Correcting The Age on Activity Centres
The Age’s 3D renders of the Activity Centres have more in common with Minecraft than reality. Here, we use Thornbury’s High Street to show how the planning controls actually work.
Key Findings
Across The Age’s series, the writing that describes the Activity Centres series is essentially correct. The problem is the visuals.
Our findings:
- Only half The Age’s rendered floorspace can be built. Filling every lot to its height limit, as The Age’s renders do, gives 7.6 km² of floorspace across the activity centre. Drawn to the rules, the figure is 3.9 km²—even with pairs of neighbouring lots combined into larger sites. That is 49% less.
- Most land stays open above the street wall. At the fourth storey, buildings can cover 62% of the High Street core’s land, against 100% in The Age’s boxes. Above 21 metres, the figure is 12%, against the newspaper’s 55%.
- We show the sun rules. The Age’s caption said rules on sun, landscaping and more “cannot be shown”. Our model shows them.
- Change is gradual. If 0.7% of what the rules allow is built each year, the High Street side of the centre gains about 2,350 homes by 2051, scattered through streets that mostly look as they do now. The area had about 4,400 homes in 2021.
How the controls compare
Quote attributable to Jonathan O'Brien, CEO
“Planning policy is the number one lever governments can pull to fight the housing crisis. Reasonable people can disagree about how much Thornbury should change—but that debate should at the very least be about the policy that actually exists.”
Related
Victorian budget continues delivery of Australia’s highest housing supply
The commitment to executing ongoing reform is pleasing. More should be done to ensure that home prices continue to fall.
Inquiry into Victoria Planning Provisions amendments VC257, VC267 and VC274
If there is a single takeaway from our submission it should be this: that these reforms are not radical. Rather, they represent common- and best-practice in planning from around the country and the world, and work predominantly to correct the devastating consequences of previous planning interventions.
The Activity Centre Program is redistributive
Through a focus on building in established areas, the Activity Centre Program is an opportunity to redistribute wealth and means to a greater number of Victorians.