Brisbane’s lord mayor has been applauded for opening up more inner-city land for high-rise residential apartments – but has been warned it will do nothing to create more affordable homes or ease the city’s housing crisis without further intervention.
Adrian Schrinner launched the city council’s sustainable growth strategy on Thursday, promising it would help Brisbane navigate its way out of a “perfect storm” in housing without resorting to urban sprawl.
Schrinner’s answer is to build up, with the plan allowing CBD-style heights for residential buildings in South Brisbane’s riverfront Kurilpa precinct, an industrial zone that the council envisages will be the city’s next “riverfront destination”.
The mayor said increasing height limits would “facilitate the creation of about 10,000 additional dwellings over time” and “help meet demand, particularly among younger people who are eager to live in this part of inner Brisbane”.
Aimee McVeigh, the chief executive of the Queensland Council of Social Service, said it was “pleasing when local governments step up and try to bring forward more housing supply” – but that alone would do little for the 46,000 Queenslanders on the social housing register.
“Of course there needs to be more houses built and that means more development,” McVeigh said. “But we need to make sure that that actually delivers social and affordable housing and, without government intervention, it is unlikely that that will be the case.”
The council’s plan does aim to “incentivise and fast-track built-to-rent developments”.
While announcing the plan at the Queensland Media Club, Schrinner was asked about setting quotas on new developments for social and affordable housing. The mayor said the council was “certainly open” to the idea but lacked the power to enforce it properly – that required state government reform.
But a Queensland University of Technology urban planner, Mark Limb, said quotas and build-to-rent schemes were “tinkering around the edges” and that the council’s proposal was “not a viable plan” to deliver affordable homes.
Limb said it was “good to see council acknowledging that affordable housing is a serious issue facing Brisbane” and that increasing building heights in Kurilpa made “sense in principle”.
But the urban planner said the housing affordability components of the plan were entirely based on principles of supply and demand, with the demand to be delivered by developers.
“They’re not in the business of delivering affordable housing,” Limb said. “They’re in the business of delivering profitable housing.”
When asked how the growth plan would ensure the development provided affordable housing, Schrinner said that opening up new stock would, in and of itself, deliver affordable homes.
“Demand and supply, it’s a basic law,” he said. “It does work. It does help moderate price increases.”
But Limb said this idea “that if you just rezone everything and allow higher densities, you will have a downward influence on prices” did not stack up.
“No developer on such highly, highly sought after inner-city land is going to sell land or units at a cost less than the maximum they can possibly get,” he said. “And if the market ends up favouring luxury multimillion-dollar apartments, young people won’t be moving in.”
Not all planning experts agreed that building skyscraper apartments was desirable, with Griffith University’s Tony Matthews saying he saw “no compelling reason” to go all the way to the limit in an area that would already allowed tall apartments.
Matthews said there had been strong community opposition to the Kurilpa redevelopment, with West End locals fearing an “some sort of dystopia of giant towers”.
“They’re going to be very visual and significant landmark on the city skyline over time,” he said.
Matthews said that a developer-led approach to housing was not resulting in homes being built that suited young families nor elderly people.
“The stock that’s being built is not necessarily being built to the priority of purchasers,” he said. “It is being built to the priority of the development industry and councils”.
