Property developer Stockland says it is being stopped from building affordable three-bedroom houses because local councils believe it will lower the status of their area.
Stockland can provide a three-bedroom house and land package in Melbourne for $313,900, one of its best selling products, managing director Matthew Quinn says.
“The problem with this is that we are the largest residential developer in the country, and in roughly half of the locations where we operate, we are not allowed to build those houses,” Mr Quinn said.
“The local governments won’t let us build those houses because they say they are too small.”
Mr Quinn said councils used planning reasons to stop smaller houses being built.
“That is nothing to do with it,” he said in an address to the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne on Tuesday.
“It’s actually fear of other people coming into their neighbourhoods in smaller houses that might change the tone, which is absurd and selfish.”
Mr Quinn said that four to five years ago, young couples shunned buying three-bedroom houses because they would feel too ashamed to have their friends over even though they (the couple) were just two people and would never use all the bedrooms.
Mr Quinn said couples had been conditioned to think that way, but had since become more acceptable of three bedrooms and would now take whatever they could afford.
He added that Australia had a housing affordability crisis and governments over the last 10 years had ignored it.
Mr Quinn said he was concerned that at some point people might not be able to afford to even rent a house, let alone buy one.
The proposition that an average family should be able to afford an average house was “miles away”, he said, because the population was rapidly increasing and not enough houses were being built.
Property developers had the capability to build sufficient numbers of houses but were constrained by environmental requirements and numerous other “hoops of fire” which Mr Quinn considered unnecessary.
Mr Quinn said the provision of housing was not keeping pace with population growth because Australia lacked a population strategy.
“Try explaining that to anyone outside the country: we have very high population growth but no population strategy – very strange.”
Mr Quinn blamed the problem on the fact that the federal, state and local governments all had different roles in the provision of housing.
They did not talk to each other and in many cases did not like each other.
“They disagree. They argue. And while they are doing that, we are facing further and further housing pressure and a growing affordability crisis,” Mr Quinn said.
