Planning laws that preserve most prewar Brisbane homes are “tantamount to exclusionary zoning”, keeping poor people out of rich suburbs without substantially preserving the city’s built heritage, according to new research.
The lead author, Rachel Gallagher, said the city’s character-zoning laws were justified as a means to preserve heritage – but in reality prevent higher-density housing being built in some of the city’s most desirable suburbs such as Chelmer, Morningside, Ashgrove, Paddington, Bulimba and Bardon.
“These character suburbs are established suburbs with really good transport and existing amenities,” Gallagher said.
“So basically, we are shutting out new housing from our older suburbs and pushing it into areas that don’t have that infrastructure.”
Brisbane city council’s traditional building character overlay prohibits demolition of any dwelling built before 1947 in a bid to “maintain traditional character”. This applies, even where normal zoning would otherwise permit construction of medium-density housing. It doesn’t, however, prevent renovations unless the home is built before 1911.
“You can transform a modest two or three bedroom workers’ cottage into a five-bedroom, double living space, double car garage and that’s completely fine,” Gallagher said.
“And it happens without the need for a development approval most of the time. You just can’t demolish the house.”
Much has been written in the US about how so-called exclusionary-zoning principles have segregated cities along racial and class lines.
“In the desegregation era, they couldn’t explicitly say that Black Americans can’t live in white residential suburbs,” Gallagher said.
“But if you can set a floor on the price of a home by saying it has to be a house, it has to be on a lot of a certain size, you’re setting a minimum floor price to live in that neighbourhood. Which means that you, by default, exclude people that can’t afford the price of the house from that community.”
Published in October, the new research by three University of Queensland academics, showed Brisbane’s legislated protection on thousands of historic homes has a similar effect of keeping the poor out.
Researchers looked back at almost 6,000 individual lots containing houses in five suburbs on both sides of the Brisbane River in past decades.
Of the 1,707 lots that still contained a detached house in 2021, more than half were in a character-housing zone. Just 14.5% of lots in a character area where ordinary zoning permitted apartments actually contained them.
Brisbane city council’s civic cabinet chair for planning and suburban renewal, Adam Allan, said the council was “actively identifying under-utilised industrial and commercial sites in Brisbane suburbs” as part of a plan to “get the balance right when it comes to housing so we protect the lifestyle that our residents love”.
As an example, he pointed to the council’s plan for tens of thousands of new dwellings in a small area near the old Parmalat milk factory in South Brisbane.
“We’re strongly committed to protecting Brisbane’s much-loved low-density and character suburbs while catering for our city’s growth,” he said.
He didn’t answer questions from the Guardian about whether council believes character-housing protections genuinely protect heritage values.
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The housing economist Matthew Maltman, formerly of the Productivity Commission, said there was strong evidence linking supply with rents and house prices, both on a citywide scale and on a neighbourhood level.
The Reserve Bank of Australia estimated in 2016 that restrictive zoning rules increased rents by about 42% in Brisbane.
The economic “premium” on high-amenity suburbs in Australia is not inevitable, he said, pointing to research that showed new apartment construction can reduce nearby rents by 7%.
“Essentially what you would see is that under kind of a freer market, you wouldn’t really have that much of a premium there, because we would just build [our way] out of that premium,” he said.
“But because they’ve restricted their supply, the fact that there is such a high demand to live there, and they have such a high amenity to live there essentially, that just ramps up the price.”
The country’s growing Yimby – yes in my back yard – movement has heritage reform in its sights.
Its spokesperson Jonathan O’Brien, a former Queenslander, said heritage laws like character-housing protections are common across the country.
“These things are often expensive; they’re specific; and they’re certainly very rarely environmentally friendly, because they’re preservationist,” he said.
O’Brien said the government should commit to preserving specific buildings in the public interest – but balance doing so against the costs of limiting new development.
At the moment heritage law takes neither factor into account, simply preserving structures because they are old, he said.
“There are buildings that we should absolutely preserve, but we should preserve buildings that people can actually use, that people can actually engage with.”