What If Australia's Housing Crisis Isn't About Housing?

**Veronica Morgan** (0:00)
Australia keeps building outward. More land releases, more greenfield estates, more infrastructure promises that arrive a decade late, if at all. While the policy debate circles endlessly around density as the apartments in the inner ring are the answer to our housing woes. The question nobody is asking clearly enough is whether the suburbs we're building right now are designed to function well in our cities, or whether we're just doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Ross Elliott has spent the better part of four decades at the intersection of research, policy, construction and development and what makes his perspective worth our attention today is that he has watched the same mistakes repeat across multiple property cycles with almost no institutional memory to show for it. Welcome to The Elephant In The Room. This is the podcast where we love to talk about the big things in property that never usually get talked about. I'm Veronica Morgan, real estate agent, buyer's agent and buyer's agent mentor, co-host of Foxtel's Location, Location, Location Australia, author of Auction Ready and co-host of Your First Home Buyer Guide.

**Chris Bates** (0:58)
Hi, I'm Chris Bates, ex-financial planner and mortgage broker, currently ranked number three in the annual MPA Top 100 Mortgage Broker Awards. Before we get started, everything we talk about today is not personal advice, and we recommend you engage the services of a licensed and experienced professional.

**Veronica Morgan** (1:17)
Ross Elliott, welcome. Today we want to explore what Australian suburban development is getting wrong at the planning level where the gap between policy intent and built outcomes is widest, and what the research in the next Australian city has revealed about housing that's being created today. Thank you so much for joining us.

**Ross Elliott** (1:34)
Thanks for the opportunity. I was looking forward to it.

**Chris Bates** (1:37)
Ross, I actually don't know where to start with this one because there's just so much in the development planning and we've just, like what Veronica said there, we've made some mistakes and we've repeated them, and I guess I'm getting nervous with post-budget, and we're going to go on another building boom and building for investors. So when you think about the way that we've been designing our cities, just what are some of the fundamental things that just been getting wrong and just repeatedly just keep making the same mistakes?

**Ross Elliott** (2:07)
So I think we've been subject to a lot of mythology, right?
I think the mistake we've made when we've come up with planning schemes for our cities is we haven't tested the myth against the facts. So myth number one has been this idea that the city centre is the economy of the city and that pretty much everyone works there and that if anyone could afford to live close to the city centre, they would because that's where they probably work and that's the best place to be. And the only people who live on the outskirts are the people who have got no choice and they're forced to live out there and endure really long commutes to their office and the CBD. Now nothing could be more wrong, basically. The census, every four years we have the census, it tells us that between eight and nine out of ten people live and work in the suburbs of our cities. They get up from a suburban bed, they go to a place of work, right? They're not working in near the city. Sydney is a little bit different. Sydney might be around 15%, maybe a touch higher, but certainly Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, all the other major cities, it's largely a suburban economy. And yet, our planning and all of our infrastructure has been on the assumption it's got to be in the middle. Now, a couple of things have really started to change many years ago.
The 1970s, 80s and 90s, and even maybe the early 2000s saw a big boom in white collar financial property and business services, and they tended to agglomerate in the CBDs. That drove a lot of new office development. That really started to slow down as technology took hold. That industry stopped growing and the industries that started growing faster were things like health and education in particular. You do not see people in lab coats, right, or in the city, in the main streets of your CBDs. Health and education is a largely suburban industries. The suburban job market was growing faster than the inner cities. Then we had COVID. All of those people who apparently just couldn't bear to be away from their glorious CBD office, given half the chance, said, no, I'm going to prefer working from home, if you don't mind. Two days out of the five, I'll be working from home. This is now normal.