The most outdated rules in Australia which is stifling innovative and creative solutions to our housing crisis centre are around minimum and maximum lot sizes.
More than half of the 500 councils throughout Australia are within the main capital cities of Australia (the rest in regional areas) and each has different rules around what housing you can and cannot build.
Almost all of the 500 different councils have a minimum lot size requirement.
It can vary greatly but generally the minimum lot size is, in majority of the urban suburbs, no less than 300m2.
For example, in Brisbane the minimum lot size in most areas is 450m2 unless you are within 3km of a shopping centre, in which case you can subdivide down to 300m2.
In our two biggest cities – Sydney and Melbourne – there are isolated pockets where you can subdivide down to no minimum lot size. But the vast majority of housing of housing is located outside of those zones.
Even within those zones where there is no prescribed minimum lot size, there are rules around site coverage. For example, in most placed within Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, a house cannot occupy more than 65 per cent of the block size.
It seems to me that we can provide a lot more affordable, well-located housing throughout Australia, by doing away with the arbitrary ‘minimum lot size’ and ‘maximum site coverage’ rules.
The most expensive part of a house is the land the house sits on.
If you reduce the size of the land, you make the biggest dent in housing affordability.
The most prohibitive restriction on building new housing is that you must build new infrastructure to accompany it. Roads, electricity, water, sewer and public transport to name a few.
Why not just build more housing in and around the existing road, electricity, water, sewer and public transport?
Collect a charge for each new housing – no different to what we do on new suburbs – and use those monies to upgrade the existing infrastructure. Surely a lot cheaper than building new infrastructure.
Arbitrary rules like minimum lot size and maximum site cover stifle innovative and creative solutions when it comes to solving housing supply and affordability.
Not enough of our time is spent thinking about how we could build a comfortable and affordable home on 100m2 of land because the rules make it too hard to try and get that type of product built.
We definitely need to keep checks and balances in place around things like minimum side, front and rear setbacks. But do away with the minimum lot size and maximum site coverage.
I’m sure there is an innovative way for us to build comfortable and spacious house on a 100m2 block of land for 50 per cent of the cost of buying an existing house in the same suburb.
But we need to take away some rules in order to encourage the innovation first.
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