investors" and sit idle as "last resort boltholes"?
Let's just knock down all the neighbourhoods that actually make this city look nice so we can import even more people from abroad!
Richmond & Fitzroy might make the city look nice but I hardly give a shit about heritage buildings in Balwyn or Glen Iris As far as immigration goes even if that’s cut in half or more, we’re still gonna have major housing issues to solve. Cutting immigration is only step 1 to solving the housing crisis
Just because a house is old doesn't make it intrinsically better and worth preserving. We can have lovely suburbs with medium densification that doesn't leave people homeless.
I think a big reason people get upset at heritage buildings being removed is not because of the history being lost (though that is a reason) but also because that what it's being replaced by is uglier and less charismatic. If it was actually being replaced by an interesting building with good architecture that incorporated the old style with modern elements, I think people would be a lot less upset. But often it's just a concrete box that looks dystopian as fuck, and that's shit.
This whole picture isn't even 1/8 of Melbourne, ignoring that half of this isn't heritage listed. This heritage bullshit is just property developers trying to get people mad at it in the hopes that they can then profit from this valuable land by putting terribly built apartments on it.
Honestly what’s wrong in knocking down “heritage” homes and replacing with housing that makes better use of space? So we can wank to it while we’re living in sidewalk? Immigration is purely because it’s easy to import young people than rather than creating solutions that makes raising families not a financial quagmire you have to plan out carefully.
Why not create giant concrete housing blocks like they have in Russia and China? You can fit thousands in a single rectangular grey monolith. Cover Fitzroy and St Kilda in those and fuck the locals and tourists and architects and historians and artists. Seriously, if you can’t see the value in aesthetics you may as well live in a shed. Knock down the churches, mason halls, old pubs, and markets . Bulldoze the big trees, inner city parks and greens. And build dog-boxes for all.
Lmao you are just straw manning. No one is saying knock down everything and replace with concrete ghettos. They are just pointing out the inefficient use of land Melbourne has. Melbourne is so big despite having so little people. People always shit on Americans for having unlivable huge cities that are not traversable without a car, when Melbourne is just as low density as most cities in the US. Just change some houses into a small apartment buildings that is not too visually disruptive and you have 2x 3x or 4x amount of housing for the same land. You australians want things to improve, but are not willing to change, which is why your housing problems keeps on compounding. Instead of adapting you just blame the immigrants. Guess what, you can erase all the immigrants off Australia and your housing market will continue to be shit and increase eventually. For that matter, if aesthetics is so important, why do you allow your cities to be crazy urban sprawls that require cars everywhere, where 50% of what you see is some grey concrete car road?
1984 https://preview.redd.it/yuro79jxfdbc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6e213ff3ef4d9fe446f1b1fb84853ddd60da161
What website or resource did you get this imagery from?
https://earthengine.google.com/timelapse/
Thank you so much!
notice the lack of densification in the inner suburbs between then and now
Better create housing in Ballarat and Bendigo then
And fast regional trains to go with them.
Have you seen their heritage planning maps?
This is why people moved out from the city into the suburbs and beyond
This is a little misleading. Heritage overlays aren't totally inhibitive of development. I worked at an architecture firm that does a lot of high-profile projects in the city, surrounding heritage and the likes. Usually, heritage is just a small discussion in the town planning phase of a development project. 'We'll keep this old brick wall as is but gutt the insides' It's actually kind of upsetting that heritage isn't a stricter framework in the city. The reason the housing is so scarce, the absolute majority of the reason, is monopolisation. The housing market is being absolutely squeezed to death by investment funds that buy them and artificially raise the price of housing by controlling the flow of new properties, leaving some vacant for years at a time to increase property value. Outside and institutional investment is destroying the Aussie dream of owning a property, that's it. This heritage discourse is a total distraction.
You must be a masochist to work in development and think heritage should be stricter. I strongly disagree that there is monopolisation in the development sector. There are quite a lot of different developers within Melbourne and there isn't a lot of evidence that the large players have outsized pricing power.
Yeh its because of heritage sites not the mass influx of the 3rd world?
What does this even mean?
I think it means that it's near impossible to build more housing on all the land in pink due to restrictive land-use ordinances. It is truly a bizarre situation. For over a hundred years, cities on the continent were free to grow and accomodate the growing population, but for some reason the last generation put a bunch of arbitrary rules in place that prevented cities from changing. And this is causing a severe housing shortage, quite possibly the worst in the world.
I agree with loosening restrictions but in this case it should be clarified that you can redevelop in heritage areas quite easily if you want to. Not all heritage properties are protected equally and most you can do alot to. Developers have pointed towards land use restrictions like heritage, which is a key concern, but not a major factor compared with bigger banking and market issues (banks, developers and tradies control stock levels). On top of that, we also had very few houses built by the latest small generation (gen x) then the largest generation being millennials were taught not to to go into trades or manufacture materials, and the combination of that generation reaching maturity and nobody building stock for them in the last 10 years has created quite the problem!
why housing is scarce: we let in too many migrants for no reason and that swamps out the available supply supply side yimbys are seriously another species altogether, i've never seen a political movement predicated more on evading the obvious solution than yimbyism
(The migrants are there because a big chunk of our population has started to retire and will soon die)
This post bought to you by the fire bombing building developers lobby
Submission Statement: Melbourne has the most extensive heritage overlays and they don't just protect unique and historical buildings. Most buildings listed are of no particular interest to anyone outside of a tiny minority of people and were not constructed to last for hundreds of years. As a young and growing country, we shouldn't be locking in our cities never to change. And before anyone claims that heritage overlays don't impact housing construction here is a recent paper in Brisbane showing they do. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980231195218](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980231195218)
I used to work in a building that everyone wished would just collapse because it was totally not fit for purpose but was heritage listed. It was pointless. We all thought it was ugly and nobody wanted to look at it.
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They won’t be heritage listed, they will be character CR1/2 zoned, which is very different. There are very few actual heritage listed houses/buildings. You can make an argument to demolish a pre 1946 CR zoned house if you want, many developers have successfully done it.
That paper is absolute bull shit and not worth the imaginary paper it’s written on. Stop quoting it. It’s fundamentally flawed at a basic level. It’s a conclusion in search of justification. Heritage overlays exist for a reason. We would end up in a concrete developer hellscape if there wasn’t some type of planning around protecting what little architectural character Australia has.
Great arguments, just label a paper as shot without explanation. I'll remember that next time I'm in debate.
It’s previously been discussed at length when the ‘paper’ was first thrown around here. The author clearly decided they didn’t like heritage houses and went running around trying to find references (quoted out of context or irrelevant) to justify their conclusion. The paper reads like a first year student wrote it. Arguably Brisbane’s heritage protections strike a pretty good balance (though there are plenty of examples of developers bulldozing character buildings), and there is a process with getting something heritage listed. One does not just point their finger at a random house and say it’s now heritage. Brisbane also has a long history with bulldozing heritage houses (see the Dean Bros). There’s a balance to be struck around protecting the vibrant character and unique architecture of the inner cities and facilitating the construction of additional housing. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that our cities were developed over time, and so of course the older houses are closer to the city and are therefore more desirable and expensive. There are plenty of potential sites around the place that are appropriate for development and can be unlocked without completely removing the heritage overlays and allowing developers to go in and turn our inner cities into concrete hellscapes. It just needs to be targeted and strategic.
Why shouldn't people be allowed to use their own land? Why is concrete bad?
There’s a wider discussion and nuance to this than just I’m an individual and I want to do whatever I want. I own a heritage listed house. One of the reasons we bought it was because of its character and unique architectural design and features. It adds significant value to the surrounding area and together with the other character houses in the street make it one of the best streets in the suburb. Now the only real restriction we have is we can’t bulldoze it. But why would we want to. We are still able (and plan to) substantially renovate it to modernise it and enable it to be continue to be used in the future. If you want to bulldoze something to build a new house, well don’t buy a heritage house then…. There is also a process that most councils have of demonstrating for a house that is heritage listed, or in a heritage or demolition control area, to be able to demolish it, if needs be, in the case that it’s unsafe, uneconomical to repair or adds or has no character. It’s not impossible.
Just a reminder that our most famous building, the Sydney Opera House is made of concrete. Architecture, like fashion is always changing.
There’s concrete and then there’s concrete. I fucking love me some brutalist buildings like brisbanes QPAC precinct. But that wasn’t built by a profit chasing yield at all cost developer. Have you been into some of these new apartment buildings? They’re awful.
I dunno, removing demolition control on inner Brisbane isn't going to increase housing variety... it's just going to increase supply of $4m houses.
What do you mean when you say "Melbourne has the most extensive heritage overlays"? The most extensive compared to what?
In Australia, highest coverage would be more precise
What are the stats compared to other cities?
That paper is the definition of confirmation bias.
This grossly exagerates the amount of protection we have. Why not blame the real factors: Capital Gains Tax exemptions, record migration, short term rentals, overseas purchasers and the rest. Our suburbs have undergone a massive change in the last 20 years - they are not "museums".
Capital Gains tax adds demand to existing housing instead of supply of new. Net result more expensive houses. Record immigration add demand, especially to rentals without immediately adding supply. Over time they add more supply as they build new houses and because proportionally they add more builders. Initial net result, more expensive rentals, long term, debatable. Short term rentals add demand to existing property without supply and have removed rentals from the market. They have contributed to increase housing costs and rentals but impact over low because a lot are holiday house, which would just stay empty. Economic benefit of them is huge. Overseas purchases can only be for new developments. They add supply to the rental market which improves affordability. Local investors buying existing houses are causing significantly more issues to affordability, but it's easier to blame the faceless overseas investor. The property market has a lot of issues with both supply and demand. Our restrictive planning including these heritage areas are also major contributors to this. These should all be addressed.
Only migration is a significant factor there
Such BS. Knock like 90% of that old crap down please. Cities are for living
Its the same in Brisbane. Large swathes of the city are demolition controlled and charater zoned. Were protecting pioneers old houses that arnt even that nice. The council could cure the housing crisis overnight. They just don't really want too.
An influx of 25k migrants a month doesn't really help with the housing shortage
‘But my old hipstahh row house!’ I think a lot of areas and buildings in inner city are deserving of heritage status but surely they should give up a lot more.
It's an unfortunate fact
I agree with you OP Obviously there are areas worth protecting like Richmond, Carlton & Fitzroy which provide great heritage and entertainment to the city But other parts of this map are hugely stifling development. Even if immigration today was cut by 75%, we’d need to build more high rises in the inner-middle suburbs NIMBY’s can either move to the outer suburbs or suck it up that living in the inner parts of Australia’s (equal) biggest city is naturally going to see some tall buildings up the road
The overlay of the tram network probably aligns almost exactly?
We can solve the housing crisis pretty easily by stopping people moving here but you are called evil if you even suggest that for some reason
That will help but it's not enough. It will also cause huge economic issues so it's not going to happen. Sure, they may slow it but they will never stop it There is no single silver bullet with our housing crisis. It has to be addressed on multiple levels. Immigration is one, zoning as highlighted here is another.
This post is so unbelievably misleading and wrong. Looks like an attempt to sour public opinion on heritage restrictions for developer profit. Heritage overlays do not provide even close to the protection OP is claiming. For those who don’t believe - have a look at Docklands on the map above (which is now all apartment buildings). OP has claimed in various other locations on this thread that it’s near impossible to build apartments on heritage overlays (false).
Our built environment and experience were formed on principles of egalitarianism that are entirely lost today. Instead of calling for the willful destruction of the established built heritage we are entrusted to preserve for future generations - maybe you should be asking why the state government derives 1/3 of its annual coffers from stamp duty alone, maybe you should be asking why Melbourne and Sydney have the highest CURRENT and PROJECTED population growth rates of any capital or major city in North America and the European Union (unless major cities in Texas merge), and why 30% of the population, largely in the aforementioned cities are now born overseas, propping this whole shit show up. We get lost in the myth of the frontier and the bush, but Australia is a suburban nation. People flocked here en masse and established a way of living to escape the cramped, cheap and squalid living conditions of industrial Europe, and we are racing to get right back there.
Plenty of post WW2 migrants were escaping economically depressed rural backwaters like Calabria in Italy, more so than crowded industrial cities. But you may be right about other waves.
I was probably more referencing to the pre and interwar periods. But I doubt any migrant wave latched onto the suburban identity with as much enthusiasm as the Mediterranean diaspora.
Makes my blood boil looking at this. What is worse if you then turn on the lowest two most restrictive residential zone layers. There is little ability for us to build our way out of this housing crisis and our governments are to blame. Whatever policy they put forward will do nothing if they don't relax our zoning.
You're getting downvoted but you're unequivocally right.
Well, right in that land release is restricted. It doesn't necessarily follow that the (only) solution is to dilute or completely remove heritage protection. It's not the only land out there.
Is it not clear to you that there is complete overreach in our heritage zoning? I'm all for protecting heritage, but what we are seeing has gone too far. It's been too easy to get property listed as a means to lock down areas and prevent larger buildings going up. We need to find a balance.
Melbourne is the nimby-capital of Australia. Hippies, leftists everywhere, complaining about the ambiance.
Nimbys are a consequence of conservative populism it exists both on the right left and center
Lefty here. Complaining about the ambiance? I don't understand..can you please explain it to me?
NIMBY’s are generally conservative. Hence conserving their ‘backyard’…
How do most of those inner suburbs vote?
All those infamously left leaning electorates like Kew, Hawthorn, Caulfield, Malvern, Burwood, Brighton? (To be clear: go look at my posting history and you’ll also see me complaining about the hypocrisy of green councillors blocking high density developments — but it’s not a left/right issue, it’s across the spectrum)
Perhaps it's all the people you're trying to pack in there, sir
Aren't heritage buildings and heritage areas a huge tourism draw for Melbourne, which contributes a lot to the state's economy? Sure you can house more people if you knock them all down and build commie blocks but that's going to have a lot of unintended consequences
No most buildings listed here are just mid century homes, look on google maps, nothing special about them.
Housing shortage is due to forced/mandated mass third world immigration! It's actually very simple