The longest city is short on homes

Housing in Perth is too expensive. Since the COVID pandemic, house prices and rents on newly listed properties have both nearly doubled. Comparing house prices to incomes, Perth now has less affordable housing than either New York or London.

Things would be better if building more homes in Perth were easier. But three quarters of residential land in Perth is zoned for two storeys or fewer — low-density controls cover 92 per cent of residential land within 30km of the CBD.

Perth is among the least dense cities in the developed world. If the inner 15km of Perth were as dense as Houston (renowned even in the US for its sprawl), Perth would have an extra 90,000 well-located homes.

Perth’s planning clamp has created a “missing middle”: barely anything between detached houses and high-rise apartments. Walk through Perth’s suburbs and you’ll see the problem: street after street of freestanding homes on large blocks, just minutes from the CBD, close to jobs and transport.

Meanwhile, the planning system funnels growth to outer suburbs such as Ellenbrook, Yanchep, and Alkimos, requiring massive new infrastructure investments, while blocking gentle development in established areas where roads, schools, and train lines already exist.

This hurts everyone: young families who want to buy a townhouse in the suburb they grew up in, retirees who can’t downsize in their neighbourhood, and essential workers who can’t afford to live near their jobs.

To fix this, the WA Government needs to increase what housing is allowed to be built in the established suburbs of Perth.

First, three-storey townhouses and apartments should be allowed on all residential-zoned land as-of-right. Victoria’s new Townhouse Code provides a template. It sets standards for building heights, setbacks, and site coverage for new developments. Councils are not permitted to knock back proposed developments that meet these standards. (But new homes still need to meet all building regulations.)

Subdividing large blocks for townhouses is an easy way to allow more housing on scarce inner-city land, offering new housing options for families and downsizers alike.

Second, housing developments of at least six storeys should be allowed around more transit hubs, as NSW and Victoria have begun to do. Many of the world’s most iconic and liveable cities — think of Paris, Vienna, Copenhagen — allow six or more storeys broadly across much of their inner areas.

And third, taller apartment buildings should be permitted in more high-demand locations, including in and around the Perth CBD. When Auckland, a city with two-thirds the population of Perth, upzoned 75 per cent of its land area in 2016, it had a building boom that added an extra 4 per cent to the city’s housing stock in just six years and reduced rents by 28 per cent. Since 2016, house prices in Auckland have fallen by 15 per cent in real terms, compared to a 13 per cent rise across New Zealand as a whole.

Relaxing land-use planning controls would not only make housing cheaper and give West Australians more lifestyle choices, it would make Perth an even wealthier, healthier, and more vibrant city. There would be economic benefits beyond the housing market, because the present high cost of housing acts as a handbrake on mobility and productivity.

Allowing more homes would also boost flagging productivity in our construction sector. Auckland’s planning reforms led to a construction productivity jump of 8 per cent in a decade, as construction firms became bigger.

And because building in established suburbs uses existing infrastructure, it can cost taxpayers up to $75,000 less per home than development on the urban fringe.

Perth’s housing crisis is solvable. We need to build more homes in places where it makes sense — near jobs, transport, and services. And more homes where people want to live will mean more affordable housing and more vibrant communities.

West Australians can’t afford anything less.