By Dave Riley
BRISBANE — There's land for sale at Forest Lake. On the outskirts of Brisbane's south-west, you too can settle in "the living forest" and pick up a piece of the continent for as little as $35,000 — or $78,000 if you are after an especially big back yard. With almost all of 1000 hectares to flog off, Delfin Realty is keen for your custom.
As well as 10 hectares of lake to enjoy, purchasing parents have the choice of private or state schools for their children. This is the first time that the Queensland Education Department and a private college (Anglican and Uniting Church) have built separate operations on the same campus. At Forest Lake, the public and private sectors get along very nicely indeed.
Nowadays you can forget the past: land for sale no longer submerges into Moreton Bay at high tide. Spec builders and sundry other real estate carpetbaggers are now warmly referred to as "the development community". We need such chums if we are to have a roof over our heads, and we must of necessity keep them happy.
"One of the great attractions of Queensland", proclaimed the Gold Coast Planning Association recently, "is our relatively uncluttered planning approvals and development process. It's second to none anywhere."
In south-east Queensland, it is estimated, the population will grow by 35% over the next 15 years. In 1992-93 48,000 new homes and townhouses were approved in the region. In Brisbane alone, there were 9242 — twice that of the preceding year.
The demand for housing is fuelling the state economy as thousands purchase cheaper land on the suburban fringes. The result is a significant shift in population. Already well over half the households in Brisbane consist of only one or two people. If the trend continues, Brisbane's population may actually decline over the next decade as young couples leave the city for the cheaper land and housing packages available in the surrounding authorities.
As the metropolitan area expands, professional and higher income households are attracted to the inner suburbs. This process, termed gentrification, helps the economic revitalisation of the inner suburban areas and may assist in the refurbishment of housing stock, but does little to redress population decline.
Gentrification of the inner suburbs encourages a mismatch between the location of services and where people live.
School enrolments decline as the local population ages. Within the inner six kilometres of Brisbane's central core live 40% of the city's residents aged over 65. Households with an income below the median are also concentrated there, while the renovating demands of invading yuppiedom push housing prices up.
The burgeoning demand — both within the inner suburbs and on the metropolitan periphery — is forcing housing prices beyond the capacity of many people. The notion of affordable housing now rests on shifting sands as unemployment and changing interest rates bite into household incomes.
The Australian commitment to the owner-occupied suburban dwelling, regardless of its idealised notions, is an expectation of accumulated security as the mortgage is paid off over the succeeding years. Aside from access to old age and unemployment benefit, house ownership is the cornerstone of people's perception of a secure future.
However, rising house prices and expensive loans reduce the amount of income that remains to meet other needs. Already, the lowest 40% of householders in Australia are paying more than 30% of their income in housing costs. Perhaps the less conservative benchmark of 25% of income is a more realistic estimation of "financial housing stress." Using this marker, half of householders cannot afford the house they live in.
Nonetheless, state and local government want "the development community" to have a free hand. Government-funded assistance programs are mainly geared to helping people participate in the private rental or housing market. First home owners and rental assistance schemes provide subsidies to the housing industry without confronting the ongoing crisis in accommodation. In all of Queensland, only 2.7% of housing stocks are public.
Given the high infrastructure cost of urban sprawl — $50,000 per new household was one recent estimate — there is a lot of pressure on the Brisbane City Council to address the drift of ratepayers away from its patch.
Under the banner of "Livable Brisbane", the town plan is going to be reviewed. An even greener city, with greater accessibility and participatory planning, is promised. As Lord Mayor Jim Soorley informed his constituency, "We are still small enough to develop a plan which puts people first. We can still put 'local' well and truly back into local government."
In consultation with "the development community", there will be a full review of the residential B provisions of the town plan. The intention is to increase the range and density of housing available.
Changes have already facilitated the growth of attached houses and duplexes within the major residential zones. In suburb after suburb, medium to large allotments are being subdivided and second houses are either shifted into (the old-style wood, stump and tin structures of Brisbane are remarkably portable) or built on land where only one structure stood previously.
However, these changes offer only piecemeal returns and are the province of small-time speculative builders or individual house owners with a bit of money to spend and an eye to a quick profit. Townhouses and units are where the big money is, and the alterations to the plan are geared to encouraging such investments.
The primary form of medium density housing in Brisbane is the sixpack. This is a three-storey walk-up building with ground floor parking for six cars and two floors of units above. Nearby householders hate them because they dominate the landscape, affect local climate patterns, reduce privacy and impact on land values.
Builders are keen on them. Sixpacks are an efficient stacking of marketable real estate within a small space. Only three units need be sold before capital costs are recovered. All the rest is sweet gross profit, and on the present market new units are snapped up usually within six or eight months of their completion.
While new type sixpacks are being encouraged in an effort to placate angry neighbours, the council's commitment to localise local government is floundering around aspects of the town plan. Quite simply, while building continues of this nature, no community-based consultative process would endorse it if it had any sniff of democracy.
Furthermore, units like these don't bring parents and their offspring back to the city environs. Designed to fill up a space, they are car- rather than child-friendly. The alternatives of single or double storey townhouses are designed with higher income earners in mind.
The reality in Brisbane is that the urban sprawl will continue unchecked while real estate and housing are totally in the hands of the "the development community".
Affordable housing is possible only through a public housing program generated by a government truly committed to putting the people first. The snappy rhetoric of the Soorley administration obscures the fact that the Brisbane of the future will be generated by the same community of business interests that gave us the Brisbane of the present.