Housing Density

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GUEST OBSERVER
Yesterday's announcement by NSW Minister for Planning, Rob Stokes, that new planning rules to expedite the approval process for medium density housing across NSW is good news. 
The release of a draft policy and Medium Density Housing Code today will encourage greater choice for home buyers looking for alternatives to freestanding homes and apartments.
Increasingly homeowners are looking towards the middle ground for their housing needs and this means townhouses, terraces and dual occupancies. 
The Medium Density Design Guide will facilitate a higher standard of housing design and ensure development is both appropriate and consistent with community expectations. 
The Design Guide will provide a consistent set of rules for anyone designing these types of low rise homes, making it easier for the building designer and builders. 
Most importantly enabling this form of housing to be ‘approved’ as Complying Development will open up a faster approval pathway than the development application which takes months and usually results in a design being approved by council with few, or no, changes.
The pressure on land prices and housing supply in Sydney means a new generation of homebuyers could have a much larger choice of housing types in the future, if this Code and the changes to the approval process can be supported by councils, industry and the community. 
The design guide will promote better quality medium density housing to be built, in the same way that the apartment design code released many years ago now has improved the design of high rise apartments.
We hope that councils will recognise that medium density housing is a desirable form of housing in Sydney but only accounts for 10 percent of all approvals granted. For medium density houses to be approved as complying development they must meet the specific design standards set out in the design guide, which will ensure the size and scale of low rise development fits into the established streetscapes.
HIA looks forward to reviewing the full details of the new draft planning rules and working with the Department of Planning and Environment to implement these changes.
David Bare is HIA executive director, NSW, and can be contacted <a href="https://hia.com.au/about/Contact.aspx?contactustab=Media" target="_blank">here</a>.
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New planning rules can make a real difference in approval times

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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/66406/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">
GUEST OBSERVER
Since the beginning of the 20th century the single-function building typology – for example, the office, school, apartment, institution or retail complex – has been subject to regulations requiring separate spaces for “working” and “living”. 
Within this framework, paid labour seldom took place inside the home. Today, people use space differently, which means legislation must change to support different ways of living and working in the one building. 
The post-industrial city, which has existed since the late 20th century, has changed the way people live and work. 
In North America, with the decline of the manufacturing sector in many cities and the “discovery” of the inner city by the 1970s, it became fashionable for people to live in former manufacturing spaces that had been converted for residential use. This trend emerged in New York and then in San Francisco a decade later. 
By the 1990s most cities in North America boasted converted loft districtswhere people were, potentially, both living and working. 
The early adopters of the contemporary live/work movement were artists and craftspeople. Other groups that have since taken advantage of live/work dwellings are entrepreneurs and the self-employed. They may be freelancers who do not keep regular office hours or need permanent office space. 
The availability and affordability of computers, advances in telecommunications and tax deductions for home offices have made the live/work option a practical and economically savvy alternative for many.
<h2>Movement calls for planning reform</h2>
When the contemporary live/work movement gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s, it challenged the North American urban planning system. New legislation allowed for mixed use, blending residential, commercial, cultural, institutional and, where appropriate, industrial uses. 
This included “home occupation”, which incorporated the right to pursue small-scale work activities at home. This model usually placed restrictions on the number of employees and commercial or client visits to the premises.
The term “live/work” signifies that the building or unit is primarily used for residential purposes, but that working is permitted. “Work/live” means the work component takes priority over the residential. In urban planning legislation, live/work is often associated with residential and mixed-use zones and codes, whereas work/live is associated with commercial, industrial or mixed-use zones and codes.
The main difference between live/work and work/live and home occupation is the “disturbance factor” – that is, how intrusive the activities in the building are for neighbours. 
In Australia, home occupations are generally permitted in current residential and mixed-use zones as long as they do not disturb the neighbours. 
While artist communities and creative entrepreneurs in Australia have been blurring the boundaries between living and working for decades, live/work (or work/live) as a formalised land use does not exist.
The adaptive reuse of vacant or underused buildings and lots is a strand of the live/work, work/live movement. Locations such as Collingwood in Melbourne, Northbridge in Perth and Surry Hills in Sydney are all home to numerous adaptive reuse projects and people working in the creative economies. Councils often turn a blind eye to the buildings’ unregulated use.
However, Australia is yet to see the development of new land use or mixed-use live/work zones such as those in North America. Since the 1990s, live/work has also been formalised in Western Europe. By the 2000s, the movement had taken hold in places such as Eastern Europe, Russia and China.
<h2>What are the live/work benefits?</h2>
As a land-use and building typology, live/work can support urban neighbourhoods through providing a diversity of uses, which can be flexible over time. It intersects with housing, job, transportation and infrastructure planning to support an integrated approach to urban planning. 
The live/work ethic advocates for mixing stores, offices and housing. This can help make neighbourhoods busier and more productive, meaning they may be livelier and safer. 
Live/work offers multiple sustainability benefits. These include a reduction in vehicle use, improved air quality, less dependency on natural resources and reduced sprawl. It can also support and promote efficient land use by putting maximum floor area within a given envelope. 
Increased choice as to how and where people live and work, as well as the accommodation of different lifestyles and new demographics, can result in a built environment that is more responsive to the changes in cities that occur over time.
<h2>What changes are needed?</h2>
The City of Perth encourages residential uses within commercial precincts – for example, in West Perth – but what happens when you want to work in your own home in the city or the suburbs? 
How many workers can you have? Can you put up signage? What services are prohibited? How easy or expensive is it to change the use of a building through the planning system? What spaces and safety conditions need to be adhered to? 
The WA planning scheme stipulates that home occupation means that the business cannot employ non-household members. It also cannot occupy over 20m² or have a physical retail component. A “home business” cannot employ more than two people, be larger than 50m², or have a physical retail component.
With a shift in the attitudes of Australian federal and state governments towards innovation and creativity, planning regimes also need to be more creative to support living and working conditions for the 21st century. An increase in densities presents an opportunity to explore further experiments in live/work.
Andréanne Doyon is research fellow, University of Melbourne, and author for The Conversation. She can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/andreanne-doyon-305144" target="_blank">here</a>.
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Reinventing density: bridging the live-work divide

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The release of the draft Greater Sydney Region Plan along with the related draft Future Transport Strategy signals a major shift in the character of the city as it becomes more urban.
It is good that the NSW Government has released an integrated regional plan for Sydney as well as a transport and infrastructure plan.
The 20 year plans along with the 40 year visions signal big changes for Sydney and it will be important that political parties and community groups embrace these changes as they underpin the economic and cultural framework for Sydney as a global city.
The aspirations from the plan are to lift Sydney from being a top 20 global city up to a top 10 global city and this will deliver quality jobs and economic prosperity. To reach this level, however, means that Sydney must mature from being an essentially suburban city to now balancing this with a new urban, cosmopolitan density linked to metro rail public transport. The reality is that the top world’s global cities have much greater densities than Sydney currently has.
It is important that the NSW Opposition and community groups that are currently expressing concern that Sydney is changing get behind the need to manage growth for future generations. The Greater Sydney Region Plan and the Future Transport Strategy can underpin a strong future for Sydney.
By focussing the new urban, apartment form of the city around railway stations will mean that most of Sydney will remain as low rise suburban housing. To change this suburban model with town houses would spread the negative concerns about change across many suburbs.
The regional plan has sensible statements about the provision of affordable housing through increased residential floor space that ensure the viability of housing projects. The Urban Taskforce is concerned that individual councils across metropolitan Sydney, however, believe that all developers should contribute a percentage of their apartments as affordable homes with no uplift. All this will do is slow down housing supply and therefore increase the cost of new housing.
The Future Transport Strategy included an analysis of other global cities that demonstrated that Sydney’s current density of 410 people per square kilometre is well below Tokyo (6,200), London (5,800), Paris (6,000), Singapore (7,000) Berlin (3,900) or New York (11,000). Car based cities like Los Angeles are at 1,050 people per square kilometre which is double that of Sydney’s current density.
The plans for heavy rail, metro rail, and intermediate transport (busses, ferry, light rail) demonstrate a real commitment to how the next phase of a denser Sydney will operate. It will be important to turn these plans and visions into real projects in future years.
A key statistic in the data presented in the regional plan is how each of the three identified cities for Sydney will accommodate growth in housing over the next 20 years (page 9). The East City will lead the way with 43.4% of the growth followed by the West city at 29.2% and the Central City at 27.4%.
Unfortunately the NSW Opposition and community groups are building up campaigns against development close to the Eastern City including attacks on projects in Marrickville, the Sydenham to Bankstown corridor and along Anzac Parade. Clearly these are areas where the tension of a move from suburban houses to apartments is creating local concerns. It will be important that these communities understand that the housing is for their own children and grand-children.
The Greater Sydney Region Plan makes a strong statement in relation to the Eastern Harbour City about 'protecting all industrial land from conversion to residential development, including conversion to mixed- use zonings'. This will make it difficult to achieve the housing growth targets for the East City.
To communicate the quality of a more urban environment the planning and transport documents use language that implies better quality will come. Terms like ‘walkable great places’, ‘successful places’ and ‘better placed’ are used to encourage readers to see the positives of urban density. It will be important as the plans are rolled out to give communities confidence that a new more urban quality environment can be the product of Sydney’s growth.
The Urban Taskforce is keen to work with the Greater Sydney Commission and the NSW Government in ensuring that the well-meaning objectives in the Greater Sydney Region Plan and the Future Transport Strategy translate into results on the ground. Sydney still has a housing supply problem with at least 725,000 new homes required over a 20 year period. Even in boom times it has been difficult to reach the yearly average of 36,250 new homes.
Chris Johnson is chief executive officer of property development industry group Urban Taskforce and can be contacted <a href="https://www.urbantaskforce.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=97&amp;Itemid=126#.Vdaart55dFI" target="_blank">here</a>. 
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