Barrier reduction strategies - Examples
Victorian Planning Provisions – rooming houses
United States’ barrier removal strategy
Western Australia Local Planning Scheme provisions
Principles of leading practice
Barrier reduction strategies
Pitfalls to avoid
Barrier reduction strategies - Examples
Victorian Planning Provisions – rooming houses
The Victoria Planning Provisions (VPPs) exempt rooming/boarding houses of up to ten habitable rooms in residential areas from a planning permit. This provision reflects a longstanding policy to ensure that prejudice does not stop disadvantaged people from finding housing in well-serviced areas and taking their place in the community.
United States’ barrier removal strategy
The US Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has established a program to help state and local governments identify and remove barriers to affordable housing development, and identify planning controls that make housing more expensive to produce. The Department has also established a Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse (www.huduser.org/rbc), which maintains information about state and local initiatives to remove regulatory barriers to affordable housing. These initiatives include reducing minimum lot sizes, ensuring diverse and higher density housing types are permissible, reducing car parking, setback or open space requirements, and enabling more affordable building forms (like manufactured homes).
Western Australia Local Planning Scheme provisions
In Western Australia, Local Planning Scheme provisions allow for the cancellation of restrictive covenants and have unilaterally removed those covenants which restrict residential density beyond the level applicable under the Local Government Scheme.
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Principles of leading practice
Barrier reduction strategies
Strategies that remove unnecessary land use planning barriers to affordable housing development can achieve leading practice in line with the following principles.
• Ensure planning schemes permit and promote a variety of housing types and forms in appropriate locations.
• Eliminate unnecessarily onerous or prescriptive design requirements, including proscriptive covenant stipulations for new residential development.
• Reduce barriers to the appropriate adaptation or redevelopment of existing housing in established areas.
• Ensure planning schemes permit the replacement of housing forms under threat of redevelopment (like boarding houses).
Pitfalls to avoid
• Avoid removing controls that are justified for other important planning criteria, like public safety, environmental protection, heritage conservation, or the efficient provision of infrastructure and amenity. Seek to offset any affordability effects of these controls by using other planning approaches for affordable housing.
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