Collected letters

A selection of letters from The Age, most on the planning issues mentioned in my previous entry.

26/10:

Protecting liveability

It is possible to accommodate growth without significantly changing the shape and character of Melbourne (“Baillieu pledges to curb high-density”, The Age, 25/10). Professor Rob Adams and his team have provided a blueprint in their report “Transforming Australian Cities”.

The report proposed medium-rise, high-density development along road-based public transport corridors (tram and bus) but just one block back from these corridors. This would leave existing suburbs as the new “green lungs” of our metropolitan areas.

However, Planning Minister Justin Madden, in his recent Planning Amendment VC71, has given the green light to high-rise, high-density development, which will destroy Melbourne’s character.

Madden’s plan allows for development along all public transport routes (tram, bus and rail) for up to 400 metres either side of the routes. Instead of developing the properties abutting road-based transport corridors, Madden is proposing 800 metre swaths of development along all public transport routes. So rather than having green lungs between the development corridors, much of the inner and middle suburbs will be turned into high-rise jungles.

In ignoring Professor Adams’ recommendations about liveability and sustainability, Mr Madden appears to be putting the interests of developers ahead of the wider community.

– Paul Hobson, Camberwell

Design rates poorly

Australia’s new green rating scheme for houses (“Green rating for sold, leased homes”, The Age, 23/10) is all very well, but it’s not much good when so many houses continue to be built with poor design for temperature control.

Go to a new suburb and look at all the little boxes. There are no eaves, let alone verandahs, to keep the sun off windows in summer, and no space on the northern and western sides for deciduous trees that can shade houses in summer. Some don’t even seem to have adequate windows on the southern side to let in the cool breeze when the weather changes in summer.

No wonder so many have airconditioners. One can only hope their solar power units are up to it, if they have them.

– Jason Foster, Windsor

8/11:

More houses means less life on earth

So 13,000 lots will be subdivided from 1100 hectares of farmland to create the suburb of Lockerbie (“Stockland buys $4bn site for new suburb”, theage.com.au, 7/12). We should be promoting our “green lungs” and be revegetating Victoria, not bulldozing more land.

Climate change, water scarcity and rising fuel prices are driving forces contrary to urban sprawl. Our population boom is not inevitable and, however much it is cloaked in ecologically friendly wording, sustainable growth is an oxymoron on a planet with shrinking resources.

Prime food-growing land on Melbourne’s fringe is being lost to make room for thousands of new homes. Any efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are outstripped and negated by more people.

The thrust to maximise our population and consume natural systems is what is threatening our future, and eating it away. Just like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish until all the nutrients are used up, we will end up in a sea of our own waste.

– Vivienne Ortega, Heidelberg Heights

10/11:

Want to save the world? Plant a tree

Since the fires of 2009 there has been an increase in clearing of trees and other native vegetation around Melbourne. In the past 200 years we have cleared billions of trees for agriculture, grazing and human habitation. The loss of these trees and other vegetation has brought about many of the environmental problems we now face in south-eastern Australia.

We need to nurture and maintain trees; by conserving and replanting them we combat climate change, filter and purify our water, cool the earth, stop soil erosion, control salinity, provide shade and shelter, preserve habitat and wildlife.

We all want to protect our families and communities, but rather than helping, cutting down more trees will probably make things worse.

Every tree saved makes a difference to retaining a healthy environment.

– Steven Katsineris, Hurstbridge

27/11:

Population growth a lose-lose situation

This past week, The Age has given voice to concern about urban sprawl (Editorial, 22/11), infill development (“Labor’s high-rise dystopia”, 24/11), housing affordability (“Melbourne now toughest city to afford a house”, 25/11) and the loss of backyards (“Design trend takes child’s play out of backyards”, 25/11). Where is the obvious synthesis of these issues?

Why is no one tackling the elephant in the room, population? Every year we funnel more and more people into our cities, and to what end? More people means more land use in total and less land available per person. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Environmental, farming and scenic values lose out as open land is developed for housing. Children lose out as backyards shrink or disappear altogether and both parents are forced to work full-time to pay for housing. Adults lose out as even backyardless shoeboxes become unaffordable, transport networks grow congested and essential services become oversubscribed.

Where is the benefit in any of this? We have the power to solve these problems permanently, through immigration policy. We could have sustainability and quality of life while maintaining humanitarian refugee and family reunion intakes. This could be done with the stroke of a politician’s pen. All it would take is the courage to stand up to business interests that profit from overpopulation at the expense of all Australians and the environment.

– Russell Edwards, Kilmore

Selling out locals

Developers are running property sales sessions in places such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Delhi and Beijing. At a major hotel in Singapore from November 11-14, developers were selling apartments in Melbourne off the plan, and offering stamp duty savings of $43,000.

Does this indicate that the apartments are not so easy to sell in Melbourne? Or maybe we don’t need the number of apartments that Planning Minister Justin Madden is so quick to approve? Could the approvals have something to do with developer donations?

– Mary Drost, Planning Backlash, Camberwell

What I want for Christmas is to no longer have Brumby and Madden destroying our heritage and environment, and hope for a sustainable future.

– Louise Page, Tyabb

29/11:

Room to play

As a play researcher, I’ve been watching our neighbourhood and documenting the changes with increasing frustration (“Design trend takes child’s play out of backyards”, The Age, 25/11). Where is the push to build these McMansions coming from? Surely it can’t be because people genuinely want their children to live their lives indoors, rather than to play freely and safely in the backyard?

I know of a parent who was shocked when she saw her newly built home for the first time, and realised that there would be almost no backyard for her young children to play in. It seems that building plans are now being super-sized to fit the available space, rather than designed to give a balanced and healthy lifestyle.

I welcome Professor Tony Hall’s timely publication The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard, and hope it stimulates thinking and debate about the reasons for and long-term effects of this disturbing social trend.

– Judy McKinty, Glen Iris

4/12:

Pushed out of cities

The real story from the article reporting that “price growth is patchy” (The Age, 2/12) is that while prices for houses over $1 million may have declined, prices for the average home buyer across the state have soared 19 per cent in the last year. Prices in historically affordable suburbs such as Heidelberg have increased 30 per cent in the past three months.

With these kinds of prices in traditionally more affordable areas, low and middle-income buyers are being pushed further and further out of our cities.

We urgently need to tackle the distortionary tax arrangements, such as negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions, that are fuelling house prices at the lower end of the market and driving a crisis of housing affordability for first home buyers and renters.

– Cath Smith, Victorian Council of Social Service, Melbourne

Ticky-tacky boxes

Voter backlash over planning issues might be eased not by immediately ceasing high-rise development but by the implementation of good-quality and aesthetically pleasing design.

Inner-city housing follows a common theme: a series of box-like apartments, all made out of ticky tacky, stacked several storeys high, each with a tiny rectangular balcony, and covered by vast, blank concrete walls painted ghastly colours.

But no shade of burgundy can cover the lack of imagination and creativity that goes into these soulless monstrosities. If we demand beautiful, sensitive buildings as part of planning requirements, we just might end up with something we can all live with.

– Lisa Aspland, Fitzroy