Brisbane City Council’s worst piece of policy making in recent years was the townhouse ban affecting much of Brisbane (see Townhouse Ban in Effect and my 27 August 2019 post). Around the world, progressive cities such as Portland, Oregon are encouraging the development of so-called Missing Middle Housing, but BCC decided to discourage it. Earlier this week, I spoke with Natalie Rayment, Executive Director at Wolter Consulting Group and co-founder of YIMBY Qld, about Missing Middle Housing and other urban planning issues, and our conversation has been published as EP83 of my Economics Explored podcast.

Among other great points she made in the episode, here’s what Natalie said about Brisbane’s townhouse ban:

…what we’ve got in Brisbane is an exclusionary housing policy. So two thirds of Brisbane can only have single family dwellings. And this at the very time where other cities around the world are starting to realise that having these blanket areas of only single family dwellings is not providing housing choices, not providing affordability. And they’re starting to ban areas of only single family dwellings. Were doing the opposite. We’re banning everything other than single family dwellings in these neighbourhoods.

As Natalie and I discuss, this is bad policy from BCC.

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