TENS of thousands of new home sites will be created around Melbourne under a dramatic State Government strategy to tackle the housing affordability crisis and cope with the city's population boom.
Premier John Brumby will announce today that all available land within Melbourne's urban growth boundary will be zoned residential — one of the biggest land releases in the city's history — in a bid to give more young families and first-time buyers the chance to get into the property market.
The fast-tracked home sites will be concentrated in five outer-suburban growth corridors: Wyndham and Melton-Caroline Springs in the west, Hume in the north, Whittlesea in the north-east and Casey-Cardinia in the east.
These are, of course, all areas with appalling to non-existent public transport. If we're planning on housing thousands more people in those areas, they'd better be planning to seriously upgrade the services to those areas. A couple of new bus services simply won't cut it. In fact, they'll need to build new rail lines - which would of course require spending money, and getting the famously unwilling Lynne Kosky to do some actual work for a change. So I'm not optimistic.
Still -
Today's speech is the first in a series expected this year to outline what the Government plans to do to ensure Victoria has sufficient services and infrastructure for future growth.
They will focus on transport congestion, regional Victoria, preventive health, climate change and "social inclusion".
I can't tell you how much I hope that they're actually going to seriously tackle transport congestion. Their track record on the issue isn't good; but who knows? Maybe they recognise that they've pushed things as far as they can on the issue and the commuters are getting angry enough to vote for the other side. Capacity needs to be upgraded, and very soon.
My fingers are crossed.
