Granny flats are an untapped resource that could ease housing pressures in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and provide affordable accommodation for essential workers, a new report has argued.
Research published on Tuesday identifies 655,000 existing homes in the capital cities that have the space to build a self-contained two-bedroom development on site. The report by Archistar, Blackfort and CoreLogic says 17.6% of all Sydney metro properties (including the Central Coast) have the potential to house a granny flat. In Melbourne the figure is 13.2%.
More than a third of the potential developments are within 2km of a train station and 17% have a hospital in the same suburb, the authors claim. They say granny flats could provide affordable housing for essential healthcare workers as the national housing market grapples with an undersupply of about 106,300 homes in the next five years.
The research director at CoreLogic, Tim Lawless, said granny flats could help ease the housing crisis.
“For policymakers and government, granny flats present an immediate and cost-effective opportunity to deliver much-needed housing supply within existing town planning guidelines,” he said.
After the Central Coast, Sydney’s northern beaches and Hornsby were identified as having the most granny flat development opportunities in the metro area. In Melbourne, the report identified the Mornington Peninsula, Casey and Monash, while in Brisbane, the Brisbane local government area, Logan and Moreton Bay were found to have the most potential.
Libby Greig, a retiree who lives in Sydney’s northern beaches, has just moved into the granny flat she has had built for herself so that her son and his family could move into the main home.
“I’ve converted the garage into my bedroom,” she says. “I live in a flat with enough room for a wheelchair and a bathroom if I need one later on.
“My son and his family were living up the road, spending an absolute fortune on rent. I’m able to help them. It’s worked much better than I thought it would.”
Alex Mitchell, the managing director of Backyard Grannys on the Central Coast, said “anything that provides additional affordable housing is part of the solution” and that councils, in his experience, had “no objection” to approving granny flats.
Prof Nicole Gurran, an urban planner at the University of Sydney, co-authored a report on secondary dwellings in NSW this year that found that changes to planning regulations had enabled the growth of an informal rental market.
“The extent to which granny flats increase supply of low-cost or affordable housing is really unclear but that’s not a reason to not enable people to build them,” she said. “At the very least, you increase housing stock, flexible housing and diversity of housing.
“That said, building granny flats … is not the optimal way to increase density in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. It might be part of the solution, but you’d rather go for a higher-density, more planned approach.”
Andrew Butt, a professor in sustainability and urban planning at RMIT University in Melbourne, said changes to Victoria’s planning process made it easier to obtain permission to build granny flats. But he questioned their worth in tackling the housing shortage.
“[Second dwellings] can meet requirements in terms of built form,” he said, “but whether that creates the outcomes we want is a concern. Is it an adequate solution for genuine, secure housing forms?”
