Adequate housing supply is a currently prevailing hot topic, about which there is no shortage of opinions as to addressing the conspicuous need to improve on the current levels of shortfall, be they affordable home ownership, social housing, or all forms of leased accommodation. So far, there is no magic bullet to be found amongst the variety of partial responses being proffered, such as reforming the slow approval processes, improving building trade capacities and reducing financial impacts of government imposed costs. Increased productivity at all levels of response throws a blanketed failure over all players. How to address what appears to be a rental market free-for-all (a misnomer if ever there was one) only underlines failure in achieving attendant social solutions.

It is important to realise that no singular response can be anticipated as fundamental to the measure of any successful solution. Equally important is the need to avoid oversimplification of what a measure of that success should be. Most regrettably, the success of these competitive solutions vying for the attention of our political decision makers has become one of misplaced and over emphasised numerical measures. In particular, the simple response measure as to how many and at what rate the number of units are increasing, essential as incorporation of those measures may be.

For some, the clear urgency of demand is satisfied by the increased number of new roofs being built to cover new heads. For others, to justify building density increases, reducing travel times between work and home to achieve the least amount of travel for the most number of people is an understandably persuasive starting point, but a starting point only.

Advocating reforms to the development approval process, if measured principally by the increase in the rates of development throughput, demonstrates another gross numerical oversimplification. As a blanket measure of urban development success, such an approach fundamentally demonstrates a complete intellectual abandonment for what is a complex, multifaceted process that bequeaths an historic legacy of enduring social consequences. The creation of which always deserves our current attention as to the measures being applied to successful urban implementation but goes well beyond attempts at merely numerical justification.

Since the multi-faceted measures of urban success are demonstrably more numerous than simply numerical, it stands to reason that multifaceted challenges deserve wider and complementary considerations beyond headline grabbing numbers. If urgent and affordable accommodation was reduced to merely a numerical question of supply, then tracts of development estates resembling Qantas huts of the likes built in the early days during the WW2 migrant influx represent a plausible solution. A solution satisfied merely by targeted numbers but not anticipated to satisfy current and broader urban housing goals as the true measure of achieving housing success. Not today and hopefully not tomorrow.

Successful urban lifestyle accommodation demands a more comprehensive solution and goes beyond the available numbers of one, two and three bedroom units. Obsessive focus on achieving the amounts of accommodation as the overriding measure of achievement may be more appropriate to the housing of battery hens. So, how do we achieve plausible measures of successful growth in accommodation without at the same time distorting the social formation of future urban development? How, in the face of financial imperatives, manpower capacities to deliver and major demographic shifts, do we avoid accepting the political simplicity of only increased housing supply and masking the more comprehensive measures of what it means to claim a successful housing program? If success is achieved at the expense of robbing the larder of accumulated social measures intrinsic to any comprehensive future success, neither can we afford to entertain such a shortcut measure.

Within any finite land area, increases in our dwelling densities correspondingly mean competing residual spatial demands generated. If we are to draw from experience with historic models of Australian patterns of urban settlement, it means a proportionate and inevitably substantial increase in demand for all types and sizes of our shared public domains, concurrently with considered provisions for common areas of private open space and private car parking area expectations, if measuring the quality of our urban lifestyle is to go beyond mere gratitude for secure shelter and address the co-ordinated allocation of competing land use demands.

The issue is not to be obfuscated as just one of whether we need to sacrifice wholesale the needed residential increase for the sake of sustaining appropriate levels of broader urban amenity expectations. Nor whether we must inevitably accept declining expectations for conducive overall amenity just for the sake of coping with the generated levels of residential density required.

More adaptive responses to satisfying attendant needs are part of a solution if we are to avoid divisive but unproductive argument that comes down to a decision of less housing versus less social-environmental accommodation. For example, honest evaluation of consequential future land use competition goes beyond the obvious spatial consumption generated by social demand, such as allowances for more recreational open spaces. At what rate can we anticipate attendant demands, and can we anticipate the land area provisions required? Adequate land provisions (or not) for all forms of public thoroughfare, pedestrian and vehicular, demand attention to long overdue reforms as to how we utilise our dedicated system of suburban roads.

Concurrently, the increased environmental imperative to enlarge urban areas of summer shade also suggests, in tandem with related concerns for adjacent residential density impacts, that our capacity and attention to landscaping improvements within street design deserve far more consideration. A considered response would serve the dual needs of increased housing and an increase in magnitude of the co-existing elements that constitute urban residential satisfaction. For example, consider how Singapore demonstrates successful co-existence between high density living and its wider environmentally complementary residential context.

If it is deemed that alternative urban goals of others are inappropriate and our traditional expectations of residential amenity cannot be met, then that new urban outcome must be identified and the levels of qualified social acceptance understood. However, absent such insights and responses, it is simply not enough to be politically satisfied that meeting target numbers of new dwellings can justify any future claim of job done.

Simple inventive market-generated building facade design variation is not the solution if all that level of building variety brings the same shortfall for the co-dependent and competing land area activities such as schools, open spaces and public thoroughfare landscaping. Those areas that do not offer an individual financial return nevertheless constitute higher levels of sustained social return, without which we are short-changing both ourselves and our obligations to future generations by depriving them of the fuller spectrum of social opportunities for urban public interaction, limiting the scope for a more imaginative urban lifestyle context, and bequeathing more appropriately responsive environmental consequences.

We would not anticipate successfully building a house simply on the singular basis that we had access to a pile of bricks. So why presume to distort our urban fabric on the basis of just affordable numbers of dwelling units alone?