[+] Liveability Crucial to Solving Density Puzzle

“In the end, it’s what goes into a spreadsheet that counts.” Kylie Legge, founder and chief executive of Place Score, knows that feasibility is important to developers. Legge also knows that communities want and need to have a say about what is built in their area, and that they are affected by what is developed and how. The usual way to resolve this has been through community engagement and similar measures via policy and planning frameworks. But community engagement isn’t always successful. So what if there was another way to understand what a community wants and needs before development happens, and that input came from as many living in the community as possible? Legge thinks she has the answer with Place Score, a method of measuring how a community experiences a place, how liveable it is and what residents say is needed to improve it. “It’s about ensuring we’re considering that voice of the community, about what’s important to those community members in the mix of our decision-making,” Legge says. Community engagement drawbacks Legge says a lot of time, money and effort is spent on community engagement by developers and governments but results are often mixed. “There’s quite a few problems that need to be solved around engagement,” she says. “One is that it tends to not be very representative, it’s often not very rigorous and not comparable. “We spend, on average, about $600 million a year on community engagement in this county and what we’re not getting is really clear insights about what can actually make communities happier.” That led Legge, along with consultancy firm Place Partners, to nearly a decade ago begin developing tools to achieve that—and then to complete a Masters thesis on place attraction. She also delved into research based in the US on place attachment as part of that process. Legge used the thesis to develop the methodology behind Place Score and then started collecting data at a national level around main streets, town centres and open spaces. Partially funded by the federal government, Legge launched the Australian Liveability Census in 2021 as a big part of the data gathering. “Building Place Score was done to ensure that the voice of the community and social impact actually got into that spreadsheet,” she says. “We had to create a tool that was numeric, that allowed some accountability.” ▲ Kylie Legge developed Place Score to ensure community engagement was representative and accountable. Since then, clients have included local and state governments, corporate developers and asset managers, all keen to use that data to better understand community needs. “One of our clients has their own online platform where they can get that data for their projects,” Legge says. “They could look at it for the whole local government area, for a specific suburb, for a particular demographic group, and they can look at it for a different demographic group in a particular area. “And then we can look at it through the lens of income, of household type, of whether or not you traveled to work, how you travel to work, what density you currently live in.” It also helps find answers to a quandary developers face: how to cater for people who are not actually living in the community yet. “Quite often developers are saying, ‘The people we are building for don’t live here yet, so traditional community engagement doesn’t work for me’,” Legge says. “We provide them with data for the current community and then can go to a national benchmark of hundreds of thousands of data sets. “Say the fastest growing demographic is single, white women over 50 who currently live in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. “I can pull that demographic and say, ‘This is what they want, this is what their priorities are’. “So, I can do planning locally while actually hearing from the future community.” That insight not only means that the groups are not competing with each other about what is developed but also that developers can better expand their market and target potential buyers. Developer Resimax has adopted this method, using an asset-based community development approach for the Eynesbury Precinct Structure Plans, the largest mixed-use-zoned project in Victoria. Resimax has opted to provide services that the council would usually be responsible for so residents will not have to wait for the local government to supply them, which could be five years after they buy their homes. Public transport services, new roads, schools and community sporting groups are being created and funded to the point of self-sufficiency by Resimax. When the developer exits the project, those services will continue operating independently. A tool for government Legge also sees an impact and advantage for governments, especially around a universal system of measuring liveability or place experience. “For example, say the council wants to build a community garden in my neighborhood,” Legge says. “The council might look at all the other priorities they’ve got and find they just don’t have money for that garden. “There might be five, six, ten metrics who would potentially benefit from the garden but the council still may not be able to deliver it. “The council could give that insight to the developer creating a housing project and show that there’s a desire for a community garden—so the developer can produce, deliver and manage that garden, instead of it coming from the public purse. “So, yes, we’ve created more housing, but we’ve also provided the garden the community wanted.” It’s an idea that would allow governments at all levels to create policy and planning frameworks. At the local level, the City of Melbourne has already adopted the idea of dynamic neighbourhood portals that help create ongoing connection with city residents. It isn’t just amenity that’s important—the data has shown that diversity of residents and typology of housing make communities more liveable. ▲ The City of Melbourne’s Neighbourhood Portals allows it to react to changing needs of residents, businesses, workers and visitors. The race to a housing target There are a myriad of factors to consider in the push to build 1.2 million new homes by 2030. Place-making and liveability, which considers many of those factors, such as affordability, is Legge’s chief concern—it’s all very well to try to fulfil housing goals but why not consider what the community needs? “Millions and trillions of dollars are going to be spent on housing and meeting one target, which is just dwelling numbers,” Legge says. “Why don’t we unlock even around 0.01 per cent of those budgets to say, what if every housing project had to deliver a net community benefit?” With state governments including Victoria and Western Australia keen on infill development and others including NSW investing in entire new capital city projects, such as Aerotropolis, the potential is huge—and existing communities will need to be considered. ▲ The multibillion-dollar Aerotropolis project in NSW will cover 11,200ha, including a new city, Bradfield. “Those 1.2 million homes have to go somewhere,” Legge says. “They’re not going on the moon. “Whether it is a regional town or an inner-city suburb or suburban suburb, in 99.9 per cent of the locations, those new homes are going into an existing community. “So, how do we actually use this new investment to actually uplift everybody?” You are currently experiencing The Urban Developer Plus (TUD+), our premium membership for property professionals. Click here to learn more.

Build-to-Rent
Marisa Wikramanayake
Thu 11 Apr 24

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