The pro-private-development movement asks the wrong questions to get the wrong answers
‘Considering the rapidity and brutality of capitalist development, the real surprise is not that so much of our architectural and constructed heritage has been destroyed but that there is anything still left to preserve’.
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Was there ever so perfect an ideological strawman as the NIMBY? The term conjures an image of smug, entitled property owners defending their turf against newcomers, blocking ‘reasonable development’ and the ‘natural growth’ of the city while scuttling younger generations’ dreams of owner-occupation. In our present circumstances of housing crisis, felt especially keenly by young adults locked out of the housing market, the detestable figure of the NIMBY has emerged as the sacrificial animal upon which to heap our collective frustration. But is NIMBYism really to blame for today’s housing inequality? And is it the most useful prism through which to understand Australia’s housing crisis? What might be the conceptual costs and hazards of an obsessive focus on NIMBYs?
The earliest recorded use of ‘Not In My Back Yard’ appears to have been in 1979, in reference to organised community opposition to the dumping of nuclear waste in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was subsequently deployed in the United States to describe all those who stood in the way of new housing developments, irrespective of their motivations for doing so. It acquired its overwhelmingly pejorative associations in the 1980s, entering the lexicon of Australian urbanism as a lazy kind of putdown for anyone deemed self-interestedly anti-development.[1]
The supposed opposite of the imagined NIMBY, the YIMBY, or someone who says ‘Yes In My Back Yard’, was, like so much global culture of the early twenty-first century, born in California’s Bay Area. With a good dose of libertarianism—a cultural politics that is nominally progressive within the warped political spectrum of a country that never really recovered from McCarthyism—an often-vapid celebration of ‘tech culture’ with its principles of disruption à la Zuckerberg’s infamous credo ‘move fast and break things’, and a basic distrust of government regulation in all forms, YIMBYism well reflects the dominant political philosophy of northern California. Its basic premise, whether in its American birthplace or its adopted Australian outpost, is that increasing the supply of housing in desirable urban zones is the essential remedy for the housing problem in major cities, and opponents of new development—those branded NIMBYs—need to be circumvented for the sake of the greater good. Behind these suppositions sit several real interconnected problems: first, how to increase access to reasonable housing for those unable to access it; second, what kind of citizen input is most productive to the process of urban development in democratically governed cities; and third, to what extent do we value and protect the embodied histories of our built environment?
The transnationalism of the YIMBY movement might lead one to assume that activists are fighting a common cause against a common set of conditions. However, urban politics are always place-bound and context-driven, inscribed in local histories and identities. In the United States, still traumatised by histories of segregation and redlining, the debate often concerns suburban areas and practices of racial exclusion, in which predominantly white, home-owning coalitions lean on mechanisms like zoning ordinances and homeowner associations to exclude poor communities—disproportionately communities of colour—from privileged suburban areas. In Australia, where the zone of contention has tended to be the old inner suburbs of state capitals, the debate hinges on a different set of issues. Here the battle lines have been drawn largely over history and heritage, the terms of debate exposing key fracture points between generations of gentrifiers.
YIMBYism entered the Australian fray with quite a bang in early 2023 as housing inequality was saturating media coverage. In more ways than one, its uptake here by enthusiastic young activists in the major metropolises was a kind of after-effect of the crisis conditions of the pandemic, which produced a series of unexpected effects in the politics of housing production and distribution. These effects were particularly pronounced in Victoria, where lockdowns were the most severe. There had been a fleeting forecast at the start of the pandemic that housing prices would fall—the long-prophesied but never-materialised crash in the speculative bubble of Australian housing. Such optimistic predictions of a ‘correction’ in housing prices were not borne out. On the contrary, panicked households trapped in metropolitan lockdowns with accumulated savings were motivated to re-invest in property. Frightened by the prospect of economic collapse, the federal government lowered interest rates to stimulate borrowing and eased lending laws. These inflationary policies, while promoting short-term household spending to keep the economy afloat, were widely criticised, including by former conservative Liberal leader John Hewson, who characterised them as likely to ‘stoke a debt monster’ in the near future.
The great pandemic property scramble—the rush of would-be buyers onto the market—coincided with a countervailing tendency: a dramatic drop in demand for renting, as immigration levels froze and short-term visa holders were cajoled by the federal government to ‘return home’. The resulting spike in vacancy rates, alongside a temporary moratorium on evictions, gave renters a historically rare improvement in their bargaining power.
The exceptional political and material conditions of the pandemic birthed a variety of new activist organisations. One was the Renters and Housing Union (RAHU). Formed in Melbourne in early 2020, where it grew out of the Rent Strike movement, it attracted thousands of renters during the period of economic paralysis at the start of the pandemic. Its emphasis was on securing material gains for renters and building the capacity to mobilise against evictions at short notice. Its leadership recognised that the public health crisis had opened a space for mobilisation and an opportunity to challenge the defensive power of the ‘paternal capital’ that props up the Australian landowning class. Another point of political organisation emerged around the ‘hard lockdown’ of the inner-city Flemington and North Melbourne public housing estates, which were sealed and placed under police guard in June and July 2020. Residents formed a class action charging the state government with false imprisonment, battery and assault. The state ombudsmen would later find these heavy-handed actions to have violated Victorian human rights laws.
By early 2023, when the new YIMBY movement had started to gain traction, the housing landscape had shifted dramatically once again. A renewed influx of people to the cities sent the vacancy rate plummeting from its exceptional pandemic-era heights to even lower than average. Meanwhile, by mid-2022, the costs of construction for new housing had increased by 25 to 30 per cent on pre-pandemic pricing.
This was the set of multiple, overlapping housing crises into which the Australian YIMBY movement was born. But in contrast to the radical, renter-focused agenda of the RAHU and public housing resident group alliances, Australian YIMBYism has been articulated within a framework of property ownership. In many respects, it is a kind of throwback to the Menzies-era ‘Great Australian Dream’ in which owner-occupation came to be seen as the ticket to social mobility, prosperity and security. In his famous speech of 1942, Menzies defined the ‘forgotten people’ of the middle class as those who through home ownership had a meaningful ‘stake in the country’. But the key difference between the Menzies vision of housing as prosperity and its YIMBYist revival is to do with the much maligned ‘back yard’. Whereas Menzies saw the virtue of the private home as residing in that ‘one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours’—in other words, the freestanding house built on a greenfield development site—YIMBYs have rearticulated the dream of home ownership as a celebration of apartments in brownfield sites.
Historical consciousness, and its absences
When you build a political identification in opposition to a phantasmagorical enemy, cognitive dissonance is bound to ensue. YIMBY analyses of housing issues have been described by supporters as ‘disarmingly simple’ and by critics as dangerously simplistic. As has been explored elsewhere, the conceptual inadequacies of the Australian YIMBY movement include a basic misunderstanding of the operation of housing markets under capitalist urbanism, mischaracterisations of the nature of planning approvals processes and the dubious assumption of ‘filtering’, or ‘trickle-down’ housing economics, which underlies the mantra of ‘housing abundance’. However, rather than revisit those critiques here, in this essay I focus on the YIMBY war against urban heritage. I will mostly limit myself to Melbourne and the proposals of the local movement that have emerged since the pandemic faded from public attention.
In the post-lockdown housing debate, urban history has emerged—rather surprisingly to me, as an urban historian—as a sinister business. Melbourne’s YIMBYs contend that villainous NIMBYs have ‘weaponised’ heritage laws to ‘block affordable housing’, arguing that our cities have been turned into ‘architectural cemeteries’ or ‘museums’ frozen in time. Through such polemics, YIMBYs frame historical preservation codes as elitist and self-serving, mired in nostalgia, and insensitive to shifting demographic need. They have tended to zoom in on specific examples, such as the heritage designation by the Melbourne City Council of the Brutalist car park on the corner of Grattan and Cardigan Streets in Carlton in early 2023. Highlighting isolated, cherry-picked examples like this is designed to elicit outrage at an elite-beholden bureaucracy gone mad, creating a petrified city. Fetishising a car park! What better example of administrative insanity could be found?
For the young activists involved, ‘history’ and ‘heritage’ are synonymous with stuffy antiquarianism, the domain of ‘aloof urban history buffs’. And once again, by a subtle sleight-of-hand, those who would protect the historical built fabric of our cities are painted as self-interested and out of touch. Here, fabricating an opposition between historical conservationism and the provision of affordable housing, the NIMBY strawman is particularly rhetorically efficient because the term ‘back yard’ resonates in the popular consciousness with protectionist property ownership. It implies a possessiveness, a boundedness, an enclosure, a defence of one’s private open space against the world beyond. For YIMBYs, any expression of concern with heritage is inherently tied up with this personalised enjoyment of private space and reduced to the expression of private gain. Owning, or caring for, a historical building is reduced to the cash nexus and the protection of one’s private asset.
The extent of the ‘heritage scourge’ is typically communicated via a deceptive visual presentation. In seeking to highlight the alleged scale of the Melbourne metropolitan ‘heritage problem’, Benjamin Clark illustrated one article with a screenshot of the city’s heritage overlays at an absurdly distant scale, coloured in an alarming shade of bright pink. The spread of heritage protection thus appeared as a tentacled beast spreading contagion across the city. But what does this great pink menace represent on the ground? How many buildings? How many precincts? What categorisations? What proportion of developable land is ‘protected’ and what is not? What does that protection mean? None of these questions is posed or answered in the text.
This image-projection-in-place-of-planning style of the Melbourne YIMBYs is most clearly on display in the report Melbourne’s Missing Middle, published in mid-2023. Part urban postcard, part ‘love letter’ to the city (which it proposes largely to bulldoze), MMM wishes that Melbourne was Paris, juxtaposing the aesthetically pleasing streetscapes of Paris’s Baron Haussmann with some fairly mundane residential suburban streets in Melbourne. The basic premise is that if Melbourne were to ‘upzone’ existing land-use controls, to facilitate a rebuilding of the city to ‘Parisian densities’, then, voila! we might emulate the urbanity of the French capital. What that would require is a complete overhaul of ‘all heritage, neighbourhood character, and design overlays’ in the targeted areas.
For anyone familiar with the history of Paris, this is a head-turning comparison to make on at least two counts. First, Haussmann’s renovations of Paris during the Second Empire (1852–1870) are a textbook case study of autocratic gentrification. The wholesale urban reconstruction emerged from an impetus to cleanse the city of dangerous working-class elements in the wake of the 1848 revolution. Haussmann, Prefect de la Seine, was instructed to clear the warrens and lanes of the medieval city that had been so effectively occupied by the labouring classes in the tumult of 1848. The refashioned boulevards were to be wide enough for tanks and near impossible to barricade. The new apartments lining the boulevards, those six-to-eight-storey neoclassical apartments celebrated by the Melbourne NIMBYs, were priced high enough to both recoup the costs of the modernisation of the city and price out the former residents.
The second reason this intercity comparison is absurd is that twenty-first-century Paris has some of the strictest heritage protections of any city in the world. Parisian municipal authorities employ two main legislative instruments, and corresponding administrative regimes, of protection against inappropriate redevelopment: the designation of Secteur Sauvegardé (Protected District) which effectively bans all new development within the entirety of the designated neighbourhoods, such as applies to the much-loved third arrondissement, Le Marais, one of the few areas of the city to have avoided Haussmannian destruction. Slightly less severe, but still very strict, guidelines apply for all other intramural neighbourhoods under their specific Plans Locaux d’Urbanisme (Local Urban Plans). These provide strict controls and guidelines for redevelopment on the basis of the documented local historical qualities of each arrondissement. Parisians recognise that their architectural heritage is their greatest urban asset—precisely what draws tourists to the city in their millions every year. The last time a Haussmann/YIMBY-style mass demolition and rebuild was proposed in Paris was in 1925, by the legendary Swiss modernist Le Corbusier in his Plan Voisin. Suffice to say, it didn’t go down so well. In other words, if Melbourne were to embrace the spirit of the Parisian planning regime, we would strengthen our heritage controls, not weaken them as the YIMBYs propose (most new development in Paris occurs deep in the suburbs, well beyond the périphérique, but given the YIMBY penchant for prime inner-city real estate, these are unlikely to be the areas of emulation they have in mind.)
In this hasty intercity comparison, as elsewhere, the YIMBY crowd displays a concerning absence of historical consciousness on two distinct planes. Not only are YIMBYs indifferent to the embedded history of the architectural patrimony they propose to tear down, they are also alarmingly—or perhaps strategically—amnesiac about their own prehistory: that is, the history of contestation over the pattern and shape of urban development in Australian cities, of which they are but the latest chapter. Australian cities, most notably Melbourne and Sydney, have faced two major periods of contentious redevelopment of their inner neighbourhoods. In the 1960s, under the prevailing doctrine of ‘urban renewal’, the then predominantly working-class inner-city areas were subject to comprehensive redevelopment schemes. The Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV) was a particularly enthusiastic proponent of ‘block clearance’, whereby the entirety of a block nominated as slum housing would be compulsorily acquired, demolished and cleared to make way for the construction of high-rises. The proponents of urban renewal justified the creative destruction of their redevelopment model on the grounds that these areas were irredeemable slums wholly incapable of sensitive upgrade.
Such views, formed in the cauldron of the Great Depression and shaped by housing reformers such as the impassioned Methodist accountant Oswald Barnett, were actually, by the 1960s, increasingly obsolete. Mediterranean migrants undertaking gentle modernisations of their hard-earned homes and university-educated gentrifiers (then known as ‘trendies’) restoring the then-affordable terraces all had a stake in the prevention of demolition, and formed broad coalitions to thwart the plans of state agencies.[2] In Melbourne, figures like the architectural historian David Saunders advocated for sensitive redevelopment that respected the form and volume of the urban context.[3]
It is in relation to this that the ‘NIMBY’ appellation, with its assumption of class privilege, is most misleading. The heritage movement in Melbourne and Sydney, and elsewhere in Australia and around the world, was as much the product of proletarian mobilisation as it was that of gentrifying trendies protecting their newfound turf. The great Sydneysider Jack Mundy, whose extraordinary tactics are well covered in Iveson and Sisson’s recent essay in Arena Quarterly, was the most prominent and celebrated exemplar of this history. But he was far from alone. In Melbourne, as in Sydney, the Green Ban movement was representative of a far more broadly based set of interclass alliances than the narrative of self-interestedly gentrifying NIMBYism permits. It was out of this unlikely alliance of the National Trust, community activists in neighbourhood associations and trade unionists that the original heritage frameworks were articulated and legislated.
The HCV did, in fact, reform its ways along the lines suggested by David Saunders. Later developments in the mid-1970s and early 1980s were far more sensitive and responsive to their urban contexts. Infill developments on land already compulsorily acquired in anticipation of wholesale rebuilding were instead redesigned to match the scale of adjoining nineteenth-century terrace housing. Other institutional and community housing providers, from Melbourne University Student Housing to the Victorian Aboriginal Housing Co-Operative, also developed models of provision in the 1970s that rehabilitated and retained the housing stock of the city’s historical neighbourhoods.[4] Such public projects, either governmental or quasi-governmental, harmonised with the surrounding housing stock while achieving modest density gains.
In the 1990s, following the demise of investment in public housing from the mid-1980s, there came a revitalised enthusiasm for high-rise development. Such development, now led by the private sector, was rebranded under a more palatable appellation: ‘urban consolidation’. High-rise apartments were henceforth sold as an environmentally and economically sustainable solution to urban population growth via the assertion that they saved additional investment in infrastructure, promoted public transportation use and saved rural land from urbanisation. However, all three theoretical benefits of consolidation were tested by urban realities. The rigorous urban scholar Patrick Troy questioned the claims of infrastructural efficiency, pointing out that the costs of consolidation could be hidden, since original wires, pipes and roads routinely required disruptive upgrading when new dwellings were built.[5] In other words, the promises of cost savings by building in established areas were often illusory. Transport planner Paul Mees clarified the oft-misunderstood relationship between land use and transportation behaviour: no amount of the building of apartments in existing public transportation corridors would change commuter behaviour if service provision did not satisfactorily meet the travel needs of potential riders.[6] Meanwhile, the progressive weakening of metropolitan planning in this period meant that even as high-rises were increasingly mushrooming in the skylines of the inner suburbs, ever more land-hungry developments were bulging the city’s fringes, mocking the government’s lame ‘urban growth boundary’. As a consequence, whatever population density gains were achieved near the centre were eroded on its peripheries.
Densification: The good, the bad, and the ugly
Melbourne’s boom of the 1990s was a boom that never ended, aside from the couple of hiccups around the Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic. The city’s population figures tell the tale: from 3.3 million in the 2001 census to just under 5 million in 2021. That is an extraordinary rate of growth by any measure. And many of these people have been accommodated in the ‘Missing Middle’. Indeed, what is most peculiar about the YIMBYs’ claims of an un-densified city petrified in historic stasis is just how far removed such claims are from reality. Anyone who has lived through Melbourne’s rapid development since the turn of the millennium would find the idea that the city has been prevented from development by restrictive planning codes hard to square with their lived experience of the enormity of change to the city’s built environment.
I would suggest that Melbourne’s recent history reveals three distinct typologies of densification.
The first is limited non-densification. In those zones designated as heritage precincts, the sensitive renovation of existing dwellings is possible, but the capacity for major densification of individual dwellings is very limited by the regulatory framework. These are not quite as protected as Paris’ secteurs sauvegardés, but are still quite robustly so. Heritage precincts of this variety include Carlton, Parkville, East Melbourne, Emerald Hill, South Melbourne and patches of St Kilda. They are among the neighbourhoods most treasured by Melburnians for their quality of urban life—the fine-grained subdivisions, human scale, walkability, corner pubs, milk bars, small retail high streets, internal block-honeycombing of laneways, median strips and cherished squares of parkland, the basic building blocks of the Victorian urbanism that once defined the city’s DNA.
I would venture that when people invoke the concept of ‘liveability’, they unconsciously think of these precise qualities in the delicate ecosystems of their own neighbourhoods. It is the erasure of these qualities that most concerns the ‘aloof’ urban conservationists, and everyday Melburnians who care about the landscapes of their city. The anti-NIMBY proselytisers seem to wilfully ignore this aspect of heritage protection: that when community activists seek to prevent the demolition of historic buildings or to have controls on the volumes and massing of new buildings, they do not necessarily do so because of the individual value of those buildings, expressed in relation to monetary property value, but in terms of the cumulative aesthetic effect of an intact streetscape: what is referred to in urban planning, somewhat elusively, as ‘neighbourhood character’. There is something of an irony in the fact that many of Melbourne’s most treasured, and most intact, Victorian neighbourhoods were originally working class, or lower middle class: places like Carlton, Williamstown, Albert Park and South Melbourne. With the exception of the Housing Commission’s activities, these areas were saved from the type of piecemeal demolition-as-upgrade that occurred throughout much of the rest of Melbourne in the early twentieth century, precisely because they were considered undesirable slums and hence did not attract private reinvestment.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is what we might call wholesale densification. Here, the historical fabric is razed almost entirely to create a tabula rasa for new construction that dramatically increases the number of dwellings. In the process, the street form and subdivision pattern are annihilated to accommodate the enlarged footprints of new high-rises. As we have seen, this was the modus operandi of the Housing Commission from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. More recently, the same kind of development has been pursued in the residential extensions of the CBD: in Docklands, along Swanston Street into South Carlton, across the perpetually skyscraping Southbank, and at the north-western edge of the Hoddle Grid, between RMIT University and the Queen Victoria Market. Such tabula rasa high-rise development can occasionally work, given the right architectural treatment and appropriate siting, but finds relatively few supporters. Indeed, YIMBY Melbourne’s suggestion of a six-storey limit on new development in MMM seems to be a tacit recognition of the unpopularity of unimpeded high-rise.
Between these two extremes are the varieties of development that combine partial heritage retention with partial densification. Beyond the very limited delineated heritage precincts, much of the remainder of historically significant Melbourne has in fact been subject to substantial redevelopment over the past few decades. The results of partial densification are not always pretty, but they attest to the flexibility of heritage laws in practice. This adaptability which is built into the heritage framework seems entirely lost on local YIMBYs. In all the hyperventilation about the heritage listing of the Brutalist car park in Carlton, the fact that it could theoretically be redeveloped from its present usage to housing while retaining its key architectural elements was overlooked.
Contrary to the YIMBY line, in most ‘middle’ suburbs of Melbourne, heritage laws have not been entirely opposed to redevelopment. In predominantly low-rise suburban areas like Camberwell or Pascoe Vale, the main tactic of densification has been lot-cramming on deep blocks, with the original freestanding house demolished and land subdivided to fit anywhere between two and four smaller homes or townhouses. Under another version of densification, as seen in suburbs like Collingwood, Abbotsford, Richmond and Brunswick, the shell of a building is kept intact while the volume and massing behind it are intensified. This tactic, referred to as ‘façadism’, has become so widespread in our two largest cities that a Wikipedia entry devotes entire subsections to Melbourne and Sydney. Elsewhere in the de-industrialised northern suburbs, derelict factories and warehouses have been demolished and replaced with mid-rise apartments. Some, such as the former Tip Top bread factory in East Brunswick, are of relatively good quality, while others are shockingly bad, like the ‘pastel-coloured tissue box’ at 528 Swanston Street, Carlton, described by architect Philip Goad as ‘just awful to see’ and offering nothing of value back to the street nor anything to residents inside.
It is the appalling quality of much apartment building since the 1990s that has made many Melburnians sceptical of the claimed benefits of densification in the manner it has been delivered in this city. The decades-long decline in building standards, which has coincided with an extraordinary rise in the cost of construction, has delivered the disastrous combination of inordinately expensive and shoddily constructed new housing. However, these issues of housing production, beyond the obsessively narrow focus on housing supply, do not seem to be on the agenda of Australian YIMBYs. If one truly cared about housing quality and equality in the longer term, rather than reforming planning regulations it would make more sense to reform building regulations. However, given the political alliances of the YIMBY movement, such a call seems unlikely.
The political uses of YIMBYism
The emergence of YIMBYism is a sign, among others, that the rising creep of housing inequality—a problem decades in the making—has reached a cultural threshold point. Such a moment of crisis could be seized upon for a comprehensive rethink of housing production in Australia, leading to a genuine renaissance in public housing and alternative modes of financing and construction, more generous forms of private tenure, expanded renters’ rights, support for cooperatives and so on. However, none of this seems to be on the YIMBY agenda. In place of material analysis, the YIMBY crowd commits the classic neoliberal fallacy: individualising the problem, as though those dastardly NIMBYs are the primary reason for the inaccessibility of housing.
It seems legitimate to ask what, then, might be the function of the NIMBY scapegoat? Whose interests is the Australian version of YIMBYism serving? It is tempting to dismiss the movement’s spokespersons as the useful idiots of the property sector, as some commentators have, or to see them—especially in the wake of some recent discursive turns in the Labor party—as shock troops for the ALP as it tries to claw back credibility on the housing question. I personally think it’s more useful to consider YIMBYism as symptomatic of the total capture of the housing debate by the logic of neoliberalism: that there is no credible alternative to the private housing market, and that solving the housing problem is eternally a matter of tinkering with the laws of supply and demand within that market.
In response to critiques from the Left, individual YIMBY spokespersons like Benjamin Clark have fretted over whether their movement is verifiably ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’. He and other card-carrying YIMBYs of his generation would like to be seen as the former. And yet that language does not even really make sense in this debate, given how far the bulk of the Australian Left has drifted from its erstwhile principles. The Left once stood for principles of solidarity with the poor, materially grounded analysis of political economy, and the power of state intervention as a vehicle for redistribution and a meaningful alternative to the private market. The great Australian housing scholar Jim Kemeny was representative of this tradition. His work showed the real costs to society of our obsession with private home ownership and made the case for the normalisation of public renting, not as a residual category for the most vulnerable and politically expendable citizens but as the expression of sensible welfare state that provides the basic needs of its citizens[7] in much the same way as we came, in the twentieth century, to think about public education and public health. The YIMBY deriding of people who support such principles as ‘terminally online public housing maximalists’ suggests a fundamental departure from what was once a recognisably leftist position on housing.
In mounting a superficial case for ‘housing abundance,’ Australian YIMBYs have all too easily become the mouthpieces of vested interests, which have shown very little political will to address the root causes of housing inequality.
Intentionally or not, the doctrine of ‘housing abundance’ both covers over and serves several distinct political projects. For state Labor governments, it has become a Trojan horse for accelerating the privatisation of remnant public housing estates. The extraordinary parting present of Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, in the form of his gifting huge swathes of valuable inner-city public land to developers and housing corporations, was not only welcomed by YIMBY Melbourne but wrapped up in the language that their months-long campaigning had helped to nourish. Chris Minns, the NSW premier, is particularly strident in his confected jihad against NIMBYs. The narrative that it is NIMBYs blocking development, through their nefarious influence over dysfunctional local government, is one that state and federal leaders are all too eager to embrace, as it distracts attention from the disastrous underinvestment in equitable housing over the past two generations.
Perhaps most telling has been YIMBY infiltration of the conservative side of politics: for the younger, ostensibly progressive wing of the Liberals, represented by people like Matthew Bach in Victoria, the embrace of YIMBY talking points has become part of a Gramscian war of position—a stick with which to beat the flailing gerontocracy of the party. However, most of all it is developers who stand to gain from the YIMBY distraction. In the case of Canberra YIMBYs, the partnership is explicit, with the young activists having ‘teamed up with Master Builders Association and the Housing Industry Association’.[8] In Melbourne, it is not clear whether such alliances have been formally made, but in any case, the push to weaken planning regulations to fast-track development approvals is a familiar refrain of the developer lobby, and the Melbourne YIMBYs are singing from the same hymn sheet.
What—rather than razing our collective history—could be done?
Despite the earnestness of YIMBY activists, the solutions they propose are as much symptom as solution to the contemporary crisis of neoliberal urbanism. If anything, the YIMBY intervention has led to an impoverishment of the housing debate in Australia, narrowing its terms of reference and distracting attention from underlying structural issues.
Urban issues are notoriously complex, the gnarly product of thousands of actions by private actors as well as public policy decisions made at federal, state and local levels. The current housing crisis has been decades in the making and is the cumulative product of the neoliberalisation of urban policy at all levels of government. The role of federal government, via its policies subsidising existing property owners through concessional tax arrangements, has been comprehensively documented. At a state level, the abandonment of meaningful metropolitan planning and the retrenchment of investment in public housing since the 1980s have likewise helped to shape the dystopian future we are now living.[9] As for the local level of government, anyone familiar with the inner workings of government will tell you that the real hold-up in planning approvals is not the influence of third-party objectors exercising their democratic right to make comment on proposed developments (aka the NIMBY scourge), but rather the inadequate hiring of statutory planners. Decades of neoliberal reform under the mantra of ‘slashing red tape’ have left local councils severely under-resourced to process development approvals in a timely manner. However, even when planning approval is forthcoming, the real delays tend to be due to developer strategy: as Nicole Gurran has demonstrated in relation to Sydney—and the situation is analogous in Melbourne—there have been more than enough planning approvals to meet housing demand over the past decade. The real hold-up has been that many of these developments are not commenced, as developers hold off on construction in order to maximise their anticipated returns. Calls to further ‘upzone’, or otherwise overhaul, the planning system should thus be treated with extreme caution and scepticism.
What then—rather than razing our collective history—could be done to address the housing crisis? A far more sensible policy, which most local councils already have in place to varying degrees, is to identify areas where higher density infill development might proceed with minimal loss to neighbourhood character and significant urban history. However, as Alan Kohler points out in his recent Quarterly Essay on Australia’s ‘housing mess’, given that easily developable brownfield sites of this nature have largely already been redeveloped in recent decades, and given the heritage value of many houses within ten kilometres of the city centre, there is in fact limited scope to achieve major density gains in established urban areas. Kohler proposes developing fast rail into regions, and thus extending the ‘commuting radius’ to 100–200 kilometres from the city centre.[10] This kind of investment would be welcome, but in the case of Melbourne there is the potential to do much more, much closer.
Belatedly, the Victorian state government has begun to undertake the kind of proactive planning work it should have embraced decades ago. For instance, new investment in defined activity centres such as the Sunshine precinct is intended to support housing development. The authors of Melbourne’s Missing Middle are right in their assessment that planned new housing in these centres will be inadequate to meet current need; however, their counter-designation of 1922 (!) ‘activity centres’ is so broad as to be inevitably unachievable without compulsory acquisition of thousands of properties. The YIMBY idea that changing zoning will somehow entice all established owners to convert their freestanding houses or attached terraces to apartments is wishful thinking. To promote well-planned medium-to-high density, the city needs sensible structure plans conducted a local level, rather than insensitive, bird’s-eye bulldozing that would lead to the virtual destruction of all of Melbourne’s history. Given Melbourne’s historical tendency to grow eastwards, there is fact much more scope for urban growth from the north-west to the south-west of the metropolis. It is all but inevitable that suburban development to the west of the city will eventually merge the city’s fringe with the outskirts of Geelong, as has already occurred on the opposite side of the bay down to the Mornington peninsula.
We have an opportunity to propose a better model of development than has prevailed in recent decades in the form of poorly serviced, developer-driven low-rise housing estates. The advantage of such sites is that they do not have existing heritage protections in place, and land remains relatively affordable vis-à-vis established urban areas. There are other considerations too, such as the long-term need to safeguard agricultural land, the limits of local water catchments, and the desirability of preserving native habitat corridors for biodiversity. With these factors in mind, in such zones relatively close to the city, the scope for large-scale intervention to address the housing shortfall is much larger, provided that effective public transport and other communal infrastructure is provided.
Would such new communities, built to a higher density, satisfy the demands of the YIMBYs? One gets the sense that it is Brunswick or Bust for much of this group. Designing an entire metropolitan planning strategy around the consumer preferences of a specific subsection of aspirational buyers is not a sound, or ethically just, social policy.
Sensibly planned suburban expansion incorporating strengthened building regulations would ensure that all new building could make a durable contribution to the city. Rather than the laissez-faire procurement models of recent decades, a revitalised industry policy could mandate increased local production of materials, to make sure that we are no longer so dependent on overseas supply chains. Encouraging more people into trades, , would be another part of the strategy. Together such measures would alleviate some of the price fluctuations of recent years. In the meantime, state governments ought to impose more severe penalties on developers who ‘land bank’ instead of commencing construction in a timely manner.
Rather than focusing solely on ‘European density’, YIMBYs would be more useful promoting European varieties of tenure. Rather than focusing on the exaggerated influence of so-called NIMBYs, we ought to pressure government at every level to invest more in public housing—actually invest in housing, rather than playing the kinds of opportunistic funding games that the Albanese government is presently engaged in. This could include changing local government laws to allow municipal authorities to become housing providers, as they are in other countries. Similarly, we could empower superannuation funds to invest their managed capital in institutional housing so that their members could have access to rent-controlled dwellings, as it standard in many European jurisdictions.
Conclusions
The ‘discovery’ and rediscovery of the inner city has been an intergenerational story of Australian urbanism. For each generation of the past half-century or so, from trendies to yuppies to YIMBYs, the embrace of the joys of urban living has been something of a rite of passage. It is often part of leaving the suburban nest, wound up with life stories of attending university, or gaining inner-city employment, or tuning into alternative cultures. Some are just passing through; others stay. Today’s YIMBYs, knocking on the door of home ownership in the inner city and finding it closed, are in certain respects the cultural inheritors of the trendies and the yuppies before them. But in other respects—notably their lack of attachment to the historical fabric of our inner cities—they are radically different.
Whether the YIMBYs like it or not, all cities are museums. From Paris to Melbourne, our cities are forever in a mode of exhibition, displaying their collections of buildings, public spaces and infrastructures as the palimpsests of preceding generations. And yet they are museums in evolution: as their inheritors, we must collectively make decisions about how to shape their futures. Which parts will we choose to protect for our children, and which will we allow to be replaced, hopefully with something better?
The prominent historian of Melbourne Graeme Davison identified three distinct purposes in preserving the buildings of the past: the ‘building as antique’, preserved for its distinctive and outstanding stylistic features; the ‘building as shrine’, preserved because of its deeper religious or civic symbolism as a place of gathering; and the ‘building as document’, preserved because of what it can tell us about the social histories of previous generations. It is this third type of urban historicity that is most uplifting about historic neighbourhoods, but it is also of value for the future, in ways that are largely unknowable to us in the present. For future generations will come to reevaluate the meanings of the past embedded in the built environment in ways we cannot predict.
YIMBYs are entitled to feel angry about the lack of affordable housing. It is a national scandal. But proposing to tear down the framework of heritage protection that generations have fought for is an extremely misguided way to remedy this problem. The collective loss of demolishing en masse the remnant historical fabric of our cities would be incalculable, and irreversible.
[1] Patrick N. Troy, The Perils of Urban Consolidation: A Discussion of Australian Housing and Urban Development Policies, Annandale: Federation Press, 1996, p. 157.
[2] William Logan, The Gentrification of Inner Melbourne: A Political Geography of Inner City Housing, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1985; Renate Howe, Graeme Davison and David Nichols, Trendyville: The Battle for Australia’s Inner Cities,Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2014.
[3] Stephen Pascoe, ‘An ‘enlightened urban renewal’? The University of Melbourne, the Housing Commission of Victoria and the contest for Carlton in the 1960s,’ in Green Fields, Brown Fields, New Fields: Proceedings of the 10th Australasian Urban History, Planning History Conference, David Nichols, Anna Hurlimann, Clare Mouat and Stephen Pascoe (eds.), Melbourne: The University of Melbourne, 2010, pp 452–467.
[4] Stephen Pascoe, ‘The social and spatial construction of student housing: The University of Melbourne in an age of expansion’ [M. Phil thesis], The University of Melbourne, 2011.
[5] Troy, The Perils of Urban Consolidation. See also Miles Lewis, Suburban Backlash: The Battle for the World’s Most Liveable City, Hawthorn: Bloomings Books, 1999.
[6] Paul Mees, A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City, Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2000, and Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
[7] Jim Kemeny, The Great Australian Nightmare: A Critique of the Home-Ownership Ideology, Melbourne: Georgian House, 1983.
[8] Alan Kohler, The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It, Quarterly Essay 92, 2023, p. 48.
[9] Paul Mees, ‘Paterson’s Curse: The Attempt to Revive Metropolitan Planning in Melbourne,’ Urban Policy and Research 21(3), 2003, pp 287–299.
[10] Kohler, The Great Divide, pp 81–83.
[11] Graeme Davison, What makes a building historic?, Melbourne: Historic Buildings Council, 1986.
Comments
Great article. Couldn’t agree more with the need to skewer the YIMBYs.