Australian Governments Offering $1 Pre-Approved Housing Plans

The Australian government is hoping to help solve the nation’s housing crisis by offering low-cost architect-designed housing templates pre-approved in some Australian states like New South Wales, reports Kelly Burke in The Guardian. 

The New South Wales Housing Patterns Books is “a practical toolkit for tackling what Australian architects and town planners have long bemoaned as the ‘missing middle’ in the country’s major cities: terraces, townhouses and manor houses.”

Developers in countries like New Zealand, The Unite Kingdom, Jordan, and the United States have purchased some of the plans. In Australian, “From July this year, new developments using these $1 designs in NSW will be eligible for approval in just 10 days – a seismic shift in a country where planning delays routinely stretch into months, and sometimes years.”

The pattern book is currently only fully approved in New South Wales, but it’s expected that other state governments will follow suit, perhaps tweaking requirements to meet their own unique environmental needs. “At a time when cities around the world are grappling with housing affordability, the idea of publicly available, architect-designed templates, fast-tracked for approval and tailored to local conditions, has struck a chord well beyond Australia’s borders.”