Be Aware that Housing Density in Hobart is Set to Double

The Details
The details of this move are outlined in the Southern Tasmania Regional Land Use Strategy 2010-2035 which has been approved by the 12 southern councils and is with the Minister for approval under Sec 30 of LUPAA. The part of the strategy that this article refers to is the Greater Hobart Area (GHA) that basically stretches from Kingston to Brighton, taking in most of Clarence and a spine out to Sorell. Planning Schemes within the GHA will have two residential zones. One will be an inner residential zone where the average residential density will be 25 lots to the hectare (Average 300 m2 lot size) and a general residential zone with 15 lots to the hectare (Average 450 m2 lot size). Currently the average density in the GHA is 7-10 dwellings to the hectare, mostly made up of quarter acre lots at 700 – 800 m2. This process of increasing the density across a city is called densification.

Why it is Necessary

• It is becoming obvious that the cost of rolling infrastructure and services for urban development out over the landscape is becoming too expensive for government to provide and maintain. The cost of maintaining roads, power, water as well as social and community infrastructure is becoming prohibitive.

• It is unacceptable to have urban development sprawl out over the environment destroying everything that is worth saving in its path.

• We cannot allow urban development to rollout over productive agricultural land when we know that sooner or later that land is likely to be needed for food production.

• Where there are more houses per hectare in an area it is more economic to provide mixed use precincts with shops, restaurants and other facilities.

• People want a range of housing choice including good quality inner city dwellings so that they can take advantage of the variety that the city has to offer and what they want in their stage of the life cycle. People do not want to be forced to live in a house on the fringe of the city especially as many people choose to live alone which leads to a waste of resources.

• Many older people like the idea of living closer in to the city in smaller dwellings with a greater provision of the services needed by them. There are 31,000 people over 65 years living in the Greater Hobart Statistical Area.

• There are 6,980 lone parent families in Hobart with many of them preferring to live close in to the city.

• There is also an equity issue involved here in that it is unacceptable to force low income families out to live on the fringes of the city with insufficient facilities so that the wealthy can retain their sprawling gardens in the inner suburbs.

• When urban density reaches a threshold level it is far more economically viable to provide people with good affordable public transport where they need it.

• When you look at Hobart with a trained eye you see areas of derelict land left as development rolled out over the land in bygone days. Old sheds, hard stands, blackberry patches and new and used car lots that normally would not be on such prime inner city land.

Population Densities in Australia and Around the World.

Sydney and Melbourne have the lowest population density of major cities in the world. From early colonial days the first settlers’ main advantage was that they had plenty of space to set up their gardens to keep them alive. For the next 200 years development was at very low densities with the quarter acre lot rolled out across the landscape. Sydney now has a population density of 2,058 per km2 and Melbourne 1,566 per km2. This can be compared to London with 7,825 per km2 and Paris with 20,807 per Km2. Hobart by comparison has a low 895 per Km2. The other important difference is that in London the population density remains high in the outer suburbs at 3,582 per km2 compared with Penrith (NSW) at 439 per km2. These figures show that the population densities in the major Australian cities are much lower than in other international cities.

Now Australian communities are starting to pay the price of living in such low density cities. They can no longer afford the resulting cost for infrastructure and services spread out over such distances. So around the year 2000 metropolitan strategies in the major Australian cities recognized this problem and the need to prevent further outward growth. Sydney introduced a policy of requiring 70% of new dwellings be infill housing, Melbourne 50% and Brisbane and South East Queensland 67% infill. A decade later regulations are being introduce for Hobart to have 50% of its new dwellings as infill.

The big problem is how densification is brought in on the ground. It is possible to identify parcels of derelict land throughout the GHA but the majority of them are owned by private land owners. The scale of acquiring such land is probably too big and complex for the Lands Acquisition Act 1993. The other way is for the government to apply a high level of Tax on derelict land making it uneconomic for land owners to hold onto it. When it comes to individual lot owners negotiations can become even harder as people are very wary about doing things that will impact on their most important asset in their lives being their homes.

How it is done

Good infill development with a high level of residential amenity does not just happen on its own because new planning regulations require it to happen. There are catastrophic failures across Australia where people have experimented with infill development that has failed miserably. Instead of such experiments architects, builders and developers need to be shown exemplary developments in the other states and walk through them and see how they work. The leader in this field was the Delfin Group that built West Lakes in Adelaide and Golden Grove in South Australia in the early 1990’s. That firm gave great attention to the detail of the layout of the roads, had specialist builders that built to the company’s house plans in precincts and introduced urban design guidelines that ensured that the original high level of amenity remained that way. They installed good quality landscaping and maintained it until it was sufficiently matured. People became proud of their suburb and it continued to look good. West lakes was an infill development where the company reclaimed a significant parcel of land that was previously a swamp.

I did the initial setting up of the Defence Housing Authority, a Commonwealth Government GBE that came into existence in 1987. It was responsible for 24,000 dwellings that housed defence families across Australia. Around two third of those dwellings were substandard and had to be replaced because Defence personnel were becoming more skilled and needed better housing. DHA entered into joint venture arrangements with Delfin and other large land development firms to do a number of large new residential developments in all of the states and territories across Australia. Because we had so many projects going on we were able to develop specialist knowledge on infill and small lot housing. Indeed I believe we educated planners and developers in Victoria on how to do such developments with a development called Streeton Views (550 Lots) on Lower Plenty Road and changed the perception of many people about living in small lot dwellings. Another exemplary development that I have been involved with is City Edge in Canberra, a high density mixed development that produced a range of dwelling including a proportion for low income community housing tenants. (Such developments are best shown by photographs. People can contact me through TT if they would like to see photographs and drawings of the large portfolio of small lot developments that I have been involved with over the years)

It is a big mistake to think that a greater profit can be made by producing small lot housing developments. To create good quality dwellings on small lots the money saved on the cost of the land has to go back into the dwellings themselves and the landscaping of the lots. Small lot houses must maximize the sunlight that gets into them. Ceilings should be raised from 2.4 m to 3.36 m, with long lines of vision in the house by using French doors and using the right colour tones throughout the dwelling. Using these and other techniques in a dwelling can make them look and feel significantly larger inside.

Infill housing is much easier to construct where there are parcels of land compared with constructing infill dwellings within existing suburbs of quarter acre lots. That is putting two dwellings on the same lots. Many hard lessons have been learnt where this has been tried such as in Canberra where dual occupancy lots got out of control in some of the older suburbs and started to destroy the urban landscape. Tight regulation has since been introduced to overcome the problems. Vancouver where densification is well advanced has introduced regulations for what they term lane way houses (LWH). This is where new additional dwellings can be added to houses on the street corners either at the back or beside existing dwellings. Again with good quality housing this has become a successful way to proceed with densification. But there are a lot of challengers for builders that want to become involved in small lot housing.

The other big problem is trying to estimate how many people will take up the opportunity of putting in a dual occupancy dwelling or a lane way house on their residential blocks. GHD Ltd carried out some analysis for the southern council group trying to project the number of potential new dwellings that could fit into the Greater Hobart Area. It sampled residential areas of the city and looked at whether there were spaces where new dwelling could be fitted in. Such a study achieved very little because it does not take cognizance of the fact that the owner may in no way want to give up their land for densification. Because of that factor it is almost impossible to estimate how many new dwellings will result from a densification process.

What not to do in Regard to Small lot Housing.

The most important thing in terms of densification and small lot housing is not to make the same jarring mistakes that have been made elsewhere in Australia. The worst examples I have seen have been in the northern suburbs of Canberra. One company produced a development which resulted in a continuous line of adjacent roller doors in a back lane. Another produced kilometers of long straight back laneways that soon will become a dumping ground and then a slum. Another development in North Watson produced small lot dwellings where very little sunlight could get into any of the dwellings. Others have produced rows of dwellings that all end up looking exactly the same and as a result produce a very monotonous streetscape. So it is important to learn from the disastrous examples as well as look at the exemplary developments of small lot dwellings in Australia.

It is critical that the first few new developments of small lot infill dwellings are not disasters in terms of residential amenity. There are enough bad examples in Hobart already. There needs to be some good examples produced by professionals that are experienced and understand this form of housing so that buyers are not put off at the outset.

The Minister responsible for Housing Tasmania, Cassy O’Connor is not helping this cause by producing cases of poor quality dwellings in terms of ESD across Tasmania. Even more worrying, she has announced that Housing Tasmania is about to build 32 high rise apartments at 42 Brisbane Street in Hobart for low income families. She and her advisors must be among the very few people in Australia that do not know about the disastrous outcomes with the Redfern flats in NSW and the Carlton flats in Melbourne that became derelict social disasters. Every planner of social housing with any knowledge and experience know that low income families need to be “salt and peppered” throughout housing precincts in order not to produce a perverse environment. The Minister may well muddy the waters with her lack of knowledge and set back further densification across Hobart.

Education and Training.

Densification cannot be introduced by just dropping a new set of planning regulations on an unsuspecting public and home purchasers. People need to be shown the clear benefits of living in such developments close into the city centre with an abundance of facilities and services available. It is important that the waters are not muddied early with people being put off such developments. More importantly Tasmanian builders, architects, planners and developers must be trained how to produce good quality infill housing. They need to be shown the successes and failures of small lot and infill developments in the other states. If builders continue to build the same old dwellings as they have done in the past a major disaster is inevitable. The Victorian Government responded to the importance of such training and education to the extent that it set in place a new agency called the Growth Areas Authority to ensure that small lot development proceeded smoothly in that state.

Wrap up.

It can be seen that while densification in the Greater Hobart Area cannot be avoided if Tasmania is to manage its financial capital effectively it is not going to occur without some significant challenges. It cannot be done by dropping a series of recommendations on the community. Decision makers need to look at cities like Vancouver that has decided it is going to be the cleanest and greenest city in the world to see how it is done. The people there have become very supportive of the process of densification in their city.