🏘️Three-storey homes everywhere. Smaller lot sizes. Remove heritage overlays. Speed up approvals.
All worthy ideas. And all discussed for decades, yet things have continually gotten worse.
More critically: none of these ideas will come close to closing the growing #feasibility gap.
Here's what the report doesn't address:
• Construction costs: Labour is scarce, materials are volatile, and the industry doesn't have the capacity to deliver 1.2 million homes even if every block was rezoned tomorrow, especially in apartment form.
• Buyer capacity & demand. Zoning more land doesn't help if buyers don't want or can't afford the end product, or can't get a mortgage at today's higher interest rates.
• Finance costs: Linked to the above, high construction debt and high risk on many types of development destroy viability before a plan is even lodged.
• State taxes and charges. Developer levies, infrastructure contributions, land taxes and stamp duty add tens of thousands to every new home. The PC was quiet on that front.
As I told The Australian Financial Review:
"Simply zoning more land doesn't of itself improve feasibility. It still comes back to cost, the time it takes to build with the labour pool we have and the cost of finance – and ultimately – buyer demand and capacity."
Fixing planning. Matching infrastructure spending better. I 100% support both.
🤔But let's stop pretending zoning reform alone is the silver bullet. The feasibility trap is far, far deeper than that.