It’s a familiar planning conundrum – how can councils meet State Government housing targets in an environment where many local residents want to maintain their neighbourhood’s character?
This is of particular concern to councils in established parts of major Australian cities, where development opportunities are generally confined to strategic sites (for example, brownfield) or incremental infill housing.
The Town of Victoria Park, in Perth’s inner-southern suburbs, was looking for an evidence base to support an update to their local housing strategy.
The Town does have strategic development areas such as the Burswood Peninsula, but at the same time opportunities for infill development were becoming exhausted, particularly in suburbs east of the Albany Highway.
So how could the Town demonstrate they could meet housing targets given these constraints?
housing.id
housing.id is a tailored housing opportunity and affordability analysis that uses an established methodology to consider major forms of future housing supply within activity centres, outside activity centres and within designated development sites.
At the beginning of a housing.id process, we conduct a housing workshop with council to develop and vet the assumptions are applied to each form of housing supply. The model used to calculate housing opportunity can be adjusted to reflect different policy settings but is deliberately conservative for the purposes of the report.
The housing opportunity analysis for the Town of Victoria Park indicated an opportunity for more than 24,000 dwellings, which at 2006-2011 rates of development represented 89 years of supply. The overwhelming majority of this opportunity was identified within activity centres, particularly the Burswood Peninsula.
housing.id also includes an analysis of housing consumption trends, which mainly uses data from the Census of Population and Housing. This considers the period 2001-2011, which was a period of rapid growth in metropolitan Perth.
Many parts of the urban area grew rapidly, and within the Town, the first high-density developments on the Burswood Peninsula were completed. At the same time, the analysis showed that parts of the Town were moving through the suburban lifecycle, with younger households gradually replacing older, smaller households. These shifts are important to understand, as many council services are age based and therefore are impacted by shifts in the age structure.
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