Adelaide has a land shortage and needs a new land supply, according to South Australian Planning Minister Paul Holloway.
Minister Holloway, where are you planning to get this land? Last I heard, they’re not making anymore, except where there’s an occasional volcanic island.
The myth that land is a commodity seems to be well enough entrenched that even the most sensible and well-educated people behave as if it really were a discrete thing that can be bought and sold, with a value measured in the marketplace, separate from any biological, climatic or geographical reality.
The entire building industry has been maintained for decades on the basis of land being continually supplied for the marketplace as if it were packets of cornflakes on supermarket shelves that needed to be periodically ‘topped up’.
This absurdist nonsense underpins the economics of housing prices and is taken seriously by investors, developers and politicians whilst being sold to the general public as a sort of semi-divine truth. Challenge the conventional wisdom behind the manipulation of ‘land supply’ and you’re quickly marked down for being a spoiler, maybe an environmentalist.
The industry insists that land must continue to be ‘supplied’ or else houses will cost more than people can afford. Well, maybe there’s something wrong with the houses?
The living landscape is our life support system. The land factory of zoning does not create land. What it does do is place the fading, remnant patches of our living environment in the hands of people who convert its biological complexity into construction sites and thus conspire to kill it. When the conversion process is complete, dead concrete, bricks and steel smother something that used to be alive.
This is the process that feeds growth on the urban fringe, it provides housing for the least well-off, but at a price they cannot pay.
That’s not how it seems at first, of course. The inexorable, deceptive illogic of the market means that when land prices are kept lower (land supply = reduction of scarcity = price is low) then building blocks are more affordable. But on these blocks sit houses built to be as cheap as possible, to the minimum standards allowed by the building code, expensive to heat and cool, and tenuously connected to jobs, schools, shops and essential services by long stretches of bitumen that can only be travelled by machines driven by an energy supply that has passed its peak, is doomed to be ever more expensive, is poisoning the atmosphere, and driving climate change.
If there were any real sense of responsibility among those in government or commerce who make the decisions about land use, they would stop ‘releasing’ land and insist on all new development taking place within the framework of existing zoning. With a freeze on new land releases, there would have to simultaneously be a determined, urgent and focussed effort to undertake some real planning and reverse urban sprawl.
Instead of the incremental, extrapolatory (we’ll have a bit more of what we had last time…) process that we have come to think of as planning, we would have goal-focussed planning that was about making positive decisions about the future.
But that doesn’t just require a sense of responsibility, it requires imagination – and that does seem to be in short supply.
