Shepparton’s housing crisis has been closely examined by some of Australia’s finest young architects, who plan to offer their advice on sustainable solutions.
The visit by 24 University of Melbourne masters of architecture students to the city was hosted by the Committee for Greater Shepparton as a means for considering solutions to the undersupply of homes, which has led to homelessness and professionals being unable to move to the area due to a lack of suitable housing.
“When I started in the job, just on 12 months ago, I was left in no doubt about the need for more housing in Greater Shepparton in order to attract and have available a workforce that we need for all the skills and industries that we have locally,” Committee for Greater Shepparton chief executive Lindy Nieuwenhuizen said.
Ms Nieuwenhuizen said the region’s Community Connector program, which helps people moving to the region settle in and make connections, had also indicated that people were looking for a greater variety of options.
“They were looking for a very different mix of housing options, and really prioritising being close to work, close to the city centre, not needing multiple cars,” she said.
Associate professor in architecture at the University of Melbourne Rory Hyde led the students on their visit to Shepparton and said they had been invited to work on new ideas to tackle the city’s housing problems.
“Research that we’ve looked at has said that around 75 or 80 per cent of the existing houses in Shepparton are three or four bedrooms, so the big free-standing suburban houses, and we are hoping that with the students we can propose a whole lot of other models which are for different types of people at different life stages,” he said.
Professor Hyde said the models would take in the challenges of homelessness and affordability and climate change, including flooding.
He said they would not be huge towers, but instead might be terrace housing or clusters of two and three storeys, and units with their own front doors rather than going up in a lift inside a complex.
“Some of those ideas we hope will be able to be translated into real projects and that will take time and it will take other partners, but right now we’re at the point of cracking open the question and trying to imagine other ways of doing things,” Professor Hyde said.
Jeremy McLeod, the design director at Breathe Architecture and co-founder of not-for-profit Nightingale Housing, said Nightingale Ballarat was an example of an initiative that might work for Shepparton.
“This idea of triple-bottom-line housing, so housing that is sustainable, that is affordable, that builds community rather than destroy the community in which it exists, that doesn’t just exist in Melbourne and Sydney or in Copenhagen and Stockholm, it also exists in Ballarat and Adelaide, so it can definitely exist on the beautiful Goulburn River,” he said.
The result of the students’ work is likely to be put on display in a public exhibition later in the year.