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The Forum > Article Comments > The realities of living in Australia's first 200km city > Comments

The realities of living in Australia's first 200km city : Comments

By Peter Spearritt, published 14/3/2006

South-East Queensland is becoming a conurbation devoid of sub-tropical beauty while placing huge demands on water and energy supplies.

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An interesting article Peter but aren’t you being a bit hard on the developers. Obviously it would ideal for urban design if everybody forgoes their cars for bicycles and public transport but that is not going to happen.

The developers and the homebuyers live in the real world. An apartment without parking means trying to find a parking spot on a crowded inner city street. It means having somebody break-in to your car on a regular basis. It means parking tickets.

Developers are usually good with numbers. They know that parking spaces are relatively cheap to build and boost the sale value of the apartment. Buyers also prefer apartments with parking.

A good example of this is the old Tooth brewery site in Sydney. The site is ideally located close to four universities and Central station and with only minor heritage issues. It is the largest development site in inner Sydney but the developer walked away after the council severely limited the number of parking spaces. Most people want apartments with parking.

You wrote a good article about urban design but the developer is only selling what people want to buy.
Posted by Rob88, Tuesday, 14 March 2006 11:56:06 AM
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Well my aspirations would be a car and well, a place in the suburbs. the city is a hole of a place unless you get a big flat or home. Old red brick shoeboxes may be fine for college students studying on their parents trust funds or transient residents, but you know its funny really I read story recently that in Sydney, many of the traditional bohemian, offbeat and creative folks are being forced out by either the lowest rents still being unaffordable and/or being unable to secure decent accommodation at prices they can afford.

As a side note I was raised in a prosperous suburb in a business owning family. We've had pools at home, 2 or 3 cars, all th bells and whistles.

Inner city councils are too much against development. Of course people want cars. Public transport is so poor and woefully inadequate that you'd only bother if you were desperate and had nothing else. Try getting home from a job late, getting out to do your shopping, racing home to cook, then going out late with friends. Without a car, all that takes forever.....or spending a fortune on cab fares.

The suburbs have much more to offer. Find a nice apartment in Parramatta or Blacktown, where, and I was surprised myself, you will actually find quality contemporary apartments, quality shops, quality restaurants in a short drive [more in parramatta] and an easygoing way of life where no-one looks strangely at you if you go out in old clothes and thongs to pay your bills and the car can get you anywhere rapidly. The western suburbs of sydney is one of Australia's fastest growing areas and changing quite a lot.

I'd rather a car, ipod or cd's and getting over big distances in a few minutes rather than sitting in some crowded bus with feral backpackers or other rough people trying to hold my nose when someone didn't bath today.
Posted by Inner-Sydney based transsexual, indigent outcast progeny of merchant family, Tuesday, 14 March 2006 1:13:09 PM
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Councils are to blame.

The buck stops there.

On one hand they approve transit cities with underutilised infrastructure, on the other they discourage these same people driving to the main employment hub of the city. You have to drive for bread and milk, yet you cant drive to work.

Poor planning will ruin SEQ.

Make no mistake the council is the key, and they ruin things. Dont blame the poor guys out there trying to make a quid, they are given perameters that they run with that are decided by the council.
Posted by Realist, Tuesday, 14 March 2006 2:31:51 PM
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Excellent article.

Every time I ask a councillor in SEQ about this, their inevitable response (and they must have agreed this line between them it is so prevalent) is that they can't stop people from coming to settle - all they can do is try to preserve what they can.

My question and I haven't been able to get an adequate answer is that we are allowed to charge developers an amount of money to cover costs of infrastructure needed to service a new development. But we only charge a little bit for roads and sewerage. We don't charge the $12000 it costs in electricity infrastructure everytime someone builds a new MacMansion. We don't charge the $000's it costs to put in public transport and hospitals and doctors and everything else. I would have thought we could legitimately add some of the cost of infrastructure to new developments such that we could redirect people into decentralisation - or simply discourage them from coming by charging what their new home and land is really going to cost society.

My objective is clear I hope. I'm happy to see peeople living in nice new homes but I would like to encourage people to decentralise. My local council blithely accepts and plans for an eventual 670,000 additional people. It's madness. We don't have the roads, hospitals, shops, schools, water or electricity. We don't have anything like what that many people will consume. But if they go out west or north, there are areas with just as much room, much the same general climate and a hell of a lot cheaper infrastructure.

Beats me - but then I'm not a town planner or a councillor who gets election donations from developers.

Kevin
Posted by Kevin, Tuesday, 14 March 2006 4:32:49 PM
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This article draws attention to the urban nightmare being created in what was once a nice place. Bruce Small, the original developer of Surfers Paradise (after whom the ‘Lord Bruce’ ferry which plies the canals is named) got out of the place in the 1970s because he judged it had been ruined, and went off to live somewhere else nicer – he actually said as much.

The article is seriously flawed however because it implies that good design can make up for the ghastly consequences of high growth. It states the problem – 1,000 new arrivals a week – but overlooks the solution, which is to stop the population growth or at least turn the tap from a flood to a trickle.

The huge migration from interstate is being driven by immigration into Australia deliberately imposed on the community by a Federal Government dominated by the vested interests of the property developers – the lazy money-makers, who are happy to see our country (and it’s ours, not theirs) progressively wrecked. This is so much easier than investing in risky enterprises like little Finland (population 5 million) has done with its Nokia mobile phones.

It’s far easier to just whack up more high rises and watch the real estate prices spiral out of all reality, so that people starting out now have an almost superhuman task in front of them to get on the mortgage treadmill. Not to mention the horrendous environmental consequences.

The Howard government has deviously created the impression that it is anti-immigration while ramping immigration up to 110,000 net per year, which, combined with natural increase of 125,000, makes Australia’s population grow by nearly a million every four years.

And you ain’t seen nothing yet. According to the Queensland govt’s medium projection, the population will continue to grow at 50,000 a year (see http://www.oum.qld.gov.au/?id=466) and will be another million (up to 3.7 million from 2.7 million) in two decades. Won’t that be terrific? It won’t really matter what kind of houses people live in, the place will be more of a mess the more people it gets
Posted by Thermoman, Tuesday, 14 March 2006 8:23:00 PM
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As with Queensland as a whole, the influx of people has destroyed the lifestyle they came here to enjoy, none more than North Queensland, 5 years ago Townsville was a big country city, now it has transformed into in mine Brisbane, with associated crime, lack of public transport, and greedy councils wanting to develop what is left, without insisting on or themselves developing the appropriate infrastructure.

An ideal paradise turned into a concrete jungle in 5 short years, unbelieveable really.
Posted by SHONGA, Tuesday, 14 March 2006 8:50:16 PM
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