How to make long-term apartment living attractive

Transcript

00:00How would you feel about living in an apartment long-term with your family?

00:04For a lot of Canberrans, we have ambitions of living in a house.

00:07But as the city becomes more dense, that's not going to be reality for a lot of people.

00:12As you start to get high densities, you have to replace houses with apartments.

00:18And as a result, we tend to see a drop in the number of houses available.

00:23Take Sydney for an example.

00:25This graph shows that there was a pretty sharp upswing in the number of apartments

00:29constructed between 2015 and 2020 in the city and south there.

00:33Canberra is generally considered to be about a decade behind.

00:36And so we're following this pipeline at the moment.

00:39And with an increased push for missing middle housing in the territory,

00:42that's only set to continue.

00:43It's also much cheaper to live in an apartment in Canberra in most

00:47inner north and south suburbs.

00:49You can see that in this data here.

00:51We do have a mismatch between what people want and what realistically we can build

00:57for people to buy affordably.

00:58What can we do to make apartment living actually worth it for families

01:02and something that they want to aspire to?

01:04First of all, we need to make sure that there's homes that are actually big enough

01:07with enough bedrooms, like I wrote about here.

01:10But we also need to make sure that there's adequate infrastructure.

01:12Things like safe, secure areas for kids to play outside, general safety in the home,

01:18being really close to public transport links and a sense of community where people feel like

01:23their apartment is their long-term space.

01:26The good thing in Canberra is that we have a pretty tight and competitive development market.

01:30And so a lot of people are already working towards offering heaps of amenities in apartments,

01:35but we'll have to wait for the next kind of decade to see how this really plays out.