Article: Residents reclaim inner city

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From the Melbourne Age click here!

Residents reclaim inner city

Residents reclaim inner city
TIM COLEBATCH AND MARIKA DOBBIN
March 20, 2010

A THIRD of Melbourne's population growth is taking place within 15 kilometres of the city centre - a sharp change from the pattern of the '70s and '80s.

Inner and middle suburbs that had been losing population for decades are seeing thousands more people on their streets, as infill housing, unit developments and the odd major redevelopment put new homes in old streets.

The trend, revealed in new Bureau of Statistics figures, is reinforced by 100 per cent auction clearance rates in several inner and middle-ring suburbs.

In Bentleigh, Thornbury and Caulfield South, every property put to auction this year has sold under the hammer. Scalding demand has gifted sellers in those areas a 100 per cent success rate out of a total of 77 auctions this year, according to the Real Estate Institute of Victoria.

Other suburbs where buyers have been most frustrated are Balwyn North, Cheltenham, Elsternwick and Parkdale, where the clearance rate is close to 100 per cent with all but one auction in each suburb this year resulting in sales.

Although planners and politicians have been trying to encourage a move back to the inner and middle suburbs for 30 years, figures show the new trend is not happening fast enough to stop Melbourne's growth adding to the urban sprawl.

Almost 60 per cent of the city's population growth is happening in the new fringe suburbs more than 20 kilometres from the centre: mostly around Werribee, Melton, Craigieburn, South Morang, Berwick, Cranbourne and Pakenham.

The Bureau carves up Melbourne geographically into 79 statistical local areas. In 2007-08, the latest year for which estimates are available, 77 of them saw their population grow: most a little, some a lot. Only Eltham and the Dandenongs saw more people move out than move in.

Over the three years to June 2008, Melbourne added almost 212,000 more people. On a rough estimate based on the Bureau's figures for the 79 local areas, a net 70,000 of them settled within 15 kilometres of the city centre. That's a sharp change from the 1970s, when the population in the same area shrank by 130,000.

About 23,700 moved into the city's innermost ring. Half of those moved into Melbourne city council territory - 3531 in Docklands or Southbank, 2496 in the CBD itself, and 6350 in the suburbs surrounding it.

In mid-1996, the CBD, Docklands and Southbank housed fewer than 4000 people. By mid-2008, they had more than 30,000, roughly half living in the CBD. The 2006 Census revealed that the most socio-environmentally advantaged block in Melbourne is not in Toorak or Brighton, but Mirvac's award-winning Yarra's Edge, in Docklands. Six of the 10 most advantaged census districts were new apartment blocks in Docklands, Southbank, Port Melbourne and the CBD. The others were riverside blocks in South Yarra, Toorak and Kew, and the Monomeath Avenue area of Canterbury.

But Melbourne's growth is not happening remotely as envisaged by the state government's former Melbourne 2030 policy, or its revised Melbourne@5 million, which both envisaged redevelopment clustering around a select group of activity centres.

Step away from the city centre, and apart from Port Melbourne, no other inner or middle suburb has been transformed by redevelopment, as the planners envisaged happening around activity centres. Nor has there been much redevelopment around stations or along tramlines and bus routes, which Melbourne City Council planner Rob Adams argued in his study, Transforming Australian Cities, could house between another 1 million and 2.5 million people.

Rather, our move back to the centre is mostly happening on an ad hoc basis: a block here, a block there.

Between 2005 and 2008, the suburbs within five kilometres of Bourke Street mall grew by roughly 23,700. Those between 5 and 10 kilometres grew by 22,500. Those between 10 and 15 kilometres grew by just under 24,000, and those between 15 and 20 kilometres by just under 18,000.

The inner and middle suburbs are taking more of the city's growth. But the city is adding new residents at a pace that no Australian city has seen before - and record numbers of them are being housed on the fringes.

Meanwhile, Treasury secretary Ken Henry has said there may be an ''urban amenity dividend'' to be gained through improved organisation, and possibly higher densities, of Australia's cities. He told a conference on infrastructure that Australia has some of the world's highest levels of urbanisation but very low levels of density. He suggested policy makers should ask whether there were better ways to plan and organise Australian cities.

Sydney and Melbourne were projected to grow to around seven million by 2050.

''If we get the institutional arrangements surrounding the provision of infrastructure to cities right, is it possible that we could have a city of 10 million?

''And might this actually be a good thing?'' he said. ''For example, if we are able more intelligently to plan our cities with supporting infrastructure in the form of utilities and transport networks that were designed carefully and priced accurately, could it be that the per capita consumption of natural resources would actually be significantly decreased?''

Comment:

I grew up in inner Melbourne (Prahran/Windsor).  It was a great life transport wise, trams, rail and bicycles.  Society then lost the plot in the quest for bigger 'mac-mansions' and so forth.   It is interesting that we are turning back to commonsense.  Brisbane would have to be one of the worst planned messes in Australia transport wise.  The removal of the trams and the subsequent failure to grasp opportunity such as Briztram have condemned the residents to years of transport failure, maybe we can turn it around?