A closer examination of urban development and housing reveals several counterintuitive realities:
1. The grand experiments of mid-20th century urban planning, particularly prevalent in the post-war and post-colonial era, stand as cautionary tales. The attempt to design cities from scratch, divorced from market forces and organic development, resulted in consistent failure. Top-down urban design proved fundamentally incompatible with human needs and behaviors.
2. The international architectural discourse presents an interesting paradox: while Australian suburban homes rarely feature in design magazines, Tokyo - with its market-driven development - is celebrated globally as an exemplar of urban cool.
3. The aesthetic quality of middle-class housing reflects a broader pattern in mass taste. The parallel with media consumption is telling: when gatekeepers were removed from media production in the 1980s, rather than gravitating toward high art, audiences overwhelmingly chose what cultural critics would consider lower-quality entertainment. The same principle applies to housing aesthetics.
4. Traditional housing affordability metrics mislead through oversimplification. Mortgage-to-income and rent-to-income ratios provide more nuanced insights into true housing accessibility. These measures have shown relative stability over time, with financial distress actually declining over the past two decades. Notably, such distress concentrates in regional areas rather than affluent urban centers.
5. Australian housing statistics challenge popular narratives about declining standards. Australians enjoy the world's largest median house sizes, exceeding even American dimensions, while maintaining stable homeownership rates.
6. The reduction in backyard sizes reflects economic advancement rather than constraint. In high-value areas, dedicating space to lawns represents an increasingly expensive opportunity cost, driving more efficient land use patterns.
Another way to frame James’ contention would be: “I want developers to take all the risk with no return so that we can all have nice looking and cheap housing”.
As a private developer you have significant equity (usually between 20-30% of the total development costs) tied up in a project from the moment you settle on the site through to the moment you sell the last unit or lot.
From the day you settle on the land everything is conspiring against you to eat into your profit. Delays through Council, Banks, the weather, the market…
And you’re the last one to get paid once it’s all completed - generally speaking you don’t get $1 in profit until the Bank has been fully repaid.
If you’re lucky and the market is heading in the right direction and you are holding unsold completed stock after the financier has been repaid there might be some decent upside for you. If not…
The large land developers (Lendlease, Stockland et al) have sufficient capital to take a longer term view and master planned communities with major infrastructure requirements generally aren’t very profitable until all of the critical infrastructure has been delivered which can take several years. These master planned communities invariably include large parkland areas which increases desirability and…price!
Yes, the patchwork private land developments are often designed for the most efficient lot yield rather than livability but it delivers product to the market at a price that is within reach for first time home buyers on modest incomes.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Hence my frustration with the "Greedy Developer" narrative - there's zero appreciation for how much is stacked against developers and how it is ostensibly a miracle that anything gets built at all these days.
Just a quick correction. James Howe was never sued by a developer. He is currently refunding public donations taken for his legal expenses, if evidence that you have donated and are not an "abortion lover" can be provided.
The interesting question to get at is why purchasing power has declined. "Since around 1999-2001, the relationship between the cost of the average house, versus the average wage has been completely decoupled. House prices rose, while wages couldn’t keep up." This was around the time that Australian politicians decided to adopt very large scale immigration programs. On your point that "We get the politics we deserve" - but unfortunately Australians have never got to have a say on immigration, the Liberal-National coalition and Labor Party have run a unity ticket on that question for some time!
Second, i agree, that guy seems to not really understand property economics.
I do want to take you to task a bit for your rose-tinted views of Australia 30+ years ago.
1- when i drive through any working or lower-middle class suburb built between about 1945 and 1990, i want to top myself. These are not nice places. Think Thomastown/ Mill Park in Melbourne, or Salisbury/ Elizabeth in Adelaide. New suburban developments recently developed further out from these suburbs may not be perfect, but they’re infinitely better designed places. That they’re better places to live is reflected in property price differentials.
2- on the affordability question, you look at income:asset price ratios across two time periods, one of which (the 1980s) saw interest rates well above 10%. Of course asset prices (and the aforementioned ratio) were lower when interest rates peaked at just under 20%. One of my pet peeves.
3- life in Australia in 2025 is far more affordable than it was in 2005, 1985 or 1965 (even with the ongoing impacts of everyone losing their minds in 2020 and 2021).
This is borne out in the data. Houses have never been easy to buy.
I thought your article covered some very useful ground. I agree the root cause is structural. However, I don’t think James is the problem. You can design good affordable housing.
The big thing that has changed is the commodification of housing as an asset class for speculative investment, rather than accepting that people need shelter for our society to work at all.
There is not much point saying people having less money explains the poorly designed, poorly built housing, why environmental standards can’t be incorporated into plans and why they have no backyards. The reality is these developments are ghettos and will be with us for decades. We are not building for a constructive future.
The structural issue is that investor won’t accept a drop in their asset prices and building more houses and increasing supply isn’t going to help anyone in lower socio-economic groups buy or rent a place, now or in the future. The objective is keeping asset values high, not providing shelter to citizens.
The challenge is to decommodify at least parts of the market to provide housing security to those that won’t inherit it. Or we can decide that homelessness is an acceptable public policy. Alternative housing models are springing up, but government incentives or tax breaks? The government would actually gave to believe in housing security.
I note that Australians are incentivised to invest in built housing, which like banks, add virtually nothing to the productive economy. No incentive to innovate there.
Yes it is quite obvious that all of this is symptomatic of Australia's rapidly declining net wealth (real wealth aka resources factoring in the costs of producing them) per capita, which for much for the 19th and 20th centuries was among the highest in the world. Modern people have a habit of equating paper wealth, gadgets, and gross production with per capita real wealth, but a proper deep dive on the latter shows we are now worse off (without even beginning to include personal and household debt in the matter). We produce a lot more stuff, but it costs a lot more to produce it, leaving little left over to build lovely houses, plus msot of us no longer own assets without debt, which almost all of us did in the past.
Melbourne's amazing 19th century architecture (sadly mostly gone) was built almost entirely on the back of the most profitable gold rush the world had ever seen (barely had to scratch the surface to get it), and even the regional and rural (Bendigo, Ballarat etc) towns of Victoria's gold districts maintain a reminder of the enormous wealth that went into the architecture of the times.
Many of Australia's agricultural towns and homesteads also still maintain buildings that attest to the the wealth generated off the land , even well into the 20th century. The days when a gentleman squatter could simply round up his sheep a few times a year and send the wool to London for enormous sums of money (in between racing horses and attending parliament), paying off loans to the bank within a few years.
Well said! I think if you go back to all of the beautiful cities of yesteryear there will be a similar story of some kind of explosion of wealth for one reason or another which lead to the stunning architecture of the time. It also doesn't hurt that skilled artisan labour was dirt cheap and wealth disparity was much more extreme.
I don't know if you've read this one but I reckon you'll like it. It touches upon many of the themes you mention.
What I don't understand about these greenfield projects is why they are all designed and built by single development companies? Why doesnt the state government/council decide where the parks will go, how the roads will be laid out, where the shops will be, etc? We know that these companies are incentivised to build shitty, car-dependent, bland, repetitive etc suburbs. But I don't understand why they're in charge of these decisions at all.
Surely you could open up a greenfield site, plan out the roads and zones etc and then just let a bunch of different builders build whatever they like on the blocks?
I’d like to see a lot more of this kind of thing and just public housing in general.
If I was to name one reason why governments don’t do this it is that they don’t have the resources. You see institutions like Economic Development Queensland (EDQ) doing this on a smaller scale in places like Carseldine https://www.edq.qld.gov.au/our-work/developments/carseldine-village
I have long argued that EDQ or a similar institution should be given a massive endowment to do exactly as you say.
But generally speaking councils barely have enough money to provide any infrastructure upgrades ahead of development - so the way we fund infrastructure is completely broken.
Another big problem is fragmented land ownership. If you’ve got an area of a few hundred hectares with 50 land owners, all the government can really do is change the planning controls and boost the capacity of some infrastructure. Then you get lots of small developers buying up sites and doing small developments where they don’t have to provide for schools and parks etc and then you end up with the worst possible outcome.
I actually wrote an article that was kind of about this. Basically arguing that we need to change our mindset to lead with the infrastructure and get comfortable with the redundancy in the mean time.
Another excellent piece, thanks. It appears that there are changes underway in real estate fashion in Brisbane driven by demographics and culture, with large old Queenslander homes on large blocks declining in popularity, and more affordable mock Hamptons on small lots being built via knock downs and rebuilds in our middle suburbs to respond to the market. Space and vegetation are being sacrificed for lower cost, new builds and ease of maintenance, it would appear.
Yep. I don't deny that people would probably rather have the large old Queenslander on a large middle suburb block, but as always economics has a way of making these decisions for us. Can't wait for the mock Hamptons style to go away though haha.
Thanks for articulating this. I see the Greedy Developer argument everywhere and think, well, sure they might be greedy in their hearts but is that translating into practice, i.e. are they managing to be greedy? Who else is building homes? Not the government, lol
Yep exactly. Not to mention that many of the same people who turn their nose up at these homes would flinch at the idea of public housing - not realising that many of the nice old homes they love were once public housing!
It's always, "No we can't let them build that monstrosity, only five out of 100 apartments will be affordable," and never, "Yes, I agree, they should build ten public housing units here."
Great piece, I have also watched a few of James videos and really enjoy them but have had the same questions you did. Thanks for addressing them in such a clear easy to understand way!
Dude, how did you get through all that without mentioning mass immigration?
It's the driver of all this. Working class people wouldn't need new tracts of greenfield development, inner cities wouldn't need to be bulldozed and turned into stacks of shoeboxes if we weren't bringing in so many people.
The point is to drive down wages and standards of living for the working class, it's the only way to compete in a globalised economy, except we're just bringing in low-trust garbage culture to exploit and consume the anglo culture Australia used to have. If you think things are getting worse now, you haven't seen anything yet. The corruption in the private trade school system, and the NDIS, it's just ubiquitous. And those are only the areas I have direct insight into, I assume it's the same everywhere. The state has become so bloated in Australia that resources are going to whoever manages to find a way to insert their probiscus into the system, not whoever is most productive and is building things people want.
This is why developers generally are skeezy. It takes a skeezy operator to get into that position. It's the same reason why high political office holders in Australia are generally self-serving narcissists who have already sold out to special interests. The process of achieving the position is a selection process that weeds out anyone who is not like that. Sure, theoretically there's nothing stopping and artistic, sensitive magnanimous developer from being a thing... except at some point you have to notice that in reality it never happens. And it never happens because grogan shitbag developers who just want to grab as much money as they can are the most well adapted to the environment and they outcompete everyone else.
Good piece - I like James’ videos too but I agree preserving all old houses in aspic is not really the answer. If contemporary housing looked good though there would be a lot less opposition to it. If townhouses and apartments looked beautiful people would be happier about them being built.
I really struggle to understand the current “style” of housing (I call it minecraft style because it is just blocks piled on top of other blocks), I have never met anyone who claims to like it and yet almost everyone (even very rich people) build houses in that horrid aesthetic.
Also one thing I would say that you haven’t really touched on, and neither does James, is that most old houses were shit too. Inner suburban houses in wealthy areas built pre Second World War are built to a very high standard which is hard to replicate today but outer suburban houses have always been shit even in the good old days. Most of them aren’t worth saving aesthetically or economically.
Also it wouldn’t cost significantly more to build a house that looked good than one that looks shit. Modernism in architecture got started after all because ornament had become mass produced and too cheap. The best looking houses I have seen built recently are usually Georgian or Palladian / Italianate pastiche built from rendered hebel, that wouldn’t cost significantly more to build than anything else and it does look better—when they get the proportions right at least.
I totally agree that we need more beautiful townhouses in particular to demonstrate that they don't have to be depressing. They are actually one of the most flexible typologies out there so I could totally see a world where there's one that gives Australians everything they want out of a house. The problem is of course the cost. Europe regularly delivers beautiful townhouses, but they are ultimately marketed towards middle to upper middle income people - whereas Australian townhouses are marketed towards the lower end. The Australian middle class doesn't have to live in townhouses yet, so we won't see it for some time I think.
I also totally agree with your comment about old houses being largely shit too! I think there was much more of a "do it yourself" type resourcefulness that ultimately resulted in some incredible shonkiness out there.
I hope you're right about it being possible to build something better for cheap - the question is though, why don't we!?
Yes it’s not true though because very very rich people build some of the ugliest houses you have ever seen. And it doesn’t cost any more to build houses that look good if you have any knowledge at all about building and design. Most people, architects and builders included do not possess that knowledge.
The people who live directly opposite me have just built a house and it is obviously a (minimum) million dollar plus build, on a double wide block the land value of which is $1.5M plus and it looks like a petrol station from some angles and a sci-fi military bunker from others. It is horrendous. Money isn’t the issue.
1. Voicing disgust is an important starting point. We should not feel the need to develop a fully realised thesis first.
2. Green belts and beautiful, traditional medium density development are alternatives to Mickleham. Our governments chose Mickleham on our behalves.
3. Architecture, as an academic profession, has made us feel ashamed of our cultural heritage and this has contributed to the current bleak state of development. People whose ancestors had settled ideas about beauty now consider those ideas to be silly and nostalgic, but aren’t sure what they’re supposed to like; enter The Block.
I understand that you and most people (myself included) prefer these outcomes, but refusing to engage with reality doesn't get you any closer to a solution.
Explain to me how tighter planning laws and green belts gets someone with the ability to borrow $600,000 into a beautiful, traditional medium density building. I promise you it doesn't - it has them renting until they are deep into their 40s, if not later.
If beautiful, traditional medium density development is more important to you than putting a roof over peoples heads then fine - but you should also voice that alongside your opinions. You can't have your cake and eat it too, failing some other massive injection of capital from the government to subsidise this, it's not possible in today's economy. Again, if this is what you want to happen - then just say that rather than blaming everybody working with the hand they've been dealt.
Again I would be less keen to blame architects as they are victims of the system too. So many decisions are made and conditions are predetermined before an architect ever even hears about a project. They get their dreams crushed more than anyone. Architects enjoy classical architecture just as much as you do - they just never get asked to build it - ever!
Greenfield housing is cheap if you build a million units a year, but the capital and maintenance costs for urban sprawl, taking into account infrastructure, are usually thought to be higher than for infill development, even though the cost of construction is 5-10% higher for the latter per m^2.
I think the major pragmatic argument in favour of urban sprawl is that consultation and negotiation are quick and simple, provided that the state government is in favour. The landowner benefits and there are no neighbours to convince or roads to close.
To Australians, the idea that you could knock down some low density 20th century houses and replace them with something better and more beautiful that will actually improve the neighbourhood is inconceivable. That is a major barrier to infill.
Something I've been thinking about lately is the fact that Australians don't like townhouses because 99% of the time, they are built for lower-income customers and are usually quite ugly for that reason. Whereas in Europe, you see new townhouses that are quite beautiful - because they geared towards middle class people and above.
Because inner city land in Australia is so expensive, I do think there is potential for infill renewal that is actually quite beautiful - because buyers in those neighbourhoods can afford it. Curious to see whether you think this project is any good:
Personally, I’m a fan of Louis Kahn and that style of architecture. However, I think that shameless traditionalism is the way to convince the public and to avoid ageing badly.
On your point about our current levels of wealth versus the beauty of 19th century cities - I think about this all the time and am thinking about writing an article about this. I haven't researched it properly yet, but I wonder if it was the massive wealth inequality and poor working conditions that enabled that kind of beauty. So basically my hypothesis for that would be that even though we are richer in aggregate, and have a healthier middle class right now, it is the fact that rich people were *so* much richer in the 19th and early 20th Century that they could afford such opulance. While the average Australian is certainly wealthier, they can't afford to build a neo-classical stone townhouse in the inner suburbs. So it's not just how we want to spend our wealth - a completely different model is required to build this. Public subsidisation of architecture?
For example, in the 19th century skilled artisans and stonemasons were dirt cheap and widely available back then, whereas now it is a niche, higher value profession. Back then the world was industrialising and peasants were being driven off their feudal lands (talking European context now) as the industrial revolution was kicking in, so the cities were flooded with cheap labour. Whereas now we have a labour shortage and tradies are well paid, with much lower productivity due to better working conditions. Not married to this argument, just thinking aloud.
On planning laws making Mickleham(s) illegal. If that's your priority then sure, but just realise that this is going to result in much less housing being built. During a housing crisis I'd argue that's the wrong time to make that move. Green belts restrict supply and drive up prices - this I am confident in.
Again I would be less keen to blame architects as they are victims of the system too. So many decisions are made and conditions are predetermined before an architect ever even hears about a project. They get their dreams crushed more than anyone. Also, more often than not the housing in the Micklehams of the world are not designed by architects, but by master builders.
Bravo! What a piece.
Cheers mate! Thanks for reading
A closer examination of urban development and housing reveals several counterintuitive realities:
1. The grand experiments of mid-20th century urban planning, particularly prevalent in the post-war and post-colonial era, stand as cautionary tales. The attempt to design cities from scratch, divorced from market forces and organic development, resulted in consistent failure. Top-down urban design proved fundamentally incompatible with human needs and behaviors.
2. The international architectural discourse presents an interesting paradox: while Australian suburban homes rarely feature in design magazines, Tokyo - with its market-driven development - is celebrated globally as an exemplar of urban cool.
3. The aesthetic quality of middle-class housing reflects a broader pattern in mass taste. The parallel with media consumption is telling: when gatekeepers were removed from media production in the 1980s, rather than gravitating toward high art, audiences overwhelmingly chose what cultural critics would consider lower-quality entertainment. The same principle applies to housing aesthetics.
4. Traditional housing affordability metrics mislead through oversimplification. Mortgage-to-income and rent-to-income ratios provide more nuanced insights into true housing accessibility. These measures have shown relative stability over time, with financial distress actually declining over the past two decades. Notably, such distress concentrates in regional areas rather than affluent urban centers.
5. Australian housing statistics challenge popular narratives about declining standards. Australians enjoy the world's largest median house sizes, exceeding even American dimensions, while maintaining stable homeownership rates.
6. The reduction in backyard sizes reflects economic advancement rather than constraint. In high-value areas, dedicating space to lawns represents an increasingly expensive opportunity cost, driving more efficient land use patterns.
Another way to frame James’ contention would be: “I want developers to take all the risk with no return so that we can all have nice looking and cheap housing”.
As a private developer you have significant equity (usually between 20-30% of the total development costs) tied up in a project from the moment you settle on the site through to the moment you sell the last unit or lot.
From the day you settle on the land everything is conspiring against you to eat into your profit. Delays through Council, Banks, the weather, the market…
And you’re the last one to get paid once it’s all completed - generally speaking you don’t get $1 in profit until the Bank has been fully repaid.
If you’re lucky and the market is heading in the right direction and you are holding unsold completed stock after the financier has been repaid there might be some decent upside for you. If not…
The large land developers (Lendlease, Stockland et al) have sufficient capital to take a longer term view and master planned communities with major infrastructure requirements generally aren’t very profitable until all of the critical infrastructure has been delivered which can take several years. These master planned communities invariably include large parkland areas which increases desirability and…price!
Yes, the patchwork private land developments are often designed for the most efficient lot yield rather than livability but it delivers product to the market at a price that is within reach for first time home buyers on modest incomes.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Hence my frustration with the "Greedy Developer" narrative - there's zero appreciation for how much is stacked against developers and how it is ostensibly a miracle that anything gets built at all these days.
Just a quick correction. James Howe was never sued by a developer. He is currently refunding public donations taken for his legal expenses, if evidence that you have donated and are not an "abortion lover" can be provided.
Oh dear - thanks for the correction, I'll remove that. Yes I've since become aware of his charming wife lol.
The interesting question to get at is why purchasing power has declined. "Since around 1999-2001, the relationship between the cost of the average house, versus the average wage has been completely decoupled. House prices rose, while wages couldn’t keep up." This was around the time that Australian politicians decided to adopt very large scale immigration programs. On your point that "We get the politics we deserve" - but unfortunately Australians have never got to have a say on immigration, the Liberal-National coalition and Labor Party have run a unity ticket on that question for some time!
Firstly, great piece.
Second, i agree, that guy seems to not really understand property economics.
I do want to take you to task a bit for your rose-tinted views of Australia 30+ years ago.
1- when i drive through any working or lower-middle class suburb built between about 1945 and 1990, i want to top myself. These are not nice places. Think Thomastown/ Mill Park in Melbourne, or Salisbury/ Elizabeth in Adelaide. New suburban developments recently developed further out from these suburbs may not be perfect, but they’re infinitely better designed places. That they’re better places to live is reflected in property price differentials.
2- on the affordability question, you look at income:asset price ratios across two time periods, one of which (the 1980s) saw interest rates well above 10%. Of course asset prices (and the aforementioned ratio) were lower when interest rates peaked at just under 20%. One of my pet peeves.
3- life in Australia in 2025 is far more affordable than it was in 2005, 1985 or 1965 (even with the ongoing impacts of everyone losing their minds in 2020 and 2021).
This is borne out in the data. Houses have never been easy to buy.
I thought your article covered some very useful ground. I agree the root cause is structural. However, I don’t think James is the problem. You can design good affordable housing.
The big thing that has changed is the commodification of housing as an asset class for speculative investment, rather than accepting that people need shelter for our society to work at all.
There is not much point saying people having less money explains the poorly designed, poorly built housing, why environmental standards can’t be incorporated into plans and why they have no backyards. The reality is these developments are ghettos and will be with us for decades. We are not building for a constructive future.
The structural issue is that investor won’t accept a drop in their asset prices and building more houses and increasing supply isn’t going to help anyone in lower socio-economic groups buy or rent a place, now or in the future. The objective is keeping asset values high, not providing shelter to citizens.
The challenge is to decommodify at least parts of the market to provide housing security to those that won’t inherit it. Or we can decide that homelessness is an acceptable public policy. Alternative housing models are springing up, but government incentives or tax breaks? The government would actually gave to believe in housing security.
I note that Australians are incentivised to invest in built housing, which like banks, add virtually nothing to the productive economy. No incentive to innovate there.
Yes it is quite obvious that all of this is symptomatic of Australia's rapidly declining net wealth (real wealth aka resources factoring in the costs of producing them) per capita, which for much for the 19th and 20th centuries was among the highest in the world. Modern people have a habit of equating paper wealth, gadgets, and gross production with per capita real wealth, but a proper deep dive on the latter shows we are now worse off (without even beginning to include personal and household debt in the matter). We produce a lot more stuff, but it costs a lot more to produce it, leaving little left over to build lovely houses, plus msot of us no longer own assets without debt, which almost all of us did in the past.
Melbourne's amazing 19th century architecture (sadly mostly gone) was built almost entirely on the back of the most profitable gold rush the world had ever seen (barely had to scratch the surface to get it), and even the regional and rural (Bendigo, Ballarat etc) towns of Victoria's gold districts maintain a reminder of the enormous wealth that went into the architecture of the times.
Many of Australia's agricultural towns and homesteads also still maintain buildings that attest to the the wealth generated off the land , even well into the 20th century. The days when a gentleman squatter could simply round up his sheep a few times a year and send the wool to London for enormous sums of money (in between racing horses and attending parliament), paying off loans to the bank within a few years.
Well said! I think if you go back to all of the beautiful cities of yesteryear there will be a similar story of some kind of explosion of wealth for one reason or another which lead to the stunning architecture of the time. It also doesn't hurt that skilled artisan labour was dirt cheap and wealth disparity was much more extreme.
I don't know if you've read this one but I reckon you'll like it. It touches upon many of the themes you mention.
https://theemergentcity.substack.com/p/from-convicts-to-the-castle-how-real
Tangential point/question:
What I don't understand about these greenfield projects is why they are all designed and built by single development companies? Why doesnt the state government/council decide where the parks will go, how the roads will be laid out, where the shops will be, etc? We know that these companies are incentivised to build shitty, car-dependent, bland, repetitive etc suburbs. But I don't understand why they're in charge of these decisions at all.
Surely you could open up a greenfield site, plan out the roads and zones etc and then just let a bunch of different builders build whatever they like on the blocks?
I’d like to see a lot more of this kind of thing and just public housing in general.
If I was to name one reason why governments don’t do this it is that they don’t have the resources. You see institutions like Economic Development Queensland (EDQ) doing this on a smaller scale in places like Carseldine https://www.edq.qld.gov.au/our-work/developments/carseldine-village
I have long argued that EDQ or a similar institution should be given a massive endowment to do exactly as you say.
But generally speaking councils barely have enough money to provide any infrastructure upgrades ahead of development - so the way we fund infrastructure is completely broken.
Another big problem is fragmented land ownership. If you’ve got an area of a few hundred hectares with 50 land owners, all the government can really do is change the planning controls and boost the capacity of some infrastructure. Then you get lots of small developers buying up sites and doing small developments where they don’t have to provide for schools and parks etc and then you end up with the worst possible outcome.
I actually wrote an article that was kind of about this. Basically arguing that we need to change our mindset to lead with the infrastructure and get comfortable with the redundancy in the mean time.
https://theemergentcity.substack.com/p/build-train-station-middle-nowhere
Another excellent piece, thanks. It appears that there are changes underway in real estate fashion in Brisbane driven by demographics and culture, with large old Queenslander homes on large blocks declining in popularity, and more affordable mock Hamptons on small lots being built via knock downs and rebuilds in our middle suburbs to respond to the market. Space and vegetation are being sacrificed for lower cost, new builds and ease of maintenance, it would appear.
Yep. I don't deny that people would probably rather have the large old Queenslander on a large middle suburb block, but as always economics has a way of making these decisions for us. Can't wait for the mock Hamptons style to go away though haha.
Thanks for articulating this. I see the Greedy Developer argument everywhere and think, well, sure they might be greedy in their hearts but is that translating into practice, i.e. are they managing to be greedy? Who else is building homes? Not the government, lol
Yep exactly. Not to mention that many of the same people who turn their nose up at these homes would flinch at the idea of public housing - not realising that many of the nice old homes they love were once public housing!
It's always, "No we can't let them build that monstrosity, only five out of 100 apartments will be affordable," and never, "Yes, I agree, they should build ten public housing units here."
Great piece, I have also watched a few of James videos and really enjoy them but have had the same questions you did. Thanks for addressing them in such a clear easy to understand way!
Cheers Beau! Yes I hope I don't upset him because I really do enjoy most of his stuff.
Dude, how did you get through all that without mentioning mass immigration?
It's the driver of all this. Working class people wouldn't need new tracts of greenfield development, inner cities wouldn't need to be bulldozed and turned into stacks of shoeboxes if we weren't bringing in so many people.
The point is to drive down wages and standards of living for the working class, it's the only way to compete in a globalised economy, except we're just bringing in low-trust garbage culture to exploit and consume the anglo culture Australia used to have. If you think things are getting worse now, you haven't seen anything yet. The corruption in the private trade school system, and the NDIS, it's just ubiquitous. And those are only the areas I have direct insight into, I assume it's the same everywhere. The state has become so bloated in Australia that resources are going to whoever manages to find a way to insert their probiscus into the system, not whoever is most productive and is building things people want.
This is why developers generally are skeezy. It takes a skeezy operator to get into that position. It's the same reason why high political office holders in Australia are generally self-serving narcissists who have already sold out to special interests. The process of achieving the position is a selection process that weeds out anyone who is not like that. Sure, theoretically there's nothing stopping and artistic, sensitive magnanimous developer from being a thing... except at some point you have to notice that in reality it never happens. And it never happens because grogan shitbag developers who just want to grab as much money as they can are the most well adapted to the environment and they outcompete everyone else.
Good piece - I like James’ videos too but I agree preserving all old houses in aspic is not really the answer. If contemporary housing looked good though there would be a lot less opposition to it. If townhouses and apartments looked beautiful people would be happier about them being built.
I really struggle to understand the current “style” of housing (I call it minecraft style because it is just blocks piled on top of other blocks), I have never met anyone who claims to like it and yet almost everyone (even very rich people) build houses in that horrid aesthetic.
Also one thing I would say that you haven’t really touched on, and neither does James, is that most old houses were shit too. Inner suburban houses in wealthy areas built pre Second World War are built to a very high standard which is hard to replicate today but outer suburban houses have always been shit even in the good old days. Most of them aren’t worth saving aesthetically or economically.
Also it wouldn’t cost significantly more to build a house that looked good than one that looks shit. Modernism in architecture got started after all because ornament had become mass produced and too cheap. The best looking houses I have seen built recently are usually Georgian or Palladian / Italianate pastiche built from rendered hebel, that wouldn’t cost significantly more to build than anything else and it does look better—when they get the proportions right at least.
Great points Kym thanks!
I totally agree that we need more beautiful townhouses in particular to demonstrate that they don't have to be depressing. They are actually one of the most flexible typologies out there so I could totally see a world where there's one that gives Australians everything they want out of a house. The problem is of course the cost. Europe regularly delivers beautiful townhouses, but they are ultimately marketed towards middle to upper middle income people - whereas Australian townhouses are marketed towards the lower end. The Australian middle class doesn't have to live in townhouses yet, so we won't see it for some time I think.
I also totally agree with your comment about old houses being largely shit too! I think there was much more of a "do it yourself" type resourcefulness that ultimately resulted in some incredible shonkiness out there.
I hope you're right about it being possible to build something better for cheap - the question is though, why don't we!?
That’s the $64,000 Question—why do we build everything so ugly when it wouldn’t cost any more to build beautiful? Sometimes you can only blackpill.
The reason that these aren't pretty is that people in Australia, according to Ryan, have gotten too poor to afford pretty houses.
Yes it’s not true though because very very rich people build some of the ugliest houses you have ever seen. And it doesn’t cost any more to build houses that look good if you have any knowledge at all about building and design. Most people, architects and builders included do not possess that knowledge.
Good designers are expensive, people can't afford unnecessary expenses since they're too poor.
The people who live directly opposite me have just built a house and it is obviously a (minimum) million dollar plus build, on a double wide block the land value of which is $1.5M plus and it looks like a petrol station from some angles and a sci-fi military bunker from others. It is horrendous. Money isn’t the issue.
1. Voicing disgust is an important starting point. We should not feel the need to develop a fully realised thesis first.
2. Green belts and beautiful, traditional medium density development are alternatives to Mickleham. Our governments chose Mickleham on our behalves.
3. Architecture, as an academic profession, has made us feel ashamed of our cultural heritage and this has contributed to the current bleak state of development. People whose ancestors had settled ideas about beauty now consider those ideas to be silly and nostalgic, but aren’t sure what they’re supposed to like; enter The Block.
I understand that you and most people (myself included) prefer these outcomes, but refusing to engage with reality doesn't get you any closer to a solution.
Explain to me how tighter planning laws and green belts gets someone with the ability to borrow $600,000 into a beautiful, traditional medium density building. I promise you it doesn't - it has them renting until they are deep into their 40s, if not later.
If beautiful, traditional medium density development is more important to you than putting a roof over peoples heads then fine - but you should also voice that alongside your opinions. You can't have your cake and eat it too, failing some other massive injection of capital from the government to subsidise this, it's not possible in today's economy. Again, if this is what you want to happen - then just say that rather than blaming everybody working with the hand they've been dealt.
Again I would be less keen to blame architects as they are victims of the system too. So many decisions are made and conditions are predetermined before an architect ever even hears about a project. They get their dreams crushed more than anyone. Architects enjoy classical architecture just as much as you do - they just never get asked to build it - ever!
Greenfield housing is cheap if you build a million units a year, but the capital and maintenance costs for urban sprawl, taking into account infrastructure, are usually thought to be higher than for infill development, even though the cost of construction is 5-10% higher for the latter per m^2.
I think the major pragmatic argument in favour of urban sprawl is that consultation and negotiation are quick and simple, provided that the state government is in favour. The landowner benefits and there are no neighbours to convince or roads to close.
To Australians, the idea that you could knock down some low density 20th century houses and replace them with something better and more beautiful that will actually improve the neighbourhood is inconceivable. That is a major barrier to infill.
Agree with all said, greenfield housing gets delivered in greater numbers because it is the path of least resistance (compared to infill). I wrote about that here: https://theemergentcity.substack.com/p/why-is-the-missing-middle-missing
Something I've been thinking about lately is the fact that Australians don't like townhouses because 99% of the time, they are built for lower-income customers and are usually quite ugly for that reason. Whereas in Europe, you see new townhouses that are quite beautiful - because they geared towards middle class people and above.
Because inner city land in Australia is so expensive, I do think there is potential for infill renewal that is actually quite beautiful - because buyers in those neighbourhoods can afford it. Curious to see whether you think this project is any good:
https://sjb.com.au/projects/ashbury-terraces/
https://ashburyterraces.com.au/
Personally, I’m a fan of Louis Kahn and that style of architecture. However, I think that shameless traditionalism is the way to convince the public and to avoid ageing badly.
I did not expect you to like Louis Kahn! He's one of my favourites too.
On your point about our current levels of wealth versus the beauty of 19th century cities - I think about this all the time and am thinking about writing an article about this. I haven't researched it properly yet, but I wonder if it was the massive wealth inequality and poor working conditions that enabled that kind of beauty. So basically my hypothesis for that would be that even though we are richer in aggregate, and have a healthier middle class right now, it is the fact that rich people were *so* much richer in the 19th and early 20th Century that they could afford such opulance. While the average Australian is certainly wealthier, they can't afford to build a neo-classical stone townhouse in the inner suburbs. So it's not just how we want to spend our wealth - a completely different model is required to build this. Public subsidisation of architecture?
For example, in the 19th century skilled artisans and stonemasons were dirt cheap and widely available back then, whereas now it is a niche, higher value profession. Back then the world was industrialising and peasants were being driven off their feudal lands (talking European context now) as the industrial revolution was kicking in, so the cities were flooded with cheap labour. Whereas now we have a labour shortage and tradies are well paid, with much lower productivity due to better working conditions. Not married to this argument, just thinking aloud.
On planning laws making Mickleham(s) illegal. If that's your priority then sure, but just realise that this is going to result in much less housing being built. During a housing crisis I'd argue that's the wrong time to make that move. Green belts restrict supply and drive up prices - this I am confident in.
Again I would be less keen to blame architects as they are victims of the system too. So many decisions are made and conditions are predetermined before an architect ever even hears about a project. They get their dreams crushed more than anyone. Also, more often than not the housing in the Micklehams of the world are not designed by architects, but by master builders.