A decades-long absence of medium-density homes in suburban Adelaide’s housing market – dubbed “the missing middle” – will be plugged by a new initiative, the state government says.
Planning Minister Nick Champion is set to announce a move to “bring back missing middle housing”, which he defines as low-rise, medium-density home types, such as duplexes, manor homes and small apartment buildings.
Under the initiative, “missing middle” housing-types would be added to a government “pattern book” of pre-approved designs bypassing regular planning processes – thereby incentivising developers to build more medium-density homes.
The pattern book is scheduled to be ready to use before the year’s end.
Peter Koulizos, an adjunct senior fellow at Adelaide University’s Australian Centre for Housing Research, said the state’s planning laws have prohibited missing middle housing types in recent decades.
“The missing middle is what we’ve been missing for a few decades,” he said.
“The choice was either something really small or very close to the city, or something bigger but a long way out of the city.
“Now (following the new initiative), you can have something mid-size, say two or three bedrooms, in the inner or middle-ring suburbs.”
Mr Koulizos said manor houses – properties that looked like mansions but contained multiple dwellings – had not been seen in Adelaide for “many, many years”.
“I’ve seen it in Melbourne. It looks like a mansion, but when you look at the letterbox, there’s lots of little letterboxes rather than just the one, and it works really well,” he said.
“It can blend into the character of the area because from the front it looks like one building.”
Mr Koulizos said small apartment blocks had not been built in South Australia recently.
“If you travel the suburbs, you’ll see the walk-up flats of the 60s and 70s. The cream brick ones, there might be groups of four or six or eight, single-storey, double-storey,” he said.
“Then we stopped building those, and people, if they wanted a new place, went further out where the city meets the country. What I would call affordable housing of the 60s and 70s, we haven’t built that up until now.
“It’s like we’re going back to the future.”
The government said the homes – sized between a single detached house and a large apartment tower – would provide alternative housing options for people who did not want to to live in a high-rise apartment building or an outer growth area.
The state is “piloting” an SA Housing Trust manor house at Blair Athol, which will include six homes available for private ownership through a rent-to-own scheme.
Plans for the Forster St development were approved earlier this month by the State Commission Assessment Panel.
Mr Champion said missing middle homes would “give South Australians a genuine new option to live affordably in the suburbs they know and love”.