The unplanned source of housing supply: What drives incremental infill housing development?
Julian Szafraniec, Senior Consultant SGS Economics and Planning, presented a paper to the 6th Australasian Housing Researchers' Conference, held on 8-10th February 2012 at the University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia
The paper, co-authored with Alison Holloway, SGS Principal, will be published in full at a later date.
Download the conference presentation
Abstract of the paper
The unplanned source of housing supply: What drives incremental infill housing development?
Australian cities capture the majority of our country's population and economic activity. As a result, the success of Australia is largely dependent on the success of our cities. Recently, they have been experiencing significant population growth and current forecasts suggest this trend is likely to continue into the future. Understanding and ensuring this growth is appropriately located is critical to the future success of the cities and Australia as a whole.
Traditionally research into this area has focused on how metropolitan growth can be accommodated through a combination of greenfield development and targeted high density redevelopment. However, in Melbourne, a significant proportion of recent housing supply has been provided through small scale incremental developments right across the established suburban landscape. This distribution and density of new housing is likely to continue into the future.
These established suburban areas of Melbourne typically have performance based planning controls that provide limited prescriptive guidance as to the scale of development that is permitted. Therefore, to understand the scale of development that is likely within these areas an innovative research approach was developed to statistically analyse the key drivers of housing density.
The resultant density of 11,000 recent housing developments from 2004 to 2008 was analysed against over 40 variables that describe a location's metropolitan connectivity, regional context and local site characteristics. The results identified five key variables that account for a significant portion of the variation in density between all recent housing projects across Melbourne's established suburbs. This analysis provides valuable insights into the dynamics and drivers of new housing density.
The paper describes the approach, findings, and critically discuss the implications of this distribution
