MELBOURNE'S GROWING PAINS

Melbourne's population is presently estimated to be 4.88 million people. The population density of Melbourne is 440 people per square kilometre. Melbourne is booming as far as population is concerned. The population is totally expanding at a quick speed. It has been said that the city grows by 1800 individuals every 7 days. Melbourne is hustling at a quicker rate to rival Sydney as the nation’s biggest city. The city had the biggest population growth contrasted with all the capital urban cities in the nation.

The population of Victoria is expected to hit 10 million people by the 2050s and Melbourne's population will double by 2031, new figures indicate. Population growth will continue to be strong, according to new figures from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, and the capital will need another 2 million homes to accommodate the growth. The rising trends in births, life expectancy and migration are said to account for the strong population growth.

As the building boom continues and infrastructure lags behind the unchecked growth, our city is becoming overcrowded, noisier, more polluted, more congested and more unsafe (the number of criminal offences recorded in Victoria went up by more than 50,000 last year — an 8 per cent rise in the per-capita crime rate)... Nevertheless, it's still a good place to live and to visit...

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FLAT TO LET

We are currently experiencing a housing shortage in Victoria with supply unable to keep up with population growth. This is especially true in Melbourne, where booming population is forcing extensive development. People are urged to embrace higher density living if the city is to keep up with demand for new homes.

New data from the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) found that despite record-high levels of housing development, the state had a shortfall of 9,000 new properties in the past two years. It said if that trend continued it would lead to an undersupply in excess of 50,000 houses by 2020...

The homelessness crisis in Melbourne is much worse in the suburbs and on the urban fringe than in the CBD. It's just not as obvious because people are taking shelter in places such as toilet blocks, bushes and cars. Private rentals are expensive, shared accommodation is often full, cheap motels are only a short-term fix and the waiting list for public housing is only getting longer.

Victoria is the fastest growing state in the nation because of the remarkable population growth in its capital. From congested roads to overcrowded public transport, energy, housing affordability and public safety, managing Australia’s most rapid population growth is an extraordinary challenge.

A total of 77 per cent of our state’s population live in Melbourne and about 90 per cent of our annual growth settles in the capital. If we continue as “business as usual”, Victoria by 2051 will see another 3.8 million people in Melbourne but only 690,000 people moving or settling in the rest of state — a pattern that is reflected across much of the country.

Not only is decentralisation important to protecting and conserving the capital’s liveability, it makes economic sense. Essential Economics observed: “It is less costly for government to ­develop the regions than provide for increased infrastructure to manage increased growth in Melbourne. Indeed, it has been estimated that to provide infra­structure to support a 50,000-person population increase in regional Victoria, it would cost $1 billion, compared with $3.1 billion to provide for the same increase in metropolitan Melbourne.”

Victoria has not had a decentralisation agenda since the Hamer Liberal government in the 1970s, and during that period Victoria witnessed 10 consecutive years when the population growth rate in the regions outperformed the capital. Now we are overdeveloping Melbourne, we are overcrowding the city and the increasing density is such that the infrastructure cannot keep up. Regional Victoria is languishing and country towns are experiencing population decreases. Building more and more apartment buildings in the city is not the answer.

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