[PRO] Roseworthy Satellite City 43,300 homes

[dbl96]

These developments are needed. I know some people would prefer everyone live in an apartment, but the majority of people don't want that (as evidenced by the fact we aren't seeing the CBD filled with apartment buildings but we are seeing huge developments of detached housing).

The average buyer’s first preference is not a CBD apartment. But neither is it a house in a new estate on the outskirts of Roseworthy or Two Wells.

The type of housing that the average buyer prefers is well-located and affordable Torrens title properties in established middle suburbs. Essentially, townhouses and other small-scale subdivisions in existing areas. However, this is precisely the kind of development that the Greater Adelaide Regional Plan is opposed to, basically because existing residents don’t like their streets filling up with ugly box-houses and parked cars. But the fact is that most buyers would prefer to purchase one of these box-houses over an apartment or over a free-standing house in some far-flung exurb.

Marshall and others like to market places like Roseworthy and Two Wells as if by permitting these developments to go ahead, they are somehow saving the Australian Dream of a backyard with hills hoist. But the fact is that most of these properties are on postage stamp sized blocks anyway, and the houses are massive single storey things that cover the block and leave no space for a backyard anyway. At this point, people may as well be living in apartments - rather than chewing up more farmland.

Of course if we're going to talk about what buyers prefer, well that's an endless debate. Some would prefer the beachside suburbs others the hills, others the leafy eastern suburbs and so on.

Whether it's in an established suburb or a new estate on the outskirts of the metropolitan area, they are still choosing a detached dwelling, not an apartment..which is the point.

If you consider new housing estate blocks as postage stamp sized, what would you refer apartments to?

Of course everyone has their own preferences - there is a market for all different kinds of housing. My point was that the most common preference at this point in time is for well-located and affordable Torrens title properties in established middle suburbs. This type of housing is sometimes detached, but most often semi-detached, or attached but with its own street frontage and separate services.

By "most common preference" I don't mean what the average person would want in an ideal world. I mean what the most preferred category of property is in the current market. That is informed by consumer preferences in the context of the constraints of the market, such as price. Probably in an ideal world, the most preferred type of property would be a large detached house on land in an inner suburb. But the fact is that the vast majority of buyers cannot afford this in the current market, so they compromise for townhouses and similar properties in the middle suburbs, which preserve as many of the benefits of the ideal as possible (such as not having to deal with/pay strata, having separate services, privacy and freedom to do what you want with your house), while remaining relatively affordable (I stress the word "relatively") and in areas which are convenient for people's lives (close to their existing social connections, work etc).

Of course apartments don't have backyards. My point about the disappearance of the backyard was more to point out the irony of the narrative which idealises greenfield developments on the urban fringe as the place where the Australian Dream is still alive. The fact is that most new fringe developments are denser than many middle suburbs, and the tendency for most homes in these new developments to be large-floorplan single story homes means that even where block sizes are reasonably big (500m2 +) there is often hardly any backyard anyway.