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Hi checking in from Victoria, Australia where our state government has just made the bold move of making sure that all documents which were referenced by and relied upon by planning codes are actually available online. This was not previously the case 
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Aug 4, 2018 02:08
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knox_harrington posted:It was a while ago when I visited Melbourne but driving to my then-gf's family's home I was astonished by the urban sprawl. I think it was in the North Melbourne suburbs. Guessing it is a situation very similar to the USA where there is just a shitload of available land and people understandably want a house to themselves for their family or whatever, but it seems to remove any possibility of any local community. Melbourne is cursed by a lack of constraining geography. There’s some mountainous bits to the east but other than that there’s very little to act as a forced barrier on sprawl. The growth areas are seriously horrendous in terms of the quality of communities being put up. Under serviced by community infrastructure, non-existent public transport, and massive houses on medium sized lots so you get serious urban heat island and stormwater management problems. The sprawl is I’m sure similar to many US cities. We have instituted an urban growth boundary through the planning system, but in the first few years of operation it had numerous expansions, and now everyone in the development industry believes they just have to bribe hard enough to get their tract included and turn a farm purchase into a $30M residential estate. This has the follow on effect of inflating land values around the boundary due to speculation, meaning farmers face skyrocketing land taxes without their income going up and having to abandon the most fertile land (of the stuff we haven’t paved over yet) I’m really envious of Portland and some of the Canadian cities because they seem to have growth boundaries pretty well sorted with a fairly transparent and predictable system that people have confidence in. One of our two major political parties portrays the problem of housing affordability as purely one of growth area land supply, so there is no confidence in the bi-partisanship of the growth boundary.
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Aug 4, 2018 15:53
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OddObserver posted:So is the sprawl still a part of Melbourne proper? One of the problems in US is that sprawl is often totally separate municipalities. Same here. Victoria has 79 local government areas, 31 of those are located within the greater metropolitan Melbourne area. The State Government in many political respects functions as a Metropolitan Government as 4.9M of the states 5.8M residents live in the metro area, and in terms of planning the state planning minister has the ultimate power over the planning codes of each council, but this is generally left devolved to councils in most circumstances. Things like the growth boundary are implemented by the State, and the State may call in decisions if there is particular importance or political interest (effectively when to override the local authority is entirely at the discretion of the Minister) It’s further complicated by the fact that by default planning decisions are the remit of the elected councillors, who may choose to delegate to council officers. This means that if anything gets political it compromises the actual planning component of decision making. We also have a really strong third party appeal system, so even if an interest group didn’t succeed in saying the council opinion, they can have another crack at the appeals tribunal, and its quite a low barrier to be heard there so lots of things get delayed through pretty spurious appeals.
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Aug 4, 2018 22:59
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I have a real issue with people trying to use planning to regulate away ugly buildings, but it’s also a difficult and hazy line for where “legitimate” concerns about impacts on the public realm begin. I think this is personally maybe the issue I’ve grappled with most when it comes to planning.
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Aug 17, 2018 03:11
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Dameius posted:No wonder nature is trying to burn the PNW. Speaking of fire, we sure are having a fun time down here in Australia. The conservative government and most of the media are running with the line that bushfires have nothing to do with climate change, and it’s all because those darn environmentalists won’t let anyone do fuel reduction burns. This is ignoring the fact that: -we do still do fuel reduction and the major environmental party supports them explicitly -climate change is shortening the window where you can safely do them -of relevance to the thread, we have allowed development in really dumb places, which means fire services have to take an asset and life protection approach so smaller fires aren’t allowed to come through and clear poo poo out
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Nov 14, 2019 22:45
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SpaceCadetBob posted:I'd love to get some information, or discussion about how to balance building more affordable housing with building housing that is highly energy efficient/green (ie not affordable). Couple of things I’m thinking of: Ideally you want a mandatory contribution with mechanisms in place that encourage going above that level. The contribution should be allowable in either delivered units or a cash equivalent so you can get more granular in what is a reasonable contribution (and smaller developments can collectively contribute to affordable housing in the area). Offering units at a discount to affordable housing providers runs into problems where local providers may not have the cash on hand to meet what the developer has provided. Need to be really careful about what trade offs you are willing to make to encourage affordable housing provision. Effectively you can either increase the potential yield (allowing higher density, built form exemptions etc) or you can decrease the risk (exempt from neighbour objections, streamlined pathway for approval etc). Maybe the de-risking pathway works better? Ideally you should sit down and list all the things in your power that you can use as levers to make the development more attractive, and work out which you’re willing to budge on to encourage affordable housing. Also it seems totally reasonable to me to explicitly require that any units delivered as part of an affordable housing contribution meet an X star energy standard. Running costs are a critical part of making housing affordable, including both efficiency and maintenance. A lot of that can be achieved by good design without that much in increased cost. Proper siting is a big contributor. But as you’ve noted all that can be undermined by shoddy materials. The other problem with your scenario is that it further stigmatises affordable housing in the rest of the community.
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Nov 14, 2019 23:26
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Affordable housing is like the one thing developers and NIMBYs can agree on
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Nov 15, 2019 00:18
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Bodhidharma posted:That's interesting because conservatives are arguing the same thing about wildfires in California. Maybe Rupert Murdoch has something to do with this. It’s definitely a big part, Murdoch owns like 60+% of print circulation in Australia, we’ve had years of conservatives stacking our public broadcaster with ex-Murdoch staff, and the commercial tv stations are no better. As an illustration of how dire Australian media is: today one of the people portrayed as a leading intellectual in our equivalent of the Democrats (nominally centre left mainstream party) wrote an article for one of the nominally centre left media company’s papers with the line “national socialism is resurgent - but so is international green socialism, a variant of white supremacism” as the pullout quote and the entire professional journalistic class are now competing on twitter to suck himself and each other off the hardest for a great take. Solemn Sloth fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 18, 2019 22:29
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People who make laws tend to like golf. Similar to how cycling gets higher profile treatment in planning than pedestrianism (policy development, not necessarily decision making and implementation) because a whole bunch of civil servants are white bike dads.
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Dec 10, 2019 08:02
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I present to you Geelong City Council Geelong is the largest city in the state of Victoria outside the capital. Theyve also got a bit of a detroit vibe to them because they were always very focused around heavy industry, particularly Ford, and that all went away. Theres been a huge amount of State government funding poured in to help transform the city. One of the initiatives was to modernise the CBD by implementing a “green spine” of protected cycling lanes next to linear gardens and outdoor dining areas. Again, they received a fuckton of State money to do this, and its only partway through but some pieces have been implemented. The absolute brain genius elected councillors have now decided to rip up a big section of the green spine to reinstate on street parking and turning lanes. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-26/geelong-council-votes-to-rip-up-malop-st-green-spine-bike-lane/12002544 In doing so they have managed to piss off the liberal (currently governing), conservative, and green parties; cyclists; traders; current and former staff; pretty much everyone except the SUV drivers who think a CBD should be only something you drive through to get to the other side. The section theyre ripping up only completed two years ago, so local traders say they can’t absorb another hit to their business from new construction blocking access. The State government has threatened to do any or all of the following: remove planning control of the CBD from council; freeze funding for any infrastructure projects with council; declare the street a state road so council can’t modify it.
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Feb 26, 2020 20:17
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gret posted:I think this might be in contention for the dumbest thing ever said at a planning meeting (although I'm sure there are many other contenders out there!). The battery or the bullet
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Feb 27, 2020 22:28
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