Melbourne most livable (again)

Melbourne was voted most livable for this year again for health care, education and infrastructure. Which bemused many, including me, as there is much to be improved in all these areas. It is certainly a better place to live than many other cities, but far from perfect.

I dislike this sort of publicity as this makes people more inclined to want to move here when the city and suburbs are already bursting at the seams and struggling to cope. Another article came out this week saying Melbourne was undergoing rapid population growth, which is dismayingly obvious to anyone who has lived here for a while – infrastructure is not coping with the influx.

Melbourne’s population is swelling by 2 per cent a year, adding more than 900,000 people since this century began – and putting it on track to be a city of 8 million people by 2050.

The Bureau of Statistics estimates that in mid-2012, the city’s population was about to hit 4.25 million, after six boom years in which it grew by almost half a million.

Recent bureau figures imply that Melbourne today is home to 4.35 million people – and 27 per cent bigger than the city it was at the start of 2000.

With a rapidly growing population squeezing into road and rail systems that are barely growing at all, this would intensify the strain on the city’s infrastructure, leading to increased congestion on the roads and overcrowding on trains.

The figures will probably seem miniscule compared with many major cities – Wikipedia has a list of these, where population for the highest is into the tens of millions. High density living is promoted as desirable because amenities are close together, but there is a tradeoff in loss of open space, stress from overcrowding, noise and other pollution, and limited access to nature. A properly-planned city might alleviate some of these negative factors, but few if any urban centers are; they tend to grow haphazardly over decades as more people are crammed in.

High-density hell

Every time I visit Melbourne CBD (every few months by train) I am reminded why I don’t like cities and certainly wouldn’t want to live there as a resident! It is noisy, stinky and increasingly crowded, not to mention unbearably hot in summer with all the asphalt and concrete smothering the ground, the streets claustrophobically overshadowed by towering buildings. And this is the city again voted world’s most livable! I shudder to think what less-livable cities are like.

A new resident to the CBD made the mistake of complaining about how noisy it was – the main offenders being music venues – and oh was he castigated, both in the article comments and elsewhere (Reddit’s mostly-younger members being a predictable example). Well, seeing as governments are pushing for higher-density cities, this sort of conflict is going to happen a lot, so I don’t know why those castigating him were so offended. Is there any law that says cities have to be noisy, aside from fatuous bullshit about noise contributing to “vibrancy”? A lot of what passes for “music” is just loud noise pollution and the environment is better off without it.

There was a quite vitriolic post on Reddit – Urban Sprawl now biggest impediment to Economy – where those who objected to high density/urban consolidation being touted as the ultimate solution to our woes got downvoted and called NIMBYers (the usual predictably tired insult). They are anti-backyards (a wasteful allotment of space according to their philosophy) and think everyone should live crammed into apartment towers with a park or two providing lonely oases of greenery. I have given up arguing with people of that mindset as they have a quasi-religious conviction that high-density is the only acceptable way to live. Not so – reducing population growth would enable people to live in detached houses with gardens and backyards, and contain urban sprawl – it would also ensure that land is retained for local food production. But this alternative solution is unthinkable to high-density advocates.

I also found disagreeable this later related post, You want housing up, not out? – the HD advocates (I really need a catchy name for them) want to brainwash children into their cult:

My idea is to use an art/design competition to harness the imaginations of older children and effectively use their drawings as covert propaganda for the type of places we want to exist, after steering their little minds towards what we want them to draw. It’ll be asking primary school children to draw how they foresee their dream Australian lifestyle, or dream city in X amount of years. What will streets and cities look like? How will people live?

This Sustainable Living webpage from NSW Save Our Suburbs gives arguments against urban consolidation. (They don’t, however, advocate restricting population growth; rather, they encourage regional decentralization.)

My little utopian vision is of cities being mostly depopulated, and people living in smaller regional towns, each having its own sustainable power and food supplies, and connected by high-speed rail and Internet. A slower, environmentally-friendly and more relaxed society. I would like to see a “small, smart and sustainable” future for Australia; I emphatically reject the “big Australia” and frantic unsustainable push for endless economic growth that currently has us trapped.

If you’re thinking of moving to Melbourne …

Please don’t! That’s my reaction when I see threads on that topic on forums such as r/Melbourne, though I refrain from saying thus as I will inevitably get downvoted. I might sound churlish, but almost 1000 people a week are arriving, as reported in The Age and Herald-Sun today: “Growth pains on the city’s fringe” and “Booming in the ’burbs” – the latter reproduced below as it is not online:

THE booming outer suburbs have helped Melbourne post the biggest population gain of any capital city in the past decade. Almost 650,000 extra residents moved to Melbourne in the 10 years to June last year, pushing the total population up 18 per cent to a whopping 4.17 million. Census figures released yesterday show the top five areas for growth nationwide were all on Melbourne’s outskirts.

South Morang recorded the biggest increase, with the number of residents up 32,200. Point Cook, Caroline Springs and Tarneit in the west followed with growth figures of more than 20,000.

Demographer with id Consulting, Glenn Capuano, said affordable housing within 25km of Melbourne’s centre was helping lure residents from Sydney, where prices were much more expensive. An economic downturn in southeast Queensland was also behind the influx. It is expected to push Melbourne’s population to five million by 2025.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed inner-city development was further fuelling the population increase. The Docklands recorded the state’s fastest growth, with the area’s population almost 40 times higher than it was in 2001. Taylors Hill, Cairnlea, Point Cook and Tarneit were the next fastest.

Property Council of Australia (Victoria) executive director Jennifer Cunich said more infrastructure was needed for Melbourne to keep pace with its rapid growth. Ms Cunich said toll roads and government partnerships with the private sector were among ways to accelerate investment.

Rachel Mcminimee, who moved to Tarneit from the Dandenongs with husband John 10 years ago, said access to work and the city were big drawcards.

Melbourne’s population gains dwarfed increases in the state’s regional population, which rose about 6 per cent to 1.37 million.

Perth was the nation’s fastest growing capital, with the population up 26 percent, ahead of Brisbane. In NSW, 75 per cent of the state’s population growth was in Sydney. The city now has a population of 4.61 million.

Road traffic has become horrendous and infrastructure is simply not coping – and governments will never manage to catch-up with the unwanted growth. I have lived here all my life and can emphatically assert that quality of life is eroding rapidly and the crowding is extremely stressful and anger-inducing. We are not yet at the level of crowding of megacities of the world, but it seems that government and business wants to make Melbourne that way.

Rats in a cage

“Police called to more than 100 disputes every day”, Herald-Sun, 29/5 (copy URL into Google search, click on link results to get around paywall). This was the headline for yesterday, the article saying that “Overcrowding is being blamed for rising neighbourhood violence”. Well, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to come to that conclusion!

The 000 [emergency] hotline sent police to almost 42,000 neighbourhood disputes in Melbourne and Geelong postcodes - a 12 per cent jump in a year. Violence and ugly verbal feuds between neighbours are as common as family disputes, the focus of a decade-long police campaign. Police have less power to intervene in neighbour disputes. Residents have told of incidents including vicious verbal abuse and terrifying attacks with knives, fireworks and slingshots, often after complaining about noisy parties or local hoons. Freedom of Information data obtained by the Herald Sun reveals the most crowded and fastest-growing suburbs are most affected. […]

Sgt Amanda Napier, of St Kilda police, said “paper thin walls” in overcrowded suburbs drove residents to the brink. “The incidents in St Kilda I think would be attributed to the fact that there are so many flats which have paper thin walls and any sort of noise can be heard,” she said. Dandenong police Sgt Paddy Hayes said alcohol often fuelled noisy parties and fights. He said it was an issue in growth areas such as Casey, where housing density meant residents were “living on top of each other”.

Some cultures, such as that of Japan, have adapted social behaviors that enable their populations to live high density without too much conflict (though I suspect frustration comes out in other ways). Australian culture, however, likes its space, and the crowding and urban density resulting from sustained population growth is driving many mad (myself included). I will link yet again to an article from a few years ago, “London’s a rat hole”:

His scathing assessment was being submitted to the main opposition Conservative Party’s policy group focusing on quality of life. “Putting 10 million aggressive hominids into close proximity and inviting them to engage in serial acts of competitive individualism … for jobs, schools or parking spaces, could not be considered a reasonable idea,” Bayley said. “You put rats in claustrophobic circumstances and they become homosexual, murderous and cannibalistic in no time at all. Instead humans find ingenious solutions, underground car parks, coffee shops, Chinese takeaways, one-man buses, cycle lanes, tall buildings.”

H-S letter in response, 30/5:

Overcrowding so bad for society

IT is to be expected that all this overcrowding and high-density housing being forced on us is causing social problems (“Battle in the burbs”, May 29).

All you need to do is go back to the famous study of the behaviour of rats when forced to live in overcrowded conditions. The more overcrowded, the more aggressive they became. We behave much the same as the rats.

We all need a bit of space around us to keep our sanity and balance. The more packed-in they make our city, the more the police will be called on. When will any government wake up?

– Mary Drost, convener, Planning Backlash Inc