RE-ZONING DOESN'T LAY A BRICK

Every so often, a politician stands in a hi-vis vest they have never worn before and announces planning reform as the answer to the housing crisis. It is a wonderful announcement. It costs almost nothing, it looks like action, and best of all it does not require anyone to actually build anything. Everyone claps. No bricks are harmed.

Here is the awkward part. Walk through inner Brisbane and tell us what you see. It is not a wasteland of empty blocks crying out for permission. It is already zoned up to the eyeballs, half of it is already built, and the rest is approved and waiting. Whatever is stopping the next tower around here, it is not a shortage of planning maps. We have plenty of those.

So what is actually stopping it?

Money, mostly. And people to swing the hammers. Building costs have gone up like everything else, there are not enough tradies to go around, and the construction industry has improved its productivity roughly never. Add finance that banks now hand out like it is their own child, and, as we mentioned last time, an investor buyer pool the budget is quietly showing the door, and you get a lot of very well-zoned dirt with nothing on it.

You can rezone every corner of the inner city tomorrow. If it costs more to build the thing than anyone will pay to live in it, congratulations, you have created an expensive car park.

Where planning reform genuinely does help

I'm not here to trash the whole idea. Out in the middle-ring suburbs, where the zoning still treats a modest townhouse like a nuclear facility, reform matters enormously. That is the honest bit. Where permission is the actual handbrake, releasing it works. The inner city just pulled that handbrake off years ago.

Then why is it always the answer?

Because it is the cheapest possible thing to offer. A rezoning announcement costs a media release and a nice backdrop. Fixing labour, materials and feasibility costs real money and takes years and wins no applause. So the easy lever gets yanked, the hard stuff gets a working group, and everyone looks genuinely baffled when the cranes fail to materialise.

What it means for your apartment

If you have been waiting for a re-zoning to unleash a flood of shiny new inner-city apartments and finally give buyers some breathing room, we would not plan your life around it. The shortage propping up inner-Brisbane values is a delivery problem, not a permission problem, and delivery is the bit nobody has worked out. If you own here, that maths is quietly working for you. If you are buying here, the queue for a genuinely good apartment is not getting any shorter because someone held a press conference in a vest.

The honest bit

There is no magic fix, and anyone promising you one is after your money or your vote. If you actually want to know what all this means for buying or holding an apartment in the inner city, that is the conversation we are good at. Love ya :-)