“Planning expert says Melbourne must destroy leafy eastern suburbs”, Herald-Sun, 29/4. Seems to be a week for dumb articles, as this outrageous proposal was published today: Jason Black, the president of the Planning Institute of Australia’s Victorian division, put forward a proposal that Melbourne’s eastern suburbs (which have a lot of established trees and vegetation) be forcibly acquired, demolished and replaced with high-density housing.
Mr. Black says spacious suburban blocks should be leveled and the homes replaced with three to six-storey apartment buildings. Mr. Black said at a Melbourne planning summit yesterday: “We need to realise that some of the fundamentals driving the Government’s 2030 development plan have changed and we need to rethink how we’re going to go about delivering some of the objectives and the vision.” The conference heard that metropolitan Melbourne would need an extra 850,000 new homes by 2036 if fertility and immigration levels remained the same.
[…]
But Dr. Bob Birrell, a Monash University population and urban research expert, said compulsory acquisition of middle suburban properties would not be acceptable. “I think this (redevelopment) would be a nightmare for people that live there and they would see it as expropriating them in order facilitate someone else’s growth objective and I could see why they would be so testy,” he said.
A letter I sent to the H-S (don’t know if it will be published):
Jason Black can surely not be serious in proposing to destroy the pleasant leafy suburbs that help make Melbourne liveable, and replace them with hideous cramped high-rise apartments (“Planning expert says Melbourne must destroy leafy eastern suburbs”, 29/4) – any government that tried that strategy would face a citizens’ revolution! Far better to restrict population growth so that housing demand is lessened and amenity can be preserved, though that would not please the greedy developers and construction industry.
It’s bad enough that this increasingly dictatorial government is intending to override councils’ decisions in order to fast-track planning and construction (“Brumby sidelines councils”, The Age, 16/4) – I wish enough people would get motivated to instigate a revolt and overthrow this government!
