Relative to income, housing costs in Australia’s capital cities have become some of the most expensive in the world.1 This is a relatively recent phenomenon—certainly, a problem that emerged only since the late 1990s, as a mixture of tax and land use regulations led to rapid policy-induced land price escalation. For most of the country’s twentieth-century history, housing and the land on which it was built were readily affordable to working- and middle-class families. During that period, Australia enjoyed some of the highest rates of homeownership in the developed world.2 Homeownership and the growth of the suburbs became a feature of the democratization of wealth, and a measure of the egalitarian nature of Australian society.3
In a country that continues to boast an embarrassing abundance of land, housing affordability is now a cause of national concern and daily media discussion. The “Australian Dream” of a house in the suburbs is now widely regarded as beyond the reach of young families. Young people are deferring homeownership: the median age of a first-time homeowner with a mortgage in 1981 was twenty-seven, which rose to thirty-two years by the year 2000, and by 2013 had risen to thirty-four. One in five first-time buyers is now aged over forty.4 If entering the market early, many are taking on high-debt burdens that cripple their lifestyles and leave them exposed to minor fluctuations in loan costs or unexpected changes in the economy.
This essay identifies the factors that were largely responsible for increasing the cost of basic suburban housing in Australia and reveals that the imposition of inappropriate urban planning policies combined with tax policy have not only needlessly increased the cost of housing but also reduced choice for new homebuyers. The evidence shows that despite the rhetoric and ideological agenda of various planning authorities, experts, and official agencies, the suburban home remains the preferred choice of families. In 2011 89 percent of all couples with children at home lived in a detached dwelling. Only 4.8 percent of families with children lived in a flat, unit, or apartment, and 5.8 percent lived in a townhouse or semidetached dwelling. Family households continue to make up 68 percent of all household types in Australia, and families with children (couples and single parents) are the largest of the family groups, representing 42 percent of all household types. Families without children, which can include pre- or postchildren families, constitute the next largest groups with 25 percent of all household types.5 (figs. 1.7.1–2)
This essay argues that it has been an erosion of affordability (rather than any alleged erosion of interest in suburban housing due to fundamental social or demographic change) that poses the greatest challenge to Australian society. Australian capital city home prices are now higher than those in most major markets. According to Demographia’s 2015 report, with the exception of Hong Kong, Australia’s major housing markets are among the most unaffordable in the world.6
Australia’s major cities developed rapidly in the late 1800s and early 1900s ascenters of trade and commerce, with industrial activity concentrated in the inner city and port areas. The ports of Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne were on the doorstep of what we know now as the central business districts (CBDs). Housing for workers was created in close proximity to factories and other work centers, given the limitations of transport at the time. Worker housing was typically small, low cost, and built with any readily available materials. In these cramped conditions, working-class families raised generations of children.
After World War II, a housing shortage occured, due to returning servicemen and an influx of immigration from Europe. As a result, local governments actively encouraged the supply of new suburban housing. The high cost of materials—due to postwar shortages—did not prove to be much of an obstacle: unrestrained by complex building regulations or planning laws, estimates are that up to a third of new homes constructed during this period were owner-built.7 A growing middle class emerged, and the great Australian dream of a quarter-acre lot in a suburban location was born. Housing in Australia was transformed as families left cramped inner-city housing and relocated on the outskirts of established urban areas.
The merits of homeownership and the importance of the suburban development that had created the opportunity for broader homeownership found support across the political spectrum. Australian prime minister Robert (Bob) Menzies, in a landmark speech in 1942, set the tone for decades to follow:
The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving “for a home of our own.” Your advanced socialist may rage against private property even while he acquires it; but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours: to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will…National patriotism, in other words, inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.8
From the 1950s through the 1990s, home-ownership and growth of the suburban lifestyle became more than an aspirational goal: it was a social norm and a cornerstone of economic and social life in Australia, undisputed by either end of the political spectrum. Land for further suburban development was abundant and available at low cost with few conditions. Housing prices in most cities rarely exceeded a multiple of four times incomes.9 Australia enjoyed some of the highest rates of home ownership in the world with 70 percent of households either owning their homes outright or holding a mortgage.10
By the 1990s, the outward growth of low-cost suburban housing had become a topic of increasing concern within some policy circles. At the time, state governments were overwhelmingly from the Labor Party, and their electoral fortunes relied heavily on preference votes from the Green movement. This was fertile ground in which antigrowth, anti-sprawl, and generally negative attitudes toward suburban living could take root. Larger suburban homes and their estates were derided by planning academics and urban commentators as soulless “McMansions.”11 Suburban expansion and gated communities were linked to everything from obesity to environmentally irresponsible living and social decay.12
A fast-popularizing environmental agenda also helped fan concerns about further suburban growth. Fears for the loss of bush land and loss of farmland mixed with habitat protection, population control, private automobile use, long commutes, and global warming to create a policy cocktail that viewed suburban expansion as a public enemy. In a break with long-held tradition, antigrowth and antisuburban sentiments began to find political support and expression. Bob Carr, premier of New South Wales from 1995 to 2000, famously declared in 2000 that “Sydney was full.”13 He wanted population controls and a halt to Sydney’s outward expansion. Its population then was just four million people—small by global city standards. Today it is roughly 4.6 million.
A “solution” to outward suburban expansion was needed. Smart growth was one that found widespread support in policy circles at the time. The concept, broadly imported from the United States, quickly became a cause célèbre in planning circles. Australia’s town planning systems had been heavily influenced by the British Town and Country Planning Act (mainly by the 1954 later versions), but it was smart growth and its North American exponents that captured the attention and imaginations of planners, architects, and policy makers in politics and industry.
By the early 2000s, every major city and urban area had adopted regional planning guidelines based closely on the precepts of smart growth: imposition of urban growth boundaries to prevent further outer suburban development and encouragement of high-density development in inner-city areas and around major transit nodes. According to Rod Fehring, residential executive general manager of a leading housing developer, Australand:
There is clear evidence that all Australia’s major cities are pursuing almost identical strategic planning policies. Just read them. The stated objective in all of them is to encourage more compact urban form and gain greater efficiencies in the use of existing infrastructure and future infrastructure investment.14
These schemes became increasingly driven by the promise of great things. For example, the 2013 Draft Metropolitan Strategy for Sydney to 2031 promised: “A home I can afford. Great transport connections. More jobs closer to where I live. Shorter commutes. The right type of home for my family. A park for the kids. Local schools, shops and hospitals. Livable neighborhoods.”15
Not everyone was convinced. The highly respected urban planner Tony Powell, a former commissioner of the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC), described in 2007 the various regional plans as “a sad parade of failing capital city strategic plans” more concerned with public relations than planning:
The most obvious methodological shortcoming in all of the capital city strategic plans is the paucity of urban research…in terms of development land, housing, employment, transport, health and welfare services, regional open space (and) water and communications infrastructure.16
The long-term strategic plan for Melbourne—Melbourne 2030—was singled out as “superficial to the point of ridiculousness.”17
Powell was right to be critical. Few of the urban plans at the time, for example, identified or even mentioned housing choice or affordability as legitimate planning objectives. They generally demonstrated a lack of sympathy for consumer choice, were silent on development or market economics, and were largely devoid of basic math. Many included heroic and untested assumptions about the capacity of increased urban density to provide for future population growth. Powell was one of many who were critical:
The proposition in the latest crop of metropolitan strategy plans that 50 percent or more of future housing development can be accommodated in existing suburban areas of the major cities is patently ridiculous. These are simply unexamined and unreliable hypotheses, not strategies.18
Undeterred by a lack of basic arithmetic, proponents of the high-density “solution” continued to promote the promised merits of density and the implied evils of sprawl by referencing numerous supposed social and demographic drivers. The Australian demographer Bernard Salt got caught up in the tide of enthusiasm for the high-density housing solution when responding to a news media article dealing with the “new face” of residents moving into high-density inner-city areas, focusing on a young lesbian couple as an example. “No longer will a typical Australian family comprise mum, dad and two children,” the article claimed. “In the middle of the twentieth-century, you got married and moved to the suburbs,” Salt was reported as saying. He added:
Today, there’s about 10 variations on that theme. There’s gay couples, divorcees, married couples who don’t have kids, singles, ex-pats, de facto couples and we can’t forget that we have an ageing population. Those groups didn’t exist thirty or forty years ago, so there’s different kinds of families now who have different housing requirements. There’s less need for basic three-bedroom brick veneer homes in the suburbs.19
This type of argument flew in the face of the evidence. According to the Australian Census, in 2001 family households accounted for 68.8 percent of all household types. By 2011, this proportion was little changed at 67.8 percent. The proportion of lone-person households rose from 22.8 percent to 23.1 percent in the same period—hardly evidence of any demise in the family unit or of any need to radically change the development industry’s response to housing choice. (fig. 1.7.3)
While smart growth planning schemes had their origins mostly when State Labor governments were in power, these same ideologies have transferred almost seamlessly to Conservative governments as the political landscape shifted. By 2012, Labor lost power in all three of Australia’s largest states: Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland. Yet the dominant principles of smart growth in various regional planning schemes were adopted with minimal challenge or alteration. Despite ongoing industry calls for reform, urban growth boundaries and unrealistically ambitious targets for infill and high-density housing growth remain key planning features of Australia’s major cities.
As urban growth boundaries (UGBs) were introduced from the late 1990s to early 2000s, the impact of reduced land supply was almost immediate. Developers quickly sought to acquire developable parcels within UGBs, and competition for available sites was intense. Prices for development parcels rose rapidly due to the policy-induced scarcity. According to David Keir, managing director of the developer Devine Limited in Australia, “The imposition of growth boundaries—or, more so, growth constraints—during the 1990s limited the ability of new suburbs to evolve, and subsequently limited supply. [There were] rapid increases in both the cost of undeveloped land and subsequently the cost of new product.”20 (fig. 1.7.4)
Many economists have argued that the rapid escalation in housing prices from roughly the late 1990s onward was due to a strong domestic economy, population growth, and readily available mortgage finance. This demand-side analysis rarely considers the costs of bringing new supply into the market. As Keir identifies, the price paid for limited developable (namely, permissible) land within the artificially imposed growth boundaries was a key factor driving costs up for developers and hence prices for homebuyers.
Other factors also affected supply. At almost the same time as urban growth boundaries appeared, local and state governments began to adopt a new “user pays” system of charging for community infrastructure. Whereas local infrastructure had traditionally been funded from community-wide sources (local council rates, land taxes, stamp duties, and other forms of revenue), the move to “upfront” development taxes was enthusiastically and rapidly embraced. The method by which these charges were calculated was rarely disclosed. For governments, it became a simple proposition to charge land developers a per-lot infrastructure charge, however exorbitant, in order to fund community-wide policy commitments, whether arising from new development or not. Complaints about lack of equity or transparency were batted away as the complaints of “greedy developers” and the consequential impact on land pricing ignored.21
Per-lot levies of upward of $50,000 Australian dollars ($37,000 US dollars) had by 2007 become commonplace in the urban growth areas of major markets across the country.22 While the market remained strong and the economy healthy, these charges were absorbed by developers and passed on to their purchasing public.
Completing the assault on new housing in Australia was federal tax reform. The introduction of a 10 percent Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2000 created a more progressive tax base for the nation. The state governments, which were to be the recipients of GST revenues, promised to abolish a variety of state taxes in exchange, including stamp duty on sales of assets. But the states reneged on their promise to reform stamp duties, while keeping the GST revenues. Because the GST only applied to the final end price of new supply, it was not levied on existing (or secondhand) housing, but it did add 10 percent to the cost of new housing, paid for by the purchaser. This exemption of established housing, combined with the retention of stamp duties, meant that the new housing supply was more punitively taxed than ever before. According to Guy Gibson, Communities general manager in Queensland for the global developer Lend Lease, “Overnight, the industry went from paying very little wholesale sales tax, to 8 to 10 percent GST…which made new homes less competitive against the established house market.”23
A 2011 report revealed the extent to which this combination of policy factors had affected new housing. Overall, taxes, charges, and compliance expenditures on new housing amounted to 30.4 percent of housing costs in Sydney and 25.9 percent in Brisbane.24 The result was that everywhere, except in Perth, these policy-induced charges make up a larger part of the cost of new housing than the cost of the land itself. Given that land prices were already inflated due to supply constraints imposed under UGBs, this approach to taxing land added further direct pressure to the cost of new housing supply.
Research by the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) into land supply and pricing further illustrates the impact on land prices.25 The situation was worse than figures show because developers quickly shrank typical lot sizes to meet market price points. Thus, homebuyers were paying more for smaller lots, with the rate per square meter accelerating even faster than indicated by the per-lot price. (fig. 1.7.5)
“The traditional suburban quarter-acre block is nothing but a distant memory,” the UDIA lamented in 2014, noting that the average size of a new residential lot was now one-tenth of an acre, after falling 29 percent in size over the previous decade.26
Suggestions that escalating expectations of new homebuyers and McMansion-style homes were to blame for worsening affordability did not stand up to the evidence. The cost of actually building the structure on the land, apart from the GST, had remained largely in line with inflation over time. It has been the cost of land that has escalated, leading to higher new housing prices.27 (fig. 1.7.6)
Detractors of suburban living choices also point to rapidly rising housing starts for apartment projects in inner-city areas in their search for evidence to prove that Australians are now choosing high-density housing over the suburban alternative.28 Nothing could be further from the truth. The rapid escalation in apartment construction in Australia’s capital cities is little more than a frenzy of speculative investment by purchasers who have no intention of actually living in the apartment they have bought, many of which at only one or two bedrooms are entirely unsuited to family accommodation anyway.29 One recent study of the Brisbane apartment market revealed that across a large number of recently completed projects, as few as 3 percent of units were sold to owner-occupiers. The balance was sold to (mainly) interstate and overseas investors.30
The absence of owner-occupiers is a market signal that what is occurring in apartment construction is a development industry response to investor appetite, not to housing preference by families. Rising rental vacancies in newer apartment projects is a further market signal that what is being built, contrary to the booster mythology, is not meeting with the expected depth of demand. A recent Melbourne study concluded that as many as one in five apartments was vacant, leading to the description of new projects as “ghost towers.”31
To the chagrin of density advocates, official data reinforce the preference of Australian households—especially families—for suburban housing.32 Those who suggest that suburban housing is no longer in demand are disregarding market evidence to the contrary. The most reliable and accurate measure is provided by the official Census, which shows that nine out of ten families with children at home lived in a detached house in 2011, despite the rapid increase in the supply of alternatives. And families with children—as couples or single parents—remain the largest of all household groups, making up 41 percent of Australian households: a figure that has remained largely unchanged in more than twenty years.33
According to Raynuha Sinnathamby, managing director of Springfield Land Corporation, the developer of Australia’s largest master-planned residential community:
There is plenty of market feedback that indicates that young couples move away from the dense inner city environments to ensure that, as they start a family, they will have more space for their household to grow, i.e., a bigger house, more access to a backyard or parks close to the home, access to quality schools, a safe environment for children and preferably jobs close to home. There is feedback to indicate that when moving from inner city environments, couples would achieve these aspirations by owning a detached house rather than an apartment product and generally in suburban areas.34 (fig. 1.7.7)
The Springfield development in southeast Queensland is proof of ongoing community-wide interest in the detached housing model. The 7,000-acre (2,800-hectare) site commenced development in 1992, and by the late 1990s, growth was accelerating despite widespread antipathy from a cross-section of urban elites. Its exurban location—some 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the city center and in a region not previously regarded as a preferred residential address—led many to question the vision of its founders, Maha Sinnathamby and Bob Sharpless. But Springfield today is home to some twenty-eight thousand residents, countless businesses, schools, shopping centers, a new hospital, a railway station and new rail line, parklands, a golf course, and a growing commercial hub. By 2030, it’s projected that more than one hundred thousand people will live here. Detached housing was the primary driver of its growth because Springfield at the time offered abundant detached land supply at reasonable prices. It was also subject to its own development legislation, which meant it was not caught by the changes in land regulation that affected other developers. Being able to offer the market an affordable opportunity to buy the suburban dream of a house and land proved a winning business formula for the company.35
In the relatively short space of a decade—from around the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s—Australia’s efficient, broadly accessible, and highly affordable new housing market, through a series of quite deliberate policy decisions, became one of the least affordable markets in the world. It now takes many new homebuyers an average of four years just to save for a down payment, let alone contemplate the challenge of paying off a home, which is up to eight times their combined household income.36 Housing investors are increasingly dominating purchases, leveraging the equity in existing homes that have benefited from house price inflation. But while this is creating an even wealthier property-owner class, it is pricing out younger people and families who retain a strong preference for the suburban housing model but are increasingly finding it cost prohibitive. There is little evidence yet to suggest that this market has embraced apartment living as an alternative, but it is reasonable to speculate that a number are renting this form of housing as they save for the preferred but deferred option of a suburban detached dwelling. The consequences of lower levels of homeownership, financial duress for families paying excessive mortgages during their working lives, or unfunded future retirement plans are all a question of debate and speculation. But it is almost certain that the radically different housing fundamentals now in place will lead to significant changes in what Australia has considered social and economic “norms” for generations.
The policy settings that drove this fundamental change are now deeply ingrained in land use regulation and public policy. There is little evidence to suggest that policy makers from both sides of the political spectrum have much interest in reversing these decisions in order to restore affordability and improve access to housing for future generations.
Australia is a country with a long history of placing a high value on equal access to homeownership and on raising families in generous suburban locations. The new ideological framework for land use, housing, and urban planning is having profound repercussions across the spectrum of social and economic life in Australia. A full and dispassionate reappraisal of the policy settings that have led to this outcome might offer some hope of substantial policy change. What’s required is a much-reduced emphasis on urban growth boundaries, an elimination—or at least significant reduction—of upfront and discriminatory taxation on new housing supply, and a relaxation of overly prescriptive regulatory controls and conditions. However, given the prevailing new orthodoxy, these reforms are unlikely to find much support, meaning that the suburban housing dream in Australia will fade even further from view.
2 See, e.g., Tony Kryger, “Home ownership in Australia—Data and Trends,” Parliament of Australia, February 11, 2009, accessed November 6, 2015, http://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/library/pubs/rp/2008-09/09rp21.pdf; Dan Andrews and Aida Caldera Sánchez, “The Evolution of Homeownership Rates in Selected OECD Countries: Demographic and Public Policy Influences,” OECD Journal: Economic Studies 2011, no. 1 (2011).
3 Egalitarianism in Australia is a cultural value widely regarded as having its roots in the nation’s experiences in World War I under British Command. Australian troops were considered by the British ill-disciplined and disrespectful of authority. They were also regarded as excellent combatants, and the concept of mateship and equality were said to be given meaning by the Australian experience of WWI. Attempts to define egalitarianism today are no less shrouded in popular culture, but the Australian Bureau of Statistics has commenced a data series that explores elements of egalitarianism and the Australian sense of “a fair go.” See Australian Bureau of Statistics, “1370.0—Measures of Australia’s Progress, 2013,” May 9, 2014, accessed November 6, 2015, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1370.0.
4 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “6541.0.30.001—Microdata: Income and Housing, Australia, 2013–14,” accessed November 6, 2015, http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/6541.0.30.001Main+Features12013-14?OpenDocument; see also “2012 Mortgage Choice Future First Homebuyer Survey,” Mortgage Choice, November 14, 2012, accessed November 7, 2015, www.mortgagechoice.com.au.
5 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2011 Census of Population and Housing, Australia,” Dwelling Structure by Household Composition and Family Composition Table 14, 2011, accessed November 7, 2015, http://stat.abs.gov.au/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ABS_CENSUS2011_T14_LGA.
6 “Eleventh Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2015 Ratings for Metropolitan Markets.”
7 See exhibit notes for “Suburbia,” National Museum of Australia, accessed June 22, 2015, http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/nation/suburbia.
8 Sir Robert G. Menzies, “The Forgotten People,” radio broadcast, transcript, Menzies Virtual Museum, May 22, 1942, accessed June 22, 2015, http://menziesvirtualmuseum.org.au/transcripts/the-forgotten-people.
9 “Eleventh Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2015 Ratings for Metropolitan Markets.”
10 See Kryger, “Home Ownership in Australia—Data and Trends”; and Australian Bureau of Statistics, “1301.0—Year Book Australia, 2012: Home Owners and Renters,” May 24, 2012, accessed June 22, 2015, http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/1301.0.
11 See “New Rules Will Curb Energy-Guzzling McMansions,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 2, 2005, in which the views of the then New South Wales premier Bob Carr are made clear; or the feature article by Larissa Dubecki titled “Swimming against the Tide,” Age (Melbourne), May 6, 2006 in which suburbia is referenced as “the opiate of the middle classes” and McMansions referenced as “crass over class.”
12 Alan Davis, “Is Obesity Really Caused by Suburban Sprawl?,” June 11, 2010, accessed June 22, 2015, http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2010/06/11/is-obesity-really-caused-by-suburban-sprawl/.
13 The then NSW Labor Premier made the comment at a press conference in 2001, in response to news that the national immigration intake numbers would be lifted. For an analysis of Carr’s career, including the point at which he declared Sydney to be full, see Tom Dusevic’s article “The Second Coming of Bob Carr,” Australian, April 21, 2012.
14 Rod Fehring (executive general manager, Residential, Australand Property Group), interview by Ross Elliott, January 15, 2015.
15 NSW Department of Planning and Environment, “Draft Metropolitan Strategy for Sydney to 2031,” March 2013.
16 Anthony Powell, “Illusions and Realities in Contemporary Metropolitan Planning Practice—Notes for a Lecture to Town Planning Students in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning,” (University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, July 27, 2007).
17 Anthony Powell, “Illusions and Realities in Contemporary Metropolitan Planning Practice—Notes for a Lecture to Town Planning Students in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning,” (University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, July 30, 2007).
18 Ibid.
19 Fran Metcalf, “Diverse Family Units, High Density Housing in Store,” Courier Mail, August 24, 2009.
20 David Keir (managing director, Devine Limited), interview by Ross Elliott, January 12, 2015.
21 The governmental habit of blaming “greedy developers” for escalating land costs was endemic. The development industry called for more land releases and lower taxes to alleviate affordability, but authorities resisted, pointing the finger instead at developers. For an illustration, see Kathy Sundrom, “Mayors Attack ‘Greedy’ Developers,” Sunshine Coast Daily, April 23, 2008, accessed November 8, 2015, http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/mayors-attack-greedy-developers/338680/. The attitude of a group of mayors and the response by industry could have been repeated—and was—right across the country.
22 See Property Council of Australia, “Reasons to Be Fearful: Government Taxes, Charges, and Compliance Costs and Their Impact on Housing Affordability,” Residential Development Council, March 2006.
23 Guy Gibson (General Manager Queensland, Communities, Lend Lease), interview by Ross Elliott, January 9, 2015.
24 Allen Consulting Group, “Taxes and Charges and New Homes,” Residential Developer Magazine, April 12, 2012, accessed June 26, 2015, http://www.residentialdeveloper.com.au/Article/NewsDetail.aspx?p=129&id=208.
25 “The 2014 UDIA State of the Land Report,” Urban Development Institute of Australia, November 1, 2013, accessed June 22, 2015, http://www.udia.com.au/reports-and-submissions/reports-submissions-2014.
26 Ibid.
27 See also Leith van Onselen (writing as “the Unconventional Economist”) in “Australian Land Prices Go Vertical,” Macrobusiness, April 23, 2015, accessed November 8, 2015, http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/04/australian-land-prices-go-vertical/.
28 For a good summary of how approvals have shifted from detached housing to attached housing, see Leith van Onselen, “A Land of Sweeping Plains and Shoebox Apartments,” Macrobusiness, March 3, 2015, accessed November 8, 2015, http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/03/land-sweeping-plains-shoebox-apartments/. The story includes evidence that capital city apartment starts have overtaken house starts for the first time in Australia’s history.
29 I wrote about this as a topic in “High Density Housing’s Biggest Myth,” published via my blog The Pulse, February 25, 2015, accessed November 8, 2015, http://thefingeronthepulse.blogspot.com.au/.
30 See Michael Matusik, “Investors Dominate: Inner Brisbane Apartment Update,” Matusik Property Insights, May 19, 2015. In none of the larger projects studied in this report was the proportion of owner-occupiers much above 20 percent.
31 See Aisha Dow, “‘Ghost tower’ warning for Docklands after data reveals high Melbourne home vacancies,” Age (Melbourne), November 12, 2014.
32 Australia’s Census shows little change in the composition of housing form despite nearly twenty years of pro-density policy. See for example Liz Allen, Anna Reimondos, and Edith Gray, “Fewer Occupants, More Bedrooms: Census Shows Australians Prefer Bigger Houses,” The Conversation, June 29, 2012, http://theconversation.com/fewer-occupants-more-bedrooms-census-shows-australians-prefer-bigger-houses-7871.
33 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2011 Census of Population and Housing, Australia.”
34 Raynuha Sinnathamby (managing director, Springfield Land Corporation), interview by Ross Elliott, January 13, 2015.
35 Raynuha Sinnathamby (managing director, Springfield Land Corporation), interview by Ross Elliott, January 13, 2015.
36 “Bankwest First Time Buyer Deposit Report 2014,” Bankwest, December 18, 2014, accessed June 22, 2015, https://www.bankwest.com.au/media-centre/financial-indicator-series/bankwest-first-time-buyer-deposit-report-1292518533842.
