housing

2 posts

Button Mashing: The Housing Statement and Planning Reform

Still from the Buster Keaton short "One Week" in which Keaton examines a misshapen, poorly built house.

The Victorian planning framework for residential development needs reform.

That is not to accept the much more dubious proposition that the planning system is a significant cause of our current housing affordability problem. However day-to-day the planning system doubtless causes frustration and costs for individual applicants, and enormous difficulties for the council planners (mostly) charged with administering it. Reforming such provisions is an intrinsic good that is worth pursuing.

I also do not believe that means sacrificing other planning outcomes (amenity protection, character outcomes, urban greening, etc) in the name of either process efficiency or overall housing supply. Hard choices between system efficiency and policy outcomes might need to be made if the system is already optimised to achieve its intended outcomes. But where the system has obvious deficiencies, we can focus on remedying those before evaluating the need for more radical changes.

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Visualising Deemed-to-Comply ResCode

On 22 September 2023 all planning schemes in Victoria were changed to make a range of the ResCode Standards (which apply to single houses, and medium density housing up to four storeys) deemed-to-comply. This is a change that has been suggested for a while, and which I have long argued against (I wrote a long post about it here, which goes into the long messy history of this issue).

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