Volume 1: Melbourne For Sale - Only Developers Need Apply

Picture Melbourne in 2051.

You step outside for your morning walk and immediately discover two things: sunlight is now a luxury item, and your local street has been “activated” into a permanent state of congestion. The tram is packed. The footpath is a slalom course. The nearest school is “coming soon”. So is the upgraded train line. So is the drainage fix. So is the open space. So is the basic idea that density might arrive with the things that make it liveable.

But don’t worry, the housing targets were met.

You look up at the skyline that has somehow migrated from the CBD into every suburban centre, and you start to suspect the Victorian Government has been re-watching Blade Runner, not as a dystopic future, but as an inspirational planning case study. Less cautionary tale, more implementation guide. Somewhere in Spring Street, those in charge of planning have apparently watched a flying car thread its way between megatowers and thought: Yes. That. But with less community consultation.

And that’s the thing.

What’s confronting about Victoria’s current planning direction, particularly through the Activity Centre Program, isn’t just the scale of change being proposed. It’s the casual confidence with which the State seems willing to lock in density first and sort out the consequences later and ignore communities along the way. Infrastructure, services, housing mix, build quality, genuine affordability, all treated as optional extras to be discussed at some point in a future budget cycle that never quite arrives.

---

To understand how we got here, you need to look at the ecosystem and, in particular, the three forces apparently driving planning in Victoria. Call them the three horsemen of Melbourne’s community apocalypse (I know apocalypse is a bit dramatic, but bear with me).

The first is government, operating under acute fiscal pressure, diminishing patience and the age old attitude that it just knows better than the communities it is elected to serve and, in any case, they are all just NIMBYs anyway.

Victoria is broke, or close enough to it to matter. Years of capital-heavy commitments, poor budget management, and structural deficits have left the State with limited capacity to do the hard, expensive work of city-building: schools before enrolments spike, transport before congestion locks in, drainage before flood maps change, public housing renewal without displacement.

Faced with that reality, the government has reached for the cheapest lever available: planning controls.

Rezoning and 'market led' density costs nothing. Density targets through 'market led' planning are free. Funding infrastructure and services is not. But announcing “more homes” is politically efficient, so they leave the infrastructure commitment part out.

We also see a government increasingly approaching growth with its cap in hand. Density becomes the fundraising strategy, ignoring communities becomes the plan, and uplift becomes the incentive. Planning certainty becomes the currency offered in exchange for development activity. Public land, including public housing sites, is reframed as an “underutilised opportunity”: a balance-sheet asset to be unlocked rather than a social good to be protected.

And in that framing, Melbourne’s suburbs aren’t treated as thriving communities ready to welcome responsible, well-designed density as part of a holistic response to the housing crisis (with supply as one key lever among many). They’re treated as obstacles, “NIMBYs” to be managed, overruled, and put back in their place. Suburbs become blank slates for developer-led outcomes, where the fine-grained character of streets, local culture, and the everyday micro-communities that make Melbourne Melbourne are seen as expendable collateral.

This isn’t alleged corruption. It’s something more banal and more dangerous: budget-driven governance. When you can’t fund the city you need, you start treating density as the revenue plan, and suburbs as blank slates where “obstructionists” can be overruled and local character becomes a necessary sacrifice.

And it doesn’t stop at planning. The Victorian Government is entertaining reforms that would allow a strata building to be sold without unanimous consent. In a 12-unit block, 9 owners could vote yes and the remaining 3 could be legally forced out of their homes.

That isn’t a minor technical adjustment. It’s a fundamental shift in power and it will land hardest on the most vulnerable. These are often the more affordable owner-occupied apartments, meaning the people displaced may not be able to buy back into the same suburb (or the market at all). And it won’t just hit owners: lower-rent blocks are precisely the stock most likely to be hoovered up for redevelopment, displacing renters who have the least capacity to absorb higher rents elsewhere.

Seen together, planning deregulation, reduced appeal rights, and now forced collective sales, this isn’t reform in isolation, but a coordinated package designed to strip out friction for redevelopment while pretending each piece stands alone.

---

The second horseman is YIMBY ideology, which provides the moral and rhetorical cover for this approach.

In its loudest and most influential form, contemporary YIMBYism has reduced the housing crisis to a single commandment: supply, supply, supply. Zoning is destiny. Approvals are salvation. Any friction, community input, planning scrutiny, infrastructure sequencing, is treated not as a legitimate concern, but as a moral failing standing between the city and affordability.

It is a wonderfully simple story.

It is also built on what can only be described as the lie of trickle-down housing, the idea that if enough market-priced dwellings are built at the top, affordability will eventually filter down to those who need it most.

The problem is that the evidence does not support this claim. In fact, it points in the opposite direction.

Canada offers the clearest cautionary tale. There, governments embraced precisely the logic now being championed here: aggressive up-zoning, accelerated approvals, density at scale, and faith that market supply would eventually resolve affordability pressures. Cities like Toronto and Vancouver have delivered record levels of apartment construction under this model. And yet prices have continued to climb, land values have surged, and housing stress has deepened. Supply increased. Affordability did not.

The lesson is uncomfortable, but clear. Market-priced housing does not become affordable simply because more of it exists. As urban geographer Kate Shaw has observed, no amount of market-priced housing will solve the affordability crisis we face. This is before accounting for the realities of construction economics: rising material and labour costs, financing risk, and the need for a healthy profit margin, all of which flow directly into the final price paid by buyers and renters.

Without structural intervention, large-scale public and non-market housing, binding affordability requirements, land controls and long-term stewardship - new dwellings are rapidly absorbed by higher-income households, investors and speculative demand. The market clears. The crisis remains.

This does not mean supply does not matter. It does. But it does mean that supply alone is not a strategy, and pretending otherwise risks repeating, almost line by line, the mistakes other countries are now trying to unwind.

Yet this is precisely where YIMBY advocacy is almost non-existent. Advocacy for a holistic strategy to solve the housing crisis.

Unlike most non-profit housing advocates, YIMBY groups are strikingly fixated on private supply while largely ignoring the measures that are needed with increased supply to actually deliver affordability in practice: tax reform, public and subsidised housing, non-market housing, mandatory inclusionary zoning, and permanent affordability targets.

That omission is not incidental.

Public and non-market housing do more than add dwellings. They change market dynamics. They dampen speculative demand. They place downward pressure on rents and prices at the lower end. And crucially, they reduce the residual land values and profit volume available to private developers for a given parcel of land.

It is therefore at least worth observing that the solutions most minimally called for from YIMBY advocacy are also the ones least compatible with maximising developer returns. Supply-only reform leaves the underlying profit model untouched. Structural affordability reform does not.

It is also worth noting, purely as a matter of transparency, that many prominent YIMBY organisations are funded by tech billionaires and philanthropic vehicles with strong ideological commitments to deregulation, and maintain notably close relationships with major developers and property interests. A convenient alignment of worldview and beneficiaries.

Even on the supply argument’s own turf, the numbers don’t stack up. In Melbourne in 2023, Prosper Australia’s water-use analysis found 27,408 dwellings were completely empty and another 70,453 were “barely used”, 97,861 homes sitting idle or close to it, in the middle of a housing crisis. And on census night in 2021, Greater Melbourne recorded 198,685 unoccupied private dwellings (10%). Meanwhile, the planning pipeline itself is already overflowing: the Municipal Association of Victoria says Victoria has “more than 100,000 dwellings approved by councils that remain unbuilt”, not because councils are blocking, but because projects stall for market, financing and delivery reasons.

If we can simultaneously have nearly 98,000 homes sitting empty or barely used, around 200,000 unoccupied dwellings on census night, and over 100,000 approved dwellings still not built, then the claim that “planning is the problem” starts to look less like concern for housing affordability and more like a business plan for developers.

When supply is treated as the only metric that matters, it becomes remarkably easy to ignore the harder questions: who captures value, who bears risk, and who is quietly displaced along the way.

For government, the avoidance of public and subsidised housing is not ideological mystery, it is a budgetary necessity. Public housing is expensive. Non-market housing requires capital, land, long-term stewardship and an acceptance that the State must actively shape outcomes. Market-led density, by contrast, is cheap. Rezoning costs nothing. Planning reform is almost free. Hand the problem to the private market, add a light dusting of developer contributions, and you can claim the numbers without carrying the cost (and outsourcing the real cost to communities). In that light, the government’s enthusiasm for supply-only, YIMBY-friendly solutions makes perfect sense: they allege affordability without requiring public spending.

---

Which brings us to the third horseman and in truth, the oldest one of all: large developers.

Long before the Activity Centre Program, long before YIMBYs, long before the current housing crisis became the justification for everything, Melbourne’s planning system has existed in a permanent tug-of-war. On one side: communities trying to (sometime unreasonably) protect place, amenity and liveability. On the other: developers, speculators, banks and major landowners (sometimes legitimately) pushing, relentlessly, for fewer constraints, faster approvals, and greater freedom to extract value from land. And in the middle, Councils trying to find the right balance.

This is not new. It is the background condition of planning in Melbourne.

Whilst developers are the villains in this pantomime, not all blame can be put at their doorstep. They are rational actors with rapacious incentives, operating exactly as the system encourages them to. For decades they have sought what they are now finally being offered at scale: reduced planning controls, narrowed appeal rights, faster pathways to approval, and the ability to consolidate, demolish and rebuild with minimal friction.

But the system they’re exploiting is bigger than planning. Australian property is treated, domestically and offshore, as a “safe” store of wealth, and our comparatively permissive settings for foreign capital mean demand can keep flowing into new stock regardless of whether locals can afford it. That capital doesn’t come to solve affordability; it comes to park money, hedge risk, and chase uplift, padding balance sheets while communities carry the disruption.

When land is rezoned, land values rise. When certainty increases, speculative behaviour follows. When scrutiny is reduced, yield expands. When volumes increase, so do profits. And when housing becomes an investment pipeline first and a social good second, we don’t get affordability, we get a slow drift back toward feudalism: a permanent renter class paying tribute to a property-owning tier.

None of this is new or a surprise. It is how land markets work. And it is why developers have always been the wolves at the gate of major planning reform, not waiting passively, but lobbying, shaping the narrative, and pushing hard to lift the constraints the moment they stand in the way of the next uplift.

What deserves scrutiny is not that developers pursue profit or that investors seeks safe havens for capital, but that the system is now so consistently bending to accommodate it and then expresses surprise at the consequences. Character erosion. Displacement pressure. Housing homogeneity. Infrastructure lag. Community resentment. These outcomes are not aberrations. They are the predictable by-products of a planning environment designed to privilege speed, scale and yield.

Under the current ecosystem, these familiar risk patterns are emerging. Public housing redeveloped in ways that displace existing residents under the banner of “renewal”. Activity centres optimised for maximum yield rather than long-term liveability. Smaller apartments crowding out family housing. Infrastructure perpetually promised “later”. Risk pushed downstream onto owners’ corporations and residents when quality fails. Eviction rights handed to hungry developers unable to convince an entire building to sell up.

These are not predictions. They are patterns, observable across jurisdictions, across cycles, and increasingly, across Victoria itself.

---

And yet, when communities push back against these risks, not to oppose growth, but to shape it, the debate is immediately reframed.

This is where the NIMBY/YIMBY binary has done enormous damage.

There are, of course, fringe voices who make indefensible claims about who “deserves” to live in certain suburbs. They exist in every debate. They are loud, quotable, and politically useful. But they are a tiny minority and treating them as representative is deeply dishonest.

The reality, across Melbourne, is very different. The vast majority of people now being tarred as “NIMBYs” by the Government and YIMBY movement are not anti-housing at all. They recognise the housing crisis. They support growth. Many have children, friends or family locked out of secure housing themselves. What they are asking for is not stasis, but responsible density, growth informed by local knowledge, infrastructure capacity, and lived experience, rather than dictated from a minister’s office high above Spring Street.

To collapse that position into selfish obstruction is a distortion.

Yet this flattening is exactly what YIMBY rhetoric increasingly enables. By branding all dissent as unreasonable, YIMBYs avoid engaging with substance. They turn a complex planning conversation into a moral test. Question blanket up-zoning? NIMBY. Ask about infrastructure? NIMBY. Raise concerns about displacement, housing mix or quality? NIMBY.

This is not good-faith debate. It is a rhetorical manoeuvre, one that conveniently clears the path for developer interests while absolving government of the need to justify trade-offs.

And it has consequences. When all community concern is dismissed as bad faith, governments stop listening. Councils are sidelined. Planning becomes centralised and abstract. The only thing left standing is the number and the developers best placed to maximise it.

For example, the Activity Centre Program speaks the language of engagement, but practises something closer to containment. Information is is generic. Drop in centres located outside of the proposed rezoned area. Maps hidden behind layers of clicks. Community engagement processes meticulously designed to manufacture consent and stifle dissent. Even when negative submissions make their way through, these are received, summarised, and overridden where they threaten the core objective. Councils are consulted, then sidelined. Communities are invited to participate, provided they accept almost all the outcomes are already locked in and are non-negotiable.

That is the ecosystem now shaping Melbourne’s Activity Centres. Not villains acting alone, but a reinforcing system: developers pushing at the gate, YIMBY ideology clearing the moral ground, and a government increasingly willing to trade substance for speed, the alleviation of budget pressure and the meeting of top down targets that the Government won't even release the modelling behind.

Over time, trust and participation erodes. Not because people are ambivalent, but because they recognise when the outcome has already been decided.

This is the environment Melbourne for Sale is interrogating. Not to argue against growth. Not to deny the housing crisis. Supply is part of the answer. Density will be necessary. But market led supply alone has never delivered affordability, and density without responsibility has never delivered great cities. This idea that planning is the cause of the housing crisis is frankly laughable.

---

In the volumes ahead, this series will examine the questions that have been deliberately pushed to the margins: the role of social and public housing; the land-price effects of rezoning; the quality risks of accelerated approvals paired with poor building regulations and the buck being passed to new residents; the squeeze on family housing; infrastructure sequencing and funding; parking, heritage, sunlight, solar panels and topography; land banking and speculative consolidation; eviction rights for developers and the growing displacement pressure embedded in “renewal” narratives.

These are not conclusions. They are lines of inquiry, grounded in evidence, experience, and concern, that deserve to be explored honestly rather than waved away with slogans.

For a while, the Government's approach may look like progress. Targets ticked off. Maps released. Rhetoric dialled up. A confident voice booming from behind the curtain, insisting that everything is under control.

But eventually, the curtain slips.

When density arrives without services, when congestion becomes permanent, when public housing residents are displaced in the name of “renewal”, when new residents are left holding the can on leaking buildings, when communities realise they were managed rather than heard, the bill arrives. It always does.

The question now isn’t whether Victoria needs more homes. It does. The question is whether this government will continue to choose slogans over substance, and developer convenience over community trust...and whether it has misread the political cost of that choice.

Come November, voters will decide whether this government deserves another term after treating our suburbs like blank slates and our communities like an obstacle to be overruled.

If the only plan is “build more, faster”, while the same structural forces keep prices high and renters insecure, then this isn’t housing policy. It’s managed demolition of community, dressed up as reform.

When the curtain finally falls, voters tend to notice who was pulling the levers and who was left holding the bill.