Urban Planning and Housing Development with Nicola Smith

Today's episode is a deep dive into urban and housing development with Nicola Smith, an accomplished urban and regional planner and director of Niche Planning Studio. Expertly navigating the current rental crisis and mortgage stress, she unveils the key factors that have steered us to our current housing crisis. Nicola breaks down terms like green field and brown field, highlighting their significant role in housing development. Together we strategise on how to generate more housing in established areas, promoting affordability, and diversifying our housing types.

Steering the conversation towards government policies, Nicola and I scrutinise their town planning and housing development strategies. We dissect the implications of the policy that earmarks 70% of growth for the inner city and the remaining 30% for the green fields. How will this affect the citizens of established areas? We further delve into the complexities of rejuvenating inner city areas, the potential for overlooking amenity impacts, and the advantages of home-building in green field regions. 

Nicola then shares her valuable insights on challenges surrounding housing affordability and service accessibility in Melbourne. We mull over the government's strategic planning efforts and the use of developer contributions in the face of a pressing need for affordable housing. We also explore the cost of apartment living, the possibility of converting offices into residences, and the often overlooked factor of embodied carbon in building construction. 

Join us as we unravel the convolutions of Australia's housing market, the struggle for affordable housing, and the impact of 'NIMBYism' (Not in my backyard) on planning and development.

Contact The Room Xchange

• Tweet us at @theroomxchange and @LudwinaDautovic
• Share a story on instagram @theroomxchange
• Email us at admin@theroomxchange.com

Please leave us a review
Click here for Apple reviews

Connect on our socials
Youtube | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Linkedin

Sign up on our website
www.theroomxchange.com

Chapters

• 0:01 Exploring Rental Market and Housing Development
• 9:57 Town Planning and Housing Development Focus
• 16:49 Planning and Affordable Housing Challenges
• 26:15 Affordable and Accessible Housing in Australia

Transcript

Ludwina Dautovic: 0:01

Welcome to the Room Exchange podcast helping you rent better. In this podcast, we're having conversations with industry leaders in the rental market, along with everyday renters, sharing fascinating stories, insights and tips to help you rent better. Hello and welcome to the Room Exchange podcast. If you're listening for the first time, welcome to the show. I'm Lidwena Dordovic, your host. While you're here, please make sure that you subscribe to the show on your favourite podcast directory so you never miss an episode. Today I have the pleasure of having a chat with Nicola Smith. Nicola is a qualified urban and regional planner and director of niche studio and has over 20 years experience in a wide range of planning and development roles. Nicola is also a strong advocate for high quality developments, clearly understood planning controls in a strong and efficient planning system. Her role as vice president on the National Planning Institute of Australia Board gives her the platform to advocate for best practice across Australia. Nicola, thank you for joining us.

Ludwina Dautovic: 1:07

Nice to be here. That sounds impressive. I know it does, doesn't it? Isn't it great when you get your people to write your bios for you? Now we've got a bit of a story in how we met, and I think it's quite funny. Probably says more about me than anything else. A couple of months back I was on a me break down near Apollo Bay, went there for a late brunch with my laptop and you were sitting on the table next to me with your laptop and I think there was another woman who'd met me at the place I was staying at the night before. She popped by and said hello and then all of a sudden I don't know what it was she was picking my brains on some of my organisational skills, and then you chimed in and next thing you know we're having a gas bag and here we are.

Nicola Smith: 1:52

It was so random, wasn't it? It was so good because I'd gone down for a weekend away but also have a look at some development sites. And yeah, you were talking about, I think, not having too many tabs open or something obscure. And I was like, oh, what's this lady talking about? So, yeah, it was just. And then I swung my legs around and then we sat there and gas bag for a while. It was great.

Ludwina Dautovic: 2:12

Yeah, I love randomly meeting people like that. Always got to have a chat. You never know who you're going to meet, so thank you for talking to us today. We have tried a few times to connect and we finally got here. I'm really interested in picking your brains on, particularly with town planning and housing development. Obviously, there's a lot of conversation that's happening right now with the housing and the rental crisis, mortgage stress. We don't have enough houses or apartments to actually house people. There's massive amounts of people that are turning up for you know rental inspections to apply for a place. It's an absolute mess and I think one of the things that we need to talk about is how did we get here? So why don't you firstly tell us a bit more about yourself and then we'll go into some more of the details?

Nicola Smith: 2:57

Yeah, ok, not a problem. So you said that I run a business called niche. So I've been doing niche planning studio for 11 years I think it was the other day and it's interesting because we ditched the word planning recently because we do so much more than just statutory planning. So because we do urban design and placemaking, strategic thinking, as well as what people probably normally come across town planners in, which is the statutory planning, you know, getting approvals for homes in the city or also out in the suburbs, we decided to sort of expand our name a little bit to reflect what we do and that kind of has reflected what I've done in my career, which is a not major for a while.

Nicola Smith: 3:35

So the provision of housing, like you were talking about, you know, addressing the growth that we're having or due to have post COVID and where people are going to live. When I was working as a developer, you know we were doing housing out in the green fields, which is just a fancy name for the outer suburbs, and trying to think of what people wanted, diversity of homes and ensuring we were trying to provide affordability as well as, you know, places where people want to live really. So I guess I'm a town planner that works in a consulting firm and I work for councils and private to provide homes for people. That's pretty.

Ludwina Dautovic: 4:10

OK, so you mentioned the term green field. Can you do me a favour and explain what that is, and also explain what brown fields are?

Nicola Smith: 4:17

Yeah, cool. So I guess green field is, if you think about it. I guess it's probably come from the expansion of our cities into the farming areas. So, as our cities have grown, places like Melbourne have looked at the defined boundary of the urban area and they've gone. You know what? Let's expand a little bit out to the north or a bit to the west or down the southeast, and those areas that the boundaries expanded has enabled new communities to grow, and where those communities or suburbs grow, that's generally called the green fields.

Nicola Smith: 4:49

So that would be things like Melton, wyndham, sunbury, casey, those kind of areas. So that's the green fields, and the opposite is infield, and you talked about brown fields as well. So brown fields is usually, you know, redevelopment of areas. What infield is probably what people talk about more these days. So that's usually, you know, creating more homes in established areas. So whether that's apartments in the city centre, whether that's people use this thing called the missing middle, which can often mean housing in those middle ring areas, so like Monash or Sunshine or somewhere around there. So yeah, infield is in established areas and greenfield is out on the edge.

Ludwina Dautovic: 5:33

You know, when you get suburbs that have a massive amount of subdivisions that go on. So Newport is an area we still have a house there and we did a subdivision there oh gosh, I don't know 15 years ago or something. It was a big corner block. How would you identify those areas? I mean?

Nicola Smith: 5:47

realistically, if it's an existing area, like in Newport, if it's an existing house and you're subdividing, you know the back of the property and putting a house on that, that's infield You're filling in the bits that are already developed. Well, literally, you know, when you drive out to the edge of suburbia and you sort of see, or when you're on a plane and you're flying over and you sort of see the edge of suburbs and then it looks like undeveloped land. Often that's greenfields. But I think the big thing that's important is the state government, particularly in Melbourne or in Victoria, has defined a boundary that we're allowed to go up to, and that's probably one of the things that a lot of us are worried about. We're pretty damn close to that boundary right now. So where does the new housing occur?

Ludwina Dautovic: 6:31

Right, and so looking at that then and I often see them when I'm driving outside of Melbourne, going, you know, up to Aubrey, where I come from you see, it's kind of expanding even further and further out. So typically those areas have got houses with three, four bedrooms, sometimes even more massive amounts of living spaces I'll call them McPanchons. Why is it typically that in those greenfields houses like that are being built? And I'm asking this question? This will lead into some other questions as well, because it's making the assumption that majority of the new housing that needs to be built are for families or households with multiple occupants, whereas if you look at the statistics there's more and more single-person households or couples or people not having kids in smaller homes that we don't seem to be developing, even in those outer areas. What's going on there?

Nicola Smith: 7:19

Yeah, completely. So. I guess the interesting thing is when we are planning for the future growth of towns, wherever it is, whether it's in regional areas or whether it's in on the edge of Melbourne, and you start to see those expansion areas where there's just straight-up subdivision with your big homes on big blocks of land, usually it's because there is some demand. So a developer very rarely will go oh, I just want to go and sub-debate this land into 500 homes and I haven't done my market research, I'm just going to hope that it sells. Usually what they'll do is they will look into, well, who is buying within a 5 to 10 kilometre radius of this bit of land that they own? Oh, okay, there's a particular demographic group or there's a particular cultural group? Okay, so we're going to leverage off that. What are those people currently desiring? Oh, okay, there's a majority of demand for whatever 650 square metre lot. Okay, great, all of the existing suburbs around it, all of those 650 square metre lots have been sold. Okay, we better provide some more. So often that is what a developer will do and in fact we've been working on.

Nicola Smith: 8:30

Do you know the estate Aurora? It's a housing estate that's kind of north of town and it's been developed on the go, rolling through for quite some time. It was a government project and then it's gone through to Landlice and it's just. It's a really interesting, beautiful housing estate Lots of retained trees yeah, quite pretty. And they're at the very last bit and they had an approved plan of subdivision, which is an approved location of streets, location of shops and schools and lots, lots of houses.

Nicola Smith: 9:00

And they've been talking to their sales agents in the existing parts of Aurora and they're like oh, all these people are coming into the sales office and asking for 500 square metre blocks of land, but the subdivision design had created a whole bunch of 200, 220, 250 square metre blocks of land, so smaller for your single parents or your professional couples or whatever. But those blocks haven't been selling. It's actually families coming and saying well, we want to put a 3x2 or a 4x2 on a 500 square metre block of land. They're actually buying up two blocks of land in Aurora, amalgamating the two together so they can put their dream home on these blocks of land. So it is really interesting where different people choose to live, why they choose to live in different areas, and I guess as town planners we need to make sure that we're providing a diversity of housing across the board.

Ludwina Dautovic: 9:57

Alright, let's move on a bit now. So tell me what is the government's focus on town planning and housing development in the next five years or so?

Nicola Smith: 10:06

You and I were kind of talking about this over breakfast. So here we were. There was this policy that came out like I don't know I literally don't know 10 years ago. Let's say it was called Plan Melbourne. So 7030 is a policy position that the state government actually had around focusing 70% of growth into the inner city and 30% onto the green fields. That's essentially the direction the government was taking, I don't know, 10 years ago or something, when Plan Melbourne first came out, and they never really enacted it.

Nicola Smith: 10:38

And then this state government has gone hold on a minute. Maybe this is the key. Maybe we really need to make sure that 70% happens in the inner city and 30% in the green fields, rather than what's actually happening, which is almost the other way around. So yeah, the current state government has been pretty forceful and they've said that they're going to review any new growth or green field area structure plans and maybe put a hold on it, which we're all a bit worried about, because we're a bit worried about housing provision, and they're going to focus all the development on infill, because they're going to put this 70% in the city centre or around the established areas and look, to be honest, the policy and the principle of that is great.

Nicola Smith: 11:22

But the difficulty that you have when you put, say, an apartment building and you propose it in an established area is, of course, all these people already live in that area and they get worried about. You know the amenity impacts or you know more parking or overlooking or whatever happens to be, and it often ends up being more costly. And doesn't often get up and call me cynical, but on the day that the minister announced it there was something I think was the Preston markets development which was supposed to be like an infill development and I understand it wasn't particularly awesome from the community point of view. So therefore it sort of has got put on hold. But you go God, if the intention is to put all the housing in this inner areas and redevelopment areas and that's not getting approved, and where in the world are we providing these housing areas?

Ludwina Dautovic: 12:10

So in my mind, then why did they do some research first and find out what kind of objections they're going to get from the residents before they put all this work into even starting to plan it? And look, I know that gets done to a degree, because when anyone's going to do a subdivision now place, we always get notified of the plans. But I'm sure that the owner of that property Already has gone down a road of putting some costs in to get that done right. So they must do that on a larger scale. But if I was a resident in near a brownfield In an inner city suburb, I wouldn't want somebody peering over my backyard.

Ludwina Dautovic: 12:47

I live in out of west and suburbs in Melbourne and the way that these houses are built, because my bedroom window overlooks the backyard of the neighbor and not the side. We don't have a requirement to have frosted windows, for example, right, which is ridiculous. And then I can see into the neighbors backyard. That's uncomfortable for her. So we've had to frost the windows ourselves just to give her privacy and for us to have privacy, and we're in a huge block here, right. So there's more development happening. We're in Williams landing and you already can't get a car park at the local supermarket. Yeah right, and that's in a greenfield area.

Nicola Smith: 13:24

Yeah, completely. Look, the main thing that they're trying to do to get around it is, I don't know, like if you know these areas but say everyone's watching the block right now. So say Hampton East, right, and so if you look at Hampton and they decide that they want to put I don't know, 10 story apartments up and down the main shopping street, right, they would then normally do a structure plan.

Nicola Smith: 13:47

The council would normally do a structure plan and put that up for advertising. So that's the opportunity where they'll say look, this is what we're thinking, we want to put 10 story apartments here, or we want to put three story on one side and because of overshadowing, and six on the other or whatever, and they would put it out for advertising and there'd be lots of community consultation and there'd be lots of conversation around it and then that might result in an amendment to the town planning scheme. But I think what's been happening is some of those examples where structure plans put out, people get to comment at a high level. Sometimes people don't engage as much as you want them to. Sometimes you know, until it's actually that building that's being built on your back boundary, you don't really think about it, and so it is hard. Like you know, the community might not support that structure plan with all that. You know it in that example, 10 story apartments down the main street of Hampton or whatever. So then they will sort of put in submissions to the government and say, oh, we don't think this scheme amendment should go ahead and there's an independent review and then the minister decides one way or the other.

Nicola Smith: 14:52

But it's a process that's followed. You would hope that the community is getting a bit of a say. But if the state government is saying we need X amount of homes and it has to be in this area where all these other people are already living, it's just a bit hard because you've got to acknowledge all those people like you with your frosted or not frosted window. You know you've got to think about what's my impact. How am I getting impacted by that new development? Whereas if you do it out in the green fields on the edge of suburbia, you're creating a brand new community, so you don't have all that existing community around you. So it's easier to plan blocks of homes and ensure that they're hopefully not overlooking each other, and usually it's easier.

Ludwina Dautovic: 15:34

So, nicola, here's a thought what if, instead of over developing the inner city areas and removing more of the limited free space I guess it's there what if they actually just built better infrastructure in the Greenfields area so they made it easier for us to live out here and easier to get in and out of town? We're lucky in Williams Landing We've got a train station walking distance, but when we were living in Point Cook before, we'd have to drive 20 minutes to get to Hoppers Crossing, which is ridiculous. They're very ridiculous.

Nicola Smith: 16:03

Yeah, I totally agree. So I actually wrote a LinkedIn post every day. I was so nervous about putting it up because it was my personal opinion and I thought, oh God, are people going to like this or not? I was relatively well accepted as a photo of me when I'm about five, standing on a sandpit out the front of my parents' house in the Greenfields in WA, and I wrote about how, when I was a kid, I didn't realise that mum had to catch three buses to get to the local shops and you know, like that it was all difficult from an infrastructure point of view Because, from my perspective, I played with all the kids on the road and it was, like you know, low scale and I had a great upbringing. So I think that's fine. I've got, you know, rose tinted glasses, how I grew up, but a lot of the Greenfields these days.

Nicola Smith: 16:49

The biggest problem is planning is fine. Like all of the town planners, we all seem to be doing a relatively decent job at, you know, designing the future suburbs and making sure they've got all the right facilities grand. The thing about planners is well, he don't implement these things. We put them on a plan but we don't build them, and so that's the job of either the state government funding the referral authorities. So, like your Melbourne waters or your public transport authorities or your big roads or you know like, those kind of authorities are doing their own forward planning. And they might look at an area like where you were and go, oh, we need to put a train out there, but we don't have enough people out there for the demand right now. We're going to hold off and instead we'll put the money down in the southeast because that's where the demand is, or whatever. So they've got their own strategic planning based on you know where they think the demand is. And the problem is that a lot of that strategic planning done by some of the big authorities just hasn't been keeping up with the amount of forward planning that we're doing for the future people of Victoria, and so that's one of the main reasons that the state government has said we need to stop planning new areas because we need to wait for those authorities to catch up, and that kind of makes sense. But, as you said, it would be lovely if, when we planned a community, that those facilities were provided there and then, because then it would make it so much easier for the people in these Greenfield areas.

Nicola Smith: 18:22

I do have one quick answer about that answer my own question.

Nicola Smith: 18:24

But developers, when they develop a new estate, they have to pay contributions like money to the state government and one of the really interesting conversations in the media has been around how much the money that the developers have been providing into these infrastructure funds, how much they've been used by the government to actually provide what they should have been providing at those localities.

Nicola Smith: 18:48

Because actually there's a discussion about whether the money is instead been repurposed for things like the level crossing removal and the train line around the east, you know, like things that aren't necessarily. You take the money from the developers doing the Greenfields, which should be providing maybe, a train out to those areas, but instead they use the money to do level crossing removal authority work in, you know, the southeast down near Stonnington or whatever. There's just been a bit of disparity and I think it's not an end of the world that the state government's taking stock and having a rethink. But, you know, do they really have the luxury of time? Because we've got more people needing more homes and it needs to be affordable and where are they going to live?

Ludwina Dautovic: 19:30

Great, segue, nicola, you read my mind, so I wanted to shift the conversation over to affordable housing and before we actually talk about it, I just realized that I'd love to know what the government definition is of affordable housing.

Nicola Smith: 19:48

Oh, don't. Even. So, if you were asking, know me in my office, should we give you this exact, perfect answer? And I cannot give it to you because I always get caught up. But there's social housing and affordable housing and there's housing affordability. There's like different slight tweaks on a variation. So I think the biggest thing is we need to provide housing for people that are in need. So there's an actual terminology that says if your income is under Blartibla, then you need to be getting, there needs to be some support and we need to be providing housing for those people. So there's that group. There's also key workers that you might have a percentage that you're required to provide for in developments. But there's the other space, which is ensuring that housing more broadly is affordable, and so, almost as planned as we need to think of all three spaces, because we need to ensure that we're looking after people that need housing and maybe can't afford it, but we also need to be making sure that housing for the general public, that we're thinking about affordability as a general concern, I guess.

Ludwina Dautovic: 20:52

How do you do that when the building materials are so expensive and jobs aren't even getting completed?

Nicola Smith: 20:58

Oh, I totally agree. So there's this really cool LinkedIn article that I'm trying to remember what the guy's name is, perkins Perko, wrote on LinkedIn recently and something like cost of a single bed apartment. I'm going to make this up like four times the cost of a single house and I was just like what? Sorry, like the cost of apartment living, like, if we're saying that too bad, so sad. We need to all live in apartments. We need to live more centrally because the broader cost to the state is less, because we can use existing infrastructure, we can be closer to jobs, congestion prices, blah, blah, blah. Ok, that makes sense, but if we don't end up homes that fit that bill in the inner city and they have to be built, but the cost of construction is so high, then I don't know what the actual answer is.

Ludwina Dautovic: 21:48

I mean, good point, but what about the conversion of offices that are sitting empty now?

Nicola Smith: 21:54

Yeah, yeah. So there's a thing. I went to a talk last night about embodied carbon which I thought was really cool and which is all about when we have buildings with circular economy stuff. So when we're building a building, we should do our best to think about its long term life or its life cycle. So we might be building it right now as an office building, but has it got the ability to be converted into a residential building moving forward? The reason that you do that is so that, just like you said, if you've got an office building and it's got maybe the bottom three levels as parking and you've decided to achieve the minimum height of a car park, which is lower than a bedroom, then in the future, if you ever want to convert it into a residential space, you're never going to be able to because that's always going to be used as a car park. So if we can instead think about it at the start when we're building a building, that building can stay in situ and its use can change. That's the general premise and that's good for the broader environment, which is this whole embodied carbon thing that I've been learning about.

Nicola Smith: 23:00

So we use carbon to construct a building, so you extract the raw materials out of the ground. You build the building and therefore there's a certain amount of carbon that was used to build that brick, for example, or put in that column, and that can be calculated. And if you keep that building as is and you can adapt it and turn it into homes, for example, from office say, and all you've had to do is maybe move some internal walls or change a bit of a facade, it's actually got a better environmental output result, whatever. Then it would be knocking it over and building a brand new suite of apartments. So yeah, there's environmental benefits as well in doing that adaptability. It's just whether the buildings right now can be adapted, and I'm not sure all of them can be.

Ludwina Dautovic: 23:42

Well, I'd imagine that an office space is obviously going to have bathrooms and kitchens in there. So wouldn't it be just a matter of you know, like changing internal walls? I remember speaking to a developer designer a couple of years back. It's more of a futurist in terms of housing design and looking at. You know, if we were to stay in the one place with the duration of our life, for example, how could you build so that you can just internally easily change the structure of the room? So he was talking about walls that can be moved. Or, you know, sections of the house that can be divided off. If you needed a granny flat sort of area down the road, you know, once your kids grow and left home, etc. All these different things that you can do internally, I don't think there'd be that much that you would.

Nicola Smith: 24:21

No, I mean like I'm not a builder. So once you get a planning permit and then you go to the building department for a building permit, there are different classifications under the building code of Australia. So I imagine from memory from working in a council many years ago, there's particular requirements if it's an office building and there's different requirements if it's somewhere that you're going to reside, so it's probably around openable windows or safety, things like that.

Ludwina Dautovic: 24:44

Oh, absolutely would be. Yeah, yeah, I don't imagine that.

Nicola Smith: 24:48

But you could probably convert that, like you could probably switch window out or you could probably cause.

Nicola Smith: 24:52

I don't know if it's going to be that hard, but I love that idea.

Nicola Smith: 24:55

There was this really cool developer when I first moved to Melbourne. I remember when I met him somewhere in Essendon, from memory, and he had got this approval for three story townhouses and they were sort of banked up a hill, so maybe say, maybe, say three rows of them, and then looked out on a water body and he got it approved as, yeah, these three story townhouses, but he only built them as two story, but he put in the opportunity for those two stories to be converted into three stories. And I always thought that was so cool because it meant when the people moved into the area or they bought that townhouse, they knew that all those other townhouses in front of them and behind them had been approved, perhaps these stories, and they were just building it at the, buying it at the cost of two stories, but they had the ability to go up and know that there wasn't going to be like objections and blah, blah, blah and it was all approved plans. I thought that was cool back in the day. I still think that's got relevance really.

Ludwina Dautovic: 25:55

So I have one final question before we wrap up In terms of housing accessibility and affordability in areas that get developed whether it's greenfields, infields, brownfields is there a requirement to have a certain level of how ever it is that you identify affordable housing within those developments? Because if you're just building houses or apartments or whatever, they have a certain cost value to them, and then you don't have any way for somebody that's got a lesser budget. So think back in the day I talk about this a lot Remember the block of flats that are now, by the way, getting renovated and sold for millions. But you know, I remember the one two-bedroom walk-ups, the flats, and I know people say oh yeah, but their apartments say they're not really. Apartments are actually quite different to these block of flats, right?

Ludwina Dautovic: 26:43

Totally and you could guarantee there'd be somewhere in the suburb A block of flats. If not, you know two, three, four of them. They just don't seem to be considered these days in any developments that get built. So where are people on a lower budget, or my kids, for example, with 30 and 28? Thankfully they've looked home, but the rents are ridiculous. Yeah, totally, you know. If they want to live in the inner city, what are they supposed to do?

Nicola Smith: 27:07

Yeah, I completely agree. So I think there is just talking about this. With a friend of mine there was actually looking in Adelaide at different properties and we were talking about really expensive areas, you know, and whether you could put apartments in there and would people move into the apartments? And I think there's something to be said about people wanting to live in place. You know there's a talk about aging in place, which means when you the duana, when you get to be an old, old lady and you live in your big McMansion and you don't want to move out of your McMansion right, because you like living in that area, because you know we friends around, hands around, exactly, and so you know there's a big push right now for aging in place, which is ensuring that we've got Smaller housing options in areas where people have been living in these big McMansions and then potentially, if they're not character based, moving those houses into, you know, developing flats or apartments or townhouses or options. It's happened a lot in Port Melbourne's. A lot of young people now live in Port Melbourne because you know They've kept the character areas but they've also redeveloped other areas as well.

Nicola Smith: 28:11

But yeah, that question about the affordability stuff, it could be an angle that the state government could push a little bit. Now that I sort of think about it, because we talked about in about five years ago and there was a lot of discussion about build to rent. So that's when like one person owns the whole building. So like a developer might develop a whole apartment and essentially rent out all those different Apartments in that apartment building. The idea was that was supposed to be more affordable.

Nicola Smith: 28:37

Like I think they've got good finance outcomes from the government for, you know, lending in those areas, but it's just not really worked. Some local councils have requirements for five percent or one percent provision of Affordable housing. When you're doing Greenfield Estates and if you do it you know there's maybe a fast-track process or maybe you can provide greater density. Or you know like there's a bit of a trade-off, like if you give us affordable housing, we will enable you to put more houses into that area or whatever. So they have all been trialling different ways to do it. I remember like if you had it at a state government level in Planning policy and it required it, then I think there would be more teeth and more ways for the government to enforce it. But right now it's just a high level good to do kind of position, rather than necessarily something that's being enforced.

Ludwina Dautovic: 29:28

I think it's something that needs requirements around it, because otherwise it's cool. It's just a mess, like the whole housing Situation in Australia is a mess.

Nicola Smith: 29:38

Well, I mean, I look at one of the girls in my office who lives in an apartment in the inner city and you know she that's a big, massive sort of skyscraper number and she's came to move into another apartment, doesn't want to live out in the greenfields, really happy with apartment living, but even for her to rent, like I remember, and she's like sending a good pay, she's, you know, had a professional job for five years, you know like tick, tick, tick, been in a relationship, all that stuff, and she could not get a rental. And that just blows my mind. So I think, you know, I guess this is where the state government's coming from they're trying to ensure that there are more Opportunities for apartments in the inner city. I don't think that's a bad thing, but I think they need to think more broadly because otherwise people are just gonna say I don't want that. You know that whole NIMBY not in my backyard. So, okay, cool, put apartments into enable people to have cheaper housing, but please don't put it here in my street in South Melbourne, you know, whatever.

Nicola Smith: 30:35

So I think they're gonna have to think about Strategic areas to put in. Is it around the new train stations or the new train lines that they've underground. Probably you know where are these key areas that people would go. Okay, we understand that that's a good spot, for it enables people access to transport, doesn't increase the amount of parking, enables, you know you to get to your employment easier, all that sort of stuff. So I think they're on the right track. They just haven't quite landed it and I don't think they've got the benefit of time. I think they need to really get their skates on. Yeah and yeah, you know, greenfield is not a bad word. Greenfield's housing is lovely as well, so we just need to make sure we're providing the facilities out there too.

Ludwina Dautovic: 31:14

Yeah, absolutely, and, for anyone who's listening, if you are looking for affordable and accessible housing, the room exchange has a number of homeowners on our platform in spare rooms that are looking for people to rent them, so that is one alternative. Now, nicola, before we go, why don't you tell the listers how they can find out more about you?

Nicola Smith: 31:32

So sweet. Well, we are on all the socials, so it's niche planning studio is the website, so wwwnicheplanningstudiocomau. We're really active on Insta and really active on LinkedIn. So, yeah, just look us up and you can follow me and my team of. Well, I know, I reckon they're probably average age of about 27 or give or take. So it's young word, fresh ideas, pretty innovative and great to work with.

Ludwina Dautovic: 31:56

so reach out Any planning, and we'll have all those links on our show notes page as well. So, nicola, I'm so glad that we bumped into each other down in Polo Bay and I'm looking forward to catching up with dinner soon.

Nicola Smith: 32:08

Yeah, I'm not sitting in a car like, I'm literally sitting in a fun melty.

Ludwina Dautovic: 32:14

Well, look, hey, if anyone's listening, you got to do a podcast interview. The car actually provides some really good sound quality, so how funny will you adapt? Thank you so much, nicola. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. Bye, thanks for listening. If you're looking for your next rental, head over to the room exchange, australia's first verified house sharing platform. Our profiles make it easy to match you based on personality, values and lifestyle, and you can choose to rent or offset your rent, saving you time and money. To find out more, go to the room exchange Com. You can connect with us across our social media platforms at the room exchange or email Admin at the room exchange comm.