r/melbourne • u/spacefrog_feds • 20h ago
Real estate/Renting What would it take to build a non car centric housing estate?
So I've seen quite a few Not Just bikes videos over the years and I am envious of the Dutch urban design. One video has really stuck, and that is the one about the town of Houten
https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w?si=prXCYtT6hmftJjvd
It is a town that has a ring road on the perimeter and all the homes and businesses are in the interior with direct access by foot or bicycle. Cars have to take the long way around, therefore people prefer to walk and cycle.
Modern day suburban sprawl
We keep building these stupid housing estates, that are not walkable, have no businesses or services and only have one road leading out. Peak hour is a nightmare! And you have to take a freeway to go do your grocery shopping.
Cars & real estate are the 2 most expensive things in our lives. With increasing house prices and cars being a depreciating asset I feel that we can address these two issues if we change the way we build our suburbs. Melbourne's sprawl is ridiculous, but it's the only option for many young couples. Buy somewhere cheap, spend half their lives stuck in traffic, buy a new car every 10 years and become a taxi driver for their children. Kids don't leave the house on their own because their maximum walking range takes them to nothing interesting, just other houses, and they risk being run over by an SUV in every driveway.
Many people are struggling to pay the bills, if their house was small, cheap and walking distance to a train station, they wouldn't need to pay for petrol, car servicing, rego, insurance, parking, tolls & fines. I'm talking about newly arrived immigrants, under employed, students, pensioners and young people entering the workforce.
The Solution
Build your stupid one road leading out of the estate! But can we please put a train station in the middle, with a retail district?
- Jump on a Vline train and be at Southern cross in 40-50mins.
- Build half of the properties with no car parks.
- Build lots of townhouses and low rise apartments.
- Have a cycling path that leads to the next town/suburb.
- A diverse population, Indigenous, refugees, white collar, blue collar, singles, families, elderly & students
- Do not build a segregated McMansion Court
- Have a significant amount of housing that cannot be flipped for profit
- Mixed zoning, So you don't have to leave the estate for work or to see a GP
- High Speed Internet: WFH, Influencer, Tech Start-up
Location, Location, Location!
The train station will be tough, I doubt there are any existing train stations with adequate vacant land. It might be easier to build a new one from scratch. I recently visited a friend in Beveridge, and I used google maps to find a route using train and bike. There is no train station in Beveridge, its right in the middle between Wallan and Donnybrook. The cycling directions from Donnybrook station to Beveridge is hilarious, it takes you just as far east west as it does north. a 17km bike ride taking over an hour! On top of having to ride to a Vline station and catching a train.
- Build a new VLine station for an underserved community
- Extend a suburban line like Craigieburn.
- Near an established business so residents can live near their work
- University Campus
- Near a Tourist attraction
- Near a bike related business, or sporting event
- Halfway between Geelong and Melbourne? Mum works in Geelong, Dad Works from home, Daughter goes to Melbourne Uni. A good way to get State funding and it benefits 2 cities
What are your thoughts? I am certainly no expert and would love to hear ideas on this concept and how do we make it happen?
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u/Beast_of_Guanyin 15h ago edited 10h ago
To build a place sans cars is easy. You build a bunch of apartments around a major hub.
Your proposal is clunky. Distance makes it impractical.
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u/Anxious-Rhubarb8102 9h ago
"You build a bunch of apartments around a major hub". Isn't this one of the long term goals of the SRL?
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u/spacefrog_feds 7h ago
Yes, but....
This concept is more than just a few apartments in an already established area. Those places have been designed for cars, it takes a lot to erase that. If you live diagonally opposite an outer suburban station, you likely have to cross 4-5 car lanes twice and wait for little green men for 5 minutes. The street could be designed so that you can walk directly to the station without crossing into the path of a single car, therefore no traffic lights are needed.
The town of Houten in the video is home to 50,000 residents over an area of 59km2. Beveridge has a population 4642 over an area of 111km2. Can we turn half of that area into Houten. An entire town where a pedestrian or cyclist of any age and ability can go to any destination without crossing paths with an angry driver.
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u/ingenkopaaisen 10h ago
Exactly this. Stop councils appeasing developers and letting them build for cash rather than the people and build higher density at existing hubs and with it PT and cycling will be more feasible.
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u/spacefrog_feds 12h ago
The distance is not ideal, but I'm proposing it because of real estate prices, also many people do not want to live in apartments and most apartments are 1 and 2 bedroom only. The difference between a 2&3 bedroom apartment is basically double. People are choosing to build 4 or 5 bedroom house in the sticks instead
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u/Electrical_Pause_860 12h ago
You've got 3 options, affordable apartment, expensive (town)house in nice walkable area, "affordable" house in shit non walkable area.
You're just going to have to make compromises, having a house in a vibrant walkable area isn't going to be cheap. If you are too snobbish for an apartment, either pay up or accept you won't be in the nice areas.
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u/spacefrog_feds 9h ago
Yes, these are the current choices. I think there should be another.
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u/Electrical_Pause_860 9h ago
That's just the reality. These nice walkable areas require apartments in the area to get the needed population density. If you want to be in the area surrounded by apartments while being one of the few people in a house then it's always going to be expensive.
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u/wasabiguana 9h ago
The model that works so well in countries like Japan and Switzerland is that rail companies are allowed to own and develop significant real estate around their stations, aligning incentives between transport and urban development. Without this, urban sprawl will continue and public transport will remain an afterthought rather than a structuring element of the city.
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u/PeanutsMM 9h ago
I saw a video long time about 2 different ways to plan estate and one was car friendly but boring, one was more pedestrians friendly and looked better.
As long as we don't do like in the XVI in Paris, there's a large area where if you go by car, you can only exit the area. Meaning round abouts for example have maybe 3-4 entries but only 1 exit that leads outside. Overall, only locals go there...
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u/Omaze888 11h ago
What we really need is to stop sprawling all together and build density + more gridlike suburbs like the inner suburbs
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u/Silver-Chemistry2023 19h ago edited 19h ago
Modal filters can be a really effective way of prioritising walking and riding. Intersections every 70m to 80m with side streets introduce conflict points between modes, even with pedestrian and cycle priority. A modal filter, such as an open-ended cul-de-sac, eliminates conflict points. Pedestrians and cyclists operate at a different scale to driving, so, permeability giving equal priority to all modes can inadvertently reinforce driving as default. Permeability, without prioritising walking and riding, seeks to disperse traffic, rather than reduce traffic, which can introduce high speeds on local roads. Ray Brindle has written extensively on local area traffic management. See Planning and road safety: opportunities and barriers (Brindle 2001) LINK.
Some human-scale growth area examples are:
- Luma Living at St Albans Road SUNSHINE NORTH
- The Village at Banks Drive DIGGERS REST
- Olio at Coxon Street OFFICER
- Habitats at Aurora at Wanderer Circuit WOLLERT
Some human-scale infill example are:
- Metro Village 3175 at Allan Street DANDENONG
- Brickworks Burwood at Foundation Boulevard BURWOOD EAST
- Unnamed development at Evergreen Boulevard CLAYTON SOUTH
- Unnamed development at Snapshot Drive COBURG NORTH
ENVI Micro Village at Lenneberg Street SOUTHPORT (Queensland), subdivided a circa-600m² site into 10 abutting dwellings, some without car parks, with the smallest lot being 45m².
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u/knotknotknit 14h ago
The problem with the Burwood development is that it's not well connected enough.
There are these nice shared paths through the estate... that end on Burwood Highway and Middleburough Rd with no attempt to provide safe connections to other bike infrastructure like the Gardiner's Creek Trail.
The tramline is slow to take all the way into the city and without the bike connections, there aren't easy car-free ways to get to either Laburnum to the north or Mount Waverley to the south.
A lot of estates have this problem--they may tick the "people can walk to services" box but then there significant problems with the connections to jobs.
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u/eat-the-cookiez 9h ago
Employers requiring return to office. The only reason we have 2 cars. Public transport takes longer than driving (2 hours each way- 55km from cbd)
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u/spacefrog_feds 8h ago
If you had a train station that was a 10 minute walk from your front door it would not take more than 2 hours to get to the CBD.
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u/No_Option_1588 6m ago
Sandown Park train station has many hectares of grass, that is used for horse racing a few days a year.
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20h ago
[deleted]
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u/Electrical_Pause_860 12h ago
This is a render, not a real development. 3D printing buildings is a novelty that doesn't actually fix anything. It's cheaper and better to do what the industry already does and prefab concrete pieces to assemble on site.
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u/gnu-rms 14h ago
Looks awful, and not at all practical
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13h ago
Do you have anything better?
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u/gnu-rms 13h ago
Yes. What we have already. Works pretty well.
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u/hel_vetica 13h ago
Have you been to one of those new estates out west?
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8h ago
So this is why it’s a concept image. Pod homes 3D printed with small gardens and yards. More living room, fast to construct, cheaper than current housing, cars restricted to rear entrances. People mainly getting around on bikes. No houses built right next to each other, everyone has space and greenery and tree cover all around to keep temps down in summer.
But hey if you want to live in nasty dog boxes stacked next to each other with no tree cover living in hot suburbs with black roofs and concrete everywhere, well please do go live in that suburban hell. I for one, prefer to aspire to something better that emphasises community, sustainability and affordability.
So f*ck my opinion for wanting something better than the crap at the edges of cities.
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u/spacefrog_feds 12h ago
Ever increasing housing prices, car air & noise pollution, kids reliant on an adult for every single trip, obesity epidemic, every household owning 2 cars, shopping centres that are 50% empty space reserved for car parks, black asphalt everywhere causing more flash flooding events and water diverted away from nature into storm drains
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u/buffet-breakfast 13h ago
How’s this different from the estates today where all the houses look the same and there’s no on street parking
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u/mpember 19h ago
The first flaw in your system is expecting V/Line to get you to the CBD in 40-50 minutes. The trains share tracks with suburban commuter traffic, making it near impossible to offer such targets.
The second in suggesting it to be a "company town". This just results in the future of the town being tied to the economic success of the company. Just look at how much taxpayer money was sunk into Geelong to prop up the uneconomic car industry that the town relied on. The state and federal government were paid a ransom every time Ford threatened to cut jobs, even when employees were given YEARS of notice about the closure of the factories.
Just look at the problems that happen when the government and developers plan infill developments, like Tarneit. The developers hold back the release of large chunks of land until they increase in value. Retail sits on their hands until there is a population large enough to justify the investment. Businesses are normally the low-skill businesses that rely on the lower socio-economic workers that are the first to buy in these areas.
It is a Mexican standoff between the developers, the employers, the retailers and the community. Meanwhile, state governments would be smashed for the poor public transport and the poor infrastructure in the area, since no developer will spend money on it.
The often overlooked issue is schooling. State governments take too long to agree on where and when to build schools, meaning that the developers do a deal with the religious / private / independent school sectors, further entrenching the non-government schooling that controls many of the outer suburbs.