ELIAS CLURE, REPORTER: The grand vision for the skyline of Melbourne.
JACINTA ALLAN, VICTORIAN PREMIER: We are absolutely determined to build more homes for more Victorians.
ELIAS CLURE: Has become a battle for the city’s suburbs.
PROTESTER: Are people prepared to put up with this? It’s wrong.
PROTESTER: I can’t even understand how it’s going to work.
ELIAS CLURE: As part of the Government’s ambitious commitment to deliver 800,000 homes in a decade, it’s now paving the way for residential towers up to 20 storeys high to be built in suburban hubs close to public transport known as activity centres.
JACINTA ALLAN: That’s why I’m a builder not a blocker.
MICHAEL BUXTON, PLANNING EXPERT: Why would you pull down what makes Melbourne such an interesting, attractive, liveable city
ELIAS CLURE: As part of this policy the government has stripped away some powers from council and will fast track planning permits to make it easier for developers to build as quickly as possible but that’s concerned some residents, experts and members of the federal parliament who are say there’s still a worrying lack of detail in a proposal that promises to change the face of the city.
MONIQUE RYAN, FEDERAL MEMBER FOR KOOYOUNG: There’s very little detail about how that might work, what the timing of things being rolled out might be, what other infrastructure is being thought about, planned.
MICHAEL BUXTON: The governments really engaged in a massive city rebuilding project where it’s really proposing to demolish a substantial part of the established city and to rebuild it around 60 core areas in the activity centres around rail stations and shopping centres.
That would be high rise to 20 storeys, and then an area about 800 meter radius away from those activity centres to six stories.
DOUG KLEIN: The risk is that we get bad development in residential areas, and we don’t get the infrastructure support.
ELIAS CLURE: These Melbourne residents – all active in their local community – say they are affected by the proposed plans and they took part earlier this year in the government’s consultation process.
PETER RILEY: We’ve done more in informing our community about what these activity centres and catchments are than the governments, the governments ever done.
ELIAS CLURE: Stacey Harley lives in the leafy north-western suburb of Essendon where about 10,000 new dwellings are planned for her area.
Stacey, are you opposed to housing? And in other words, are you a NIMBY because you opposed this?
STACEY HARLEY: I am absolutely not a NIMBY, and I live in a great area. of course, people want to live there, but right now, we can’t have anyone come in because we don’t have the infrastructure to currently support our community.
DOUG KLEIN: So, the population goes up without the funding to support it. So, we don’t have the community health centres, the aged care, the green spaces to allow for 70 per cent more population.
ELIAS CLURE: Michael Buxton spent 12 years working for the Victorian Government’s planning department and is now one of the nation’s leading urban development academics.
MICHAEL BUXTON: We’re going to end up with a city that is boring, that isn’t going to work, that will lead to incredible traffic congestion, and we’ll lose that interesting edge that makes Melbourne such a wonderful place.
SONYA KILKENNY, PLANNING MINISTER: So, what we need to do is work with community, work with industry, work with local government about how can we unlock these areas that are really well serviced.
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ELIAS CLURE: The government says in addition to community forums it consulted widely with residents through letter drops online surveys and social media posts, but these residents say it was window dressing
DOUG KLEIN: The community reference group, in our case, in Moorabbin, consisted of about 12 people who met twice for five hours, and it was guided discussion. We were not allowed to talk about types of apartments, the need for apartments, the speed of apartments.
So all those things were outside the boundary for discussion. It was all about how do you make the plan work?
JULIE MULHAUSER: I submitted more than 70 questions on notice in the what, why, how, categories. More than two months on, I have not received a single answer to a question.
GEORGE KANJERE: I think that if you’re going to have a run something like a reference group, you know, it’s important to actually listen to what people are saying.
ELIAS CLURE: And throughout the process they say they were kept in the dark over where the proposed towers will be built. They say the initial plan indicated they’d be situated next to public transport.
DOUG KLEIN: It was only towards the end of the process, in late August that the plan dropped, and we saw these plans for six story apartment buildings to be up to a kilometre from the train stations.
SONYA KILKENNY: We heard we got 10,000 community responses. It’s probably the largest response we’ve ever had on an engagement of that nature, which suggests to me that people are engaged. They want to talk about their communities.
ELIAS CLURE: The government believes this proposed building blitz will deliver affordable housing.
But developers, who the government is relying on to build these activity centres say the numbers don’t stack up.
MAX SCIFMAN, PROPERTY DEVELOPER: And so right now, there’s about a 30 per cent difference between what the market is prepared to pay for a unit and what developers now need to sell it for, for it to be a feasible development. so, it’s just not happening.
ELIAS CLURE: Developer Max Shiffman says the cost of building in Victoria is currently so high the government will struggle to entice developers to build the activity centres and if even they do, the housing delivered won’t be affordable.
MAX SCIFMAN: For a normal call it apartment in Melbourne now, a developer needs to be selling that for around $14,000 a square meter for the end product to be viable. and if you translate that into a modestly sized three-bedroom unit, and three bedrooms are still where the bulk of the market is for new housing, then that translates into roughly $1.4 to $1.5 million for that house.
MICHAEL BUXTON: The original planning for places like Docklands and South Bank was to create really high quality, liveable suburbs, low to medium rise housing with European model of development.
ELIAS CLURE: This vista is proof, Michael Buxton says, that the government hasn’t learned from mistakes of the past.
MICHAEL BUXTON: We ended up with high rise and the development industry making the decisions about what goes where. Now, what the Premier is doing is putting that approach on steroids for the entire city of Melbourne in the established, particularly the established suburbs
SONYA KILKENNY: It’s completely wrong, completely wrong. My focus is on building communities and providing opportunity for more Victorians, particularly young Victorians, to be able to buy or rent a place where they want to live.
And where do people want to live. They want to live in communities that have great access to public transport, that have wonderful parks, open spaces, trees, services, schools.
ELIAS CLURE: Last year the Federal Government announced an accord with the states to fund more housing to address the crisis.
Monique Ryan, whose electorate of Kooyong is earmarked for one of the first activity centres, is calling for greater scrutiny.
MONIQUE RYAN: State government can’t be allowed to just act on these things without any external input. Federal Government obviously has a financial stake in it, and so it’s the obvious thing to do for someone like me is to ask the Federal Government to help intervene in this situation and get the action at a community level that we’re looking for.
ELIAS CLURE: Despite the concerns, the Government is undeterred and sees activity centres as Melbourne’s future.
SONYA KILKENNY: What we’re doing is about fairness and about setting up Victoria to be a fairer future.
