Lending holding back sustainable housing development: AHURI

While there is an increased need for creative housing developments given a growing housing supply shortage alongside a materials crisis, a recent report by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) found multiple setbacks for sustainable housing developments within a neighbourhood scale.

The report follows the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation (NHFIC) State of the Nation’s Housing 2022–23 research that warned Australia’s housing shortfall would tip 100,000 homes over the next five years, which has sparked industry-wide discussions on ways to boost housing stock.

Indeed, the Labor government is expected to deliver the federal budget next month (Tuesday, 9 May), with housing supply forming a cornerstone of reforms.

Looking ahead, AHURI’s study investigated the challenges and opportunities that built environment professionals in Australia experience when planning, designing, and implementing sustainable housing developments at the neighbourhood scale (in between individual buildings and the urban scale).

While awareness about the value of sustainable and circular economy (CE) actions at the neighbourhood scale is growing among built environment professionals, the report found many experience barriers to incorporating sustainability principles into plans and developments at this scale.

The report investigated 15 case studies in Australia and Europe with most citing regulatory barriers between jurisdictions.

For example, since urban and regional planning is the responsibility of state and territory governments in Australia, CE neighbourhoods are planned and developed under jurisdictional policy and regulatory frameworks are directly driven by the respective government land management agencies.

In addition, one case study of the Nightingale Village in Victoria in Brunswick, which includes six buildings of up to eight storeys within the village, noted “one of the main challenges was to secure financing”.

While each building had its own funding arrangements, it was all combined into one loan with the bank (at the request of the bank), which created “complexity for the development such as the need to contract only one builder”.

Thus, this limited the selection of builders to those with sufficient capacity and the required expertise.

Nonetheless, the land was purchased in 2016 by Nightingale Housing, with construction completed in 2022.

Overall, the research highlighted the importance of partnerships of governments, private developers, and local communities and suitable governance approaches to realise and manage sustainable neighbourhoods and their infrastructures and services.

This research formed part of a wider AHURI inquiry that addresses the overarching question of how the transition to a CE in housing can be implemented.

[Related: Housing shortfall expected to worsen]