What guides where this additional housing is to go?
The guiding document defining where additional housing is to be focused in Yarra is the Yarra Housing Strategy:
Broadly speaking the YHS seeks to direct additional housing to “activity centres” (basically existing shopping strips and commercial precincts) and ex-industrial sites in the general vicinity of those activity centres.
This is in line with long-standing policy across multiple governments to encourage “20-minute neighbourhoods” where residents can accomplish their daily needs within 20 minutes of their homes within as a few hundred metres - maybe a bit more, without needing to use a car.
Much of Yarra’s existing low-rise residential housing is either in a Neighbourhood Residential Zone (NRZ) or a General Residential Zone (GRZ). The height limit in the NRZ is 9m and 2 storeys, and in the GRZ it’s 11m and 3 storeys. This limits the scope for redevelopment in such areas - and why they’re largely ruled out in the YHS.
Recent State Government changes have opened up some greater latitude to redevelop in such areas - but in Yarra generally and in North Fitzroy in particular there are many difficulties in redeveloping, e.g.:
● Lot sizes are typically small - too small to subdivide, also expensive & difficult to consolidate
● Lots are typically deep with narrow frontages - further making subdivision difficult
● Access to undertake development is difficult and therefore expensive.
Often there’s a line of thinking that the Heritage Overlay makes redevelopment difficult - and it sometimes can, but mostly the other issues listed above are probably more important.
That’s a long way of explaining why the Yarra Housing Strategy looks the way it does - the additional housing is substantially directed to the only places it can readily go.
You may also note that Yarra also has population forecasts linked from that page which are a bit lower than the DTP VIF figures above. That’s because the population forecast is based on projecting historical “run-rate” norms forward - whereas the State Government has an objective to actively encourage more housing in some areas versus others.
