It's stating the blindingly obvious that Australia has a housing shortage. So when plans for new homes are announced, it should be seen as a good thing - right?
But it's not always - or even usually - the case, particularly when those homes are set to be built in already existing neighbourhoods, and particularly when those homes come in apartment form.
Take the announcement of the Victorian government's approval of developer Vicinity's seven apartment towers up to 50 storeys tall in Box Hill earlier this week. Before anyone could say 1700 homes, the buildings were being derided as "inappropriate" and "cheap and nasty".
The truth is, the proposed plan is somewhere between the two.
Inappropriate? Maybe. Cheap and nasty? Well, likely not since the adoption of the National Construction Code in 2022. Absolutely necessary to affordably accommodate our growing population? Oh, I think you know the answer.
Meeting in the middle
"Building density in multiple places and not just in the CBD makes sense, and if it can be supported, then it should be done," YIMBY Melbourne lead organiser Jonathan O'Brien says.
"The reason we end up with these very, very, very high-density areas like we're seeing pop up in Box Hill and so on, is that we've blocked housing development and business development and building everywhere else across the city."
It's true the councils in the inner suburbs have repeatedly pushed back against medium density development. Sometimes the catch-cry is "neighbourhood character", sometimes there are worries about the need for more parking. Other times, the reasons are unclear - at least outwardly.
"We've made this decision to allow a small number of wealthy homeowners to keep their low-level neighbourhood residential character and then forced all the poorest people in our city to live on main roads, which are more polluted, which are less safe, and which are less walkable," Mr O'Brien says.
"The preservation of certain low density properties has resulted in a dichotomy of either urban sprawl or towers. And what we'd like to see is much more medium density across the whole city and the whole place."
The objections of the long-term residents who own their large homes make providing reasonably affordable, appropriately sized, multi-unit buildings in suburbs accessible to transport, workplaces and other daily amenities near-impossible.
Second CBDs
Other states have high-rise buildings in other areas than their capital cities - New South Wales with Parramatta and Queensland with the Gold Coast, for example - but Mr O'Brien says those states could still improve their planning systems to allow for more medium density housing.
"Australia is really, really bad at this. Our planning system across the whole state and across our country has restricted the exact kind of development that used to be built," he says.
That includes terrace-style homes which essentially have the same proportions as townhouses and villa-style units which are large enough to house a family, but small enough to be affordable - most of which were built prior to the 1970s.
"The reality is the easiest way to make housing more affordable is to build more of it, so the merits of [the Box Hill] project is that there will be more housing," O'Brien says. "But you will continue to see more high-rise housing if we continue to lock down medium density across our cities."
