In the midst of a housing crisis, Perth is struggling to build homes in places where people want to live.
Planners and developers say that difficulties in getting approvals, the higher cost of building apartments, community opposition, and a lack of support from government feed into why Perth keeps sprawling rather than densifying.
The state government target is for 47 per cent of new housing in Perth and Peel to be infill housing, but in 2021 — the most recent figures available — just 29 per cent of new housing was in established areas.
The rest is being built in greenfield sites on the urban fringe.
Julian Bolleter, co-director at the Australian Urban Design Research Centre at the University of WA, said that for decades greenfield development had been an easier way of building homes and often more attractive to prospective buyers.
"When you develop a new suburb on the fringe there is a well-oiled machine that just rolls out and delivers this whole carpet for new suburban development," Dr Bolleter said.
Apartments more expensive to build
Building apartments is both more expensive and more administratively complex, and while the state government has clear targets, it was mostly relying on the private sector to build those apartments and medium-density infill.
Ben Lisle, managing director of property developer Hesperia, said apartments were much more expensive to build than single dwellings and required developers to take on higher risk.
As such, they generally only made financial sense in inner-city areas where land costs were high.
"In an area where you have very high land costs then buying a house and land becomes more cost prohibitive and [the housing proposal] tilts back in favour of apartments, if there's demand," Mr Lisle said.
"If you can buy a site in the western suburbs at the right price, and then you can put enough product on it, and you can go high enough to get the premiums [from views], then that will more than offset the cost of the land and the higher construction costs per square metre of building apartments."
In less expensive areas on the urban fringe, project homes are both more attractive to buyers and cheaper to build than apartments.
Unlike housing estates, apartment blocks must be built all at once and can not be staged as buyers come along.
This makes them riskier, and means builders are reliant on selling off-the-plan before they start building.
"One of the things that generally helps manage risk is staging, but you can't really stage these sorts of product very much," Mr Lisle said.
He said building apartments also required more labour and specialist building skills that Western Australia didn't have as much of as the east coast.
Lengthy approval processes
The second issue is that infill development, while it's being constructed in areas that already have housing and infrastructure, isn't as straightforward as many people assume, according to Rachel Chapman, a director at town planning firm Taylor Burrell Barnett.
"In infill areas we're still dealing with issues like being able to clear vegetation," she said.
Infill development often also requires studies on noise (especially if a site is near a major transport corridor), as well as traffic, environmental and waste studies that can take a number of years.
Ms Chapman cites an area of industrial land in Dianella, less than 10 kilometres from Perth's CBD, that was first earmarked for rezoning as residential in 2015, and still hasn't been touched.
"It's prime land, it's really well connected, and things like that can't get off the ground," she said.
"We're constantly getting developers who come to us looking for small infill sites to do townhouses, which they can get off the ground quicker than apartments, but it's a challenge to find sites that are unconstrained."
Carrot and stick approach
Dr Bolleter said while successive state governments had set infill targets and introduced schemes to incentivise urban density, they hadn't been as strong in limiting urban sprawl.
"Take an example like Ellenbrook [in Perth's outer north-east], this was way outside of the urban growth boundary at the time that it got proposed, and probably shouldn't have been approved in that form, given the existing policy frameworks, but it did," he said.
"We have trouble holding the line. Unless you can really hold the line, you're just trying to incentivise infill.
"I do think you need a bit of carrot and a bit of stick too. There's been a reasonable amount of carrot, but not much stick."
Building community support
Dr Bolleter said community members who opposed infill often found themselves labelled Nimbys [not in my backyard] standing in the way of affordable housing, but he argued that local residents should be part of the process of densification.
"If you have got a $700,000 mortgage, or you spent the better part of 40 years or the best years of your life paying something off, I think people are totally entitled to be a little bit sensitive around what's going on around them," he said.
"I live in Bayswater and if a neighbour came to me and said, 'I'm really scared about all this density that's happening', as an urban designer, an apparent expert, I would struggle to point to anything nearby where I can say, 'It'll be okay, because look at this exemplar development'.
"All I can really see in my neighbourhood is backyard infill, which is totally substandard."
He argues there is a role for the state government to get more involved in building infill developments that showcase attractive design, such as the redevelopment of a 2.2 hectare former school site in White Gum Valley near Fremantle.
The project was led by state government agency Development WA in partnership with designers and architects to build apartments and medium-density housing showcasing new homes with sustainable principles.
"[White Gum Valley] has been genuinely really well regarded by the people who are living around it," Dr Bolleter says.
"According to Development WA, one of those people who resisted it is actually wanting to move into it now.
"I think when people can experience really good examples of density, it can allay their fears."
Thinking smaller to add homes
Town planner Ben Carter thinks the path to great infill may be less of a focus on higher-density apartments and more on townhouses and group dwellings in existing suburbs.
"If you were born in Perth, you probably weren't born in an apartment, you probably weren't even raised in a townhouse," he said.
"So it's a big jump to go from a massive backyard to a two-bedroom apartment, and maybe it just won't happen.
"A type that's closer to what people are more familiar with, with terraces, maybe there'd be more of an uptake of that."
He would like to see the state government increase the range of R-codes within 15km of the city so that the choice isn't simply between tall apartment towers and single homes with backyards, allowing more medium-density dwellings to be built on a traditional quarter-acre block.
"At the moment a lot of the councils favour a lot of lower-density residential … but then that means people just go crazy and propose 25-storey buildings on Stirling Highway," Mr Carter said.
"Then you have single-storey dwellings on the side street 50 metres away — is that really the greatest outcome? I don't think it is.
"If you can promote more of the two, three or four-storey buildings, like what you have in some European cities, and try to focus on densification that's maybe a bit more modest.
"You're still going to have a housing supply increase."
Infill goes in 'too-hard basket'
Mr Carter said opposition from local communities and councils often meant developers simply didn't even attempt infill development, even when it was planned for desirable locations, especially when compared to the ease of subdivision on the urban fringe.
"If you do structure planning on the urban fringe, you're basically working with the council and the state government with quite a well-refined, certain process," he said.
"You then compare that to infill where you have to go through design review panels for five group dwellings.
"You have to submit waste reports, traffic reports, sustainability reports and engage landscape architects only to get into a council chamber, where you've got three, four or five councillors voting 'no' to everything that's infill as a protest vote.
"A lot of people just put infill development in the 'too-hard' basket, quite frankly."
Consideration for future residents
As well as considering current residents, there is another constituency that can't yet vote that also deserves a voice when it comes to planning decisions — future residents.
"We are one of the least-dense cities in the world," Mr Lisle said.
"The issue is that to make a really vibrant, interesting city in which young people want to stay, you need choices in amenity, you need vibrant little cafes, little niche offerings.
"To do that, you need a critical mass of people so that you can support all those offerings."
Dr Bolleter said the Australian Bureau of Statistics' highest projection was that Perth would reach 6.6 million by 2061, and that those future residents' needs deserved to be taken into account as well.
"We've seen when new apartments go up, their balconies are completely covered in screens, because they're not allowed to overlook anyone's backyard.
"I totally get why that is, but the end result for the person living in the apartment is that it turns it into a kind of cage.
"I do think sometimes we also need to be mindful of the rights of those future residents and that it shouldn't be just about the vested interests of the people who currently live there."
