How about three-storey townhouses? Allowing more of them would help hold down housing prices and restrain the spread of Greater Newcastle up the Hunter Valley.
The federal government's Productivity Commission has just recommended that the general height limit in residential areas across Australia should be three storeys - yes, even in what are now the lowest-density suburban streets. Three storeys would be the lowest limit, applied where taller buildings weren't allowed.
"Australia doesn't build enough homes in the areas where people want to live," the commission says in a report on housing affordability, putting its finger on the nub of the problem.
In Greater Newcastle, we can and will do a lot with what I think of as the inner ring of suburbs, built from the 1910s to 1950s. Their locations are excellent - they're "where people want to live" - and medium density can let more people enjoy them.
They stretch from Mayfield to Lambton and Kahibah, suburbs that all have history from before the steelworks but fully developed, more or less in succession from north to south, only after it opened in 1915.
Gradually replacing these suburbs' detached homes with some apartment buildings but mostly townhouses will surely be among our greatest urban shifts this century. Don't complain as it happens in your street. The more townhouses we have, the more bush and farmland we can keep - and the lower will be our home prices.
The chart accompanying this article, showing how much of a median income is needed for a deposit, is a good illustration of how severe the housing price problem has become.
Now, as the townhouses go in, there's a lot to be said for making them bigger.
Australians these days like very big houses. They've always liked houses on big blocks of land. And we know where that combination leads: to surveyors marking out subdivisions at Lochinvar and Branxton, and to intensified competition for homes that aren't so far flung.
A townhouse can be pretty big if it can go to three storeys, and three or four such homes might go on the site of one bungalow. The buyer's question then becomes, "Am I willing to do without the big yard and instead live in a more convenient location?"
The answer will vary. But we should be making the option of a bigger townhouse more widely available. The state government and the councils on its behalf are strongly encouraging medium-density redevelopment, but our zoning doesn't always allow the third floor. Even if a local height limit is enough, the floor-area allowance may not be.
For example, streets around Georgetown shops have zoning that would suit a three-storey townhouse, but a few blocks away it couldn't be built. The pattern is similar in other suburbs.
This should change. There's nothing overbearing about a three-storey building on a standard residential street that's 20 metres wide between property lines. Even streets that are much narrower, as many in Mayfield are, wouldn't feel cramped if three-storey townhouses on them were set back a bit, with little gardens at the front.
It's not just that availability of bigger townhouses would improve choice and draw some buyers away from detached houses. If the average size of townhouses rises, more people can live in them, again easing pressure on the market and urban-fringe land.
Townhouses with three floors could also help overcome our biggest challenge in converting suburbs to medium density: our housing lots are mostly narrow and deep. As a result, street-facing townhouses on most lots would be too skinny. So developers have to build sets of townhouses sideways to the street, with a space-wasting shared driveway, no outlook except the neighbour's fence, and detested strata title.
But if the townhouse can go higher, maybe it doesn't need to be as deep, so it can face the street without feeling like a dark gun barrel. And there'll be more land for a backyard, too.
But there's a big and very reasonable objection: with two sets of stairs, three-storey townhouses just wouldn't be popular with Novocastrians.
At first. But three-storey townhouses are common in Europe and North America. Why shouldn't they be here?
It really comes down to something we all know: unless you've got plenty of dough, you can't have everything. Choose some, but not all, of what's on offer: a house instead of a flat, a big one, a big yard and a great location.
Maybe you'd like to live in a good-sized flat in a good location, enjoying no yard at all and putting up with strata title. Maybe you'd prefer that big house and big yard on the urban fringe.
We'll all make our choices, but there's no doubt that the choice will increasingly be the townhouse, as it is elsewhere in the world. And there's no doubt that, as more people get used to using stairs at home, the townhouse will increasingly have three storeys.
If zoning changes now to make three storeys available anywhere, this process will get underway sooner and there'll be less urban sprawl - and more travel on public transport or, best of all, by walking.
So higher townhouses would help. But what the move to medium-density needs above all is a solution to that problem of the narrow Australian residential lot.
Those shared-driveway townhouse developments, sometimes called villas, really are lousy configurations for housing. And their strata title, necessary because the driveway is shared, is simply an abomination for houses, however necessary it may be for flats.
A few months ago this column suggested a way out - to progressively combine these developments' driveways into new public lanes, which the townhouses would face.
I still think it's a good idea.
But more is needed. In the Planning Department there should be greater minds than mine that can work out how we can steadily fill inner-urban NSW suburbs with townhouses that face each other, not fences, and have good old Torrens title. The department should come up with a plan.
