Three-quarters of the residential land in Australia’s capital cities is under highly restrictive zoning, the Australian Zoning Atlas finds
Three-quarters of the residential land in Australia’s capital cities is under highly restrictive zoning, the Australian Zoning Atlas finds.
Around 1,480 km² of land within 20 km of a capital city centre is zoned so restrictively that little more than a detached house or a low two-storey building can be approved.
These findings come from the Australian Zoning Atlas (zoning.org.au), the first nationwide map to classify and compare the restrictiveness of residential planning controls across every Australian capital on a like-for-like basis.
The Atlas finds that 76% of all the residential land within 20 km of the eight capital city centres is “highly restricted”—and in the average capital city, that figure is 81%. It amounts to more than 1,480 km² of well-located, already-serviced residential land on which the planning rules effectively rule out the townhouses, terraces and small apartment buildings most other wealthy cities take for granted.
WHAT “HIGHLY RESTRICTED” MEANS
Land is counted as highly restricted if it carries one or more of four planning controls:
- a two-storey height limit (a published maximum of roughly two storeys, ≤ 8.5 m);
- an explicit “low-density” residential zoning;
- a detached-house mandate (zoning that permits detached dwellings only); or
- a heritage control.
Because a single parcel can carry more than one of these, the four measures overlap—so the “highly restricted” total is the combined footprint, not the sum of the four.
AUSTRALIA’S SMALLER CAPITALS ARE THE MOST RESTRICTED
Hobart is the most restricted capital—97% of residential land within 20 km of the CBD. Adelaide (92%), Darwin (88%), Perth (87%), Brisbane (86%), Sydney (81%) all sit above 80%. Canberra (74%) is the lowest of the mainland capitals, following its recent Missing Middle reforms, and Melbourne (45%) is the national outlier—the only capital where most inner residential land is not locked to the lowest densities.
THE REFORM PRIZE: THREE-STOREY TOWNHOUSES COULD UNLOCK AROUND 9.0 MILLION HOMES
If the most restrictive controls were removed and three-storey townhouses were permitted across residential land, Australia’s capitals could accommodate around 9.0 million additional homes over time—net of the housing that could already be built under today’s rules. The benefit lands hardest in the smaller, fast-growing capitals: Perth and Brisbane could each accommodate more than 2 million additional townhouse-scale homes.
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