By Laura Crommelin, Bill Randolph, Hazel Easthope and Martin Loosemore
Posted 17 Jan 2019, 5:55am
The saga
of Opal Tower,
the 36-storey Sydney apartment building evacuated on Christmas Eve after
frightening cracking, has helped to expose the deep cracks in Australia's
approach to building apartments.
An interim
engineering assessment released
yesterday indicates concrete panels cracked due to their
manufacture and assembly deviating from the original design. Though the
building is structurally sound and in no danger of collapse, repairing the
faults will be costly, slow and disruptive to residents.
The
tower's size, age (it is less than six months old) and the timing of its cracks
might have made it particularly newsworthy, but badly built apartment blocks
are far from unusual. Right now across Australia's cities many buildings have
significant leaks, cracks and fire safety failings.
So
we can't just address faults in individual developments. We need to identify
the systemic flaws in how "compact city" policies have been planned
and implemented.
Cracks in the compact city
The
consequences of these flaws increasingly affect us all.
As the population of Australia's capital cities grows, more of us are
living in apartments. Governments have been promoting greater
housing density as an alternative to sprawl for decades.
But they haven't always ensured this density has been done well, including in
terms of building quality.
In the aftermath of the Opal Tower saga, experts have pointed to many reasons why
building defects can occur.
These
include the fact that developers owe buyers few legal obligations once the
apartments are sold, which limits their risk if they get things wrong. There
are also significant market pressures, particularly in boom times, to build
quickly and cheaply. And there are gaps in how the construction process is
overseen, meaning errors go unnoticed.
These are not new observations, but getting regulations in place
to address them has proven challenging. A case in point is NSW's new defects
bond, requiring developers to put aside 2 per cent of the building value to fix
defects down the track. The bond's introduction was delayed for years,
and it will be a few more years yet before we know if it works.
Scoping the problem
So
just how severe is the situation? Right now, we don't know for sure.
In 2012 a City Futures Research Centre project surveyed
apartment owners in NSW. Out of more than 1,000 respondents, 72 per cent knew
of defects in their strata-title complex. Among those whose apartments had been
built since 2000, the percentage was 85 per cent.
That
project only looked at building defects as one of a number of issues facing
apartment owners, however, so it didn't document the issue in detail.
Our new research project will
examine just how prevalent building defects are, the reasons they occur, and
how strata-titled housing can be improved.
While
the research will focus on Sydney, we hope it is a step towards changing
planning and development policies to ensure better quality apartment buildings
nation-wide.
Increasing inequality
A system allowing defective apartment buildings not only creates
huge financial and emotional stress for residents but much wider economic and
social risks.
Poor building practices undermine confidence in the multi-billion-dollar
construction industry, the strata management
industry and in the planning system.
They also contribute to inequality.
This is because apartment residents are more likely to
be younger, renting, on lower incomes, and from non-English speaking
backgrounds.
Amid growing concerns about the widening gap between housing
"haves" and "have nots", there is renewed political
interest in housing policy. Certainly this is a crucial issue for
governments to tackle, but it goes beyond a focus on housing supply and prices.
Addressing quality must also be a priority.
At the same time, we also need to step back and reconsider how
we do compact-city planning more broadly —
including the roles governments and the private market play. With two-thirds of
us now calling our biggest cities home, we need to have a serious public
conversation about what we want our cities to be and how we can best achieve
those goals.
We
can't afford to ignore the growing evidence that our cities are cracking under
the strain. Because like the Opal Tower owners, we're all going to bear the
cost when things go wrong, and we'll all have to live amid the wreckage.
Laura
Crommelin is a research lecturer at UNSW; Bill Randolph is director of the City
Futures Research Centre, Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW; Hazel Easthope
is an associate professor in centre; and Martin Loosemore is a professor of
Construction Management at UNSW.
This
article first appeared on The
Conversation.
