In this week’s Friday Fight, a debate series in which two writers make their case on a hotly contested topic, the question is: does the planning system do more harm than good? As rents rise, property prices soar and the housing crisis reaches a boiling point, the focus has turned to supply as governments mull over reforms to the planning system.
In the negative corner, we have economist Cameron Murray. Arguing in the affirmative is lead organiser of YIMBY Melbourne Jonathan O’Brien.
Australia’s urban fabric is ruled over by an adversarial planning system geared fundamentally toward exclusion. The planning system in its current form exists first and foremost not to enable great outcomes but to limit the possibility space of human action and potential, and, in doing so, to maintain an unequal status quo that keeps our cities inaccessible and unaffordable for people who lack sufficient political power.
This system is deeply immoral, anti-social, and must be reformed.
Defenders of the status quo will say that the planning system exists to prevent “bad” outcomes, to impose a set of common sense land use controls that stop incompatible buildings or businesses from neighbouring one another — for instance, a glue factory and a kindergarten. But this is broadly dishonest. The proportion of our nation’s planning systems dedicated to this supposed noble goal is negligible and it always has been.
Some early whispers of the modern planning system can be found in Queensland’s imposition of minimum lot sizes of 1885, introduced in no small part because “poor people … should be obliged, for their own sake and for the sake of their neighbours, to build their houses at a reasonable distance from the middle of the street”. This sort of thing continued: in the 1910s, terraces were banned across Sydney and Melbourne for 50 years, again, in no small part to stop poor people congregating. Indeed, for as long as it has existed, our anti-social planning system has sought to keep people apart from each other.
Today, this remains the main occupation of the planning system: micromanaging the places where poorer Australians are allowed and able to live. We see this in how most planning schemes allocate the bulk of their lengths to innumerate residential zones of two storeys, three storeys, four, 12 — each of which is then scheduled with dozens of distinct variations, all slightly different, all imposing their individual costs for little to no material benefit for the actual human beings who’d really just like a place to live.
Indeed, none of these residential planning controls exist to manage material risk. That’s what building codes, transport planning, and connection charges are for. The contemporary planning system is, in fact, almost entirely auxiliary to risk management. It imposes massive costs for very little in the way of positive outcomes — not that the system tends to measure the outcomes of its impositions in the first place.
But there are outcomes, and many of these outcomes are devastating.
Murray will likely argue in his opposing column that planning has no effect on housing supply or affordability. This is because he is a professional contrarian, best known for a stream of against-the-grain blog posts on everything from housing economics to COVID-19 and marriage equality. For Murray, and far too many media pundits, commentary on the housing crisis is a sport.
For the sake of good discourse, then, let’s focus on an area where Murray and I agree: that the planning system affects where homes are delivered.
And where homes are delivered is obviously important. Beyond the fact that foregoing the benefits of density makes all Australians poorer, there is a real social cost to limiting people’s access to our cities and to each other, and those costs are borne disproportionately by those most at risk of harm.
Urban places are our country’s safest places. The divine combination of density and diversity breeds tolerance, and tolerant spaces are by their nature better for those at risk of discrimination. There is a reason why queer people and other minorities tend to migrate away from regional areas and toward cities: the latter provides a better quality of life.
Failing to build enough homes in our most inclusive places, then, has real negative social outcomes. A home is not just a roof over one’s head: it is also a location, a place within a community, a place connected to other places and other people. I cannot stress this enough — a planning system that fails to empower people to live in our urban communities is an anti-social system. And that is the system we have.
What’s more, where the planning system does permit density, it mostly does so on main roads which are the loudest, most polluted, and least safe areas of our cities. This is a policy choice with serious health impacts. And yet it is the policy choice our planning systems repeatedly make, all across the country. In order to protect the backyards of the land-owning gentry, the planning system has elected to make poorer people sick.
The defenders of these outdated regimes must stop pretending that our nation is served well by its myriad planning systems. It is not. These systems increase housing costs, split communities, and impose bad health outcomes on the less powerful. Because that’s what the planning system is really about — not an expression of good urban planning principles, but of political power.
DING! DING! DING! CRIKEY EDITORS DECLARE O’BRIEN HAS OFFICIALLY PASSED HIS ALLOCATED WORD COUNT
Inequality is rooted in the material world, and the material world is fundamentally governed by the planning system. It is our moral duty to reform that system.
Read the opposing argument by Cameron Murray.
Do Australia’s planning regulations create social division? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
