Hazardous dwellings yet still being constructed at the rate of knots....investors
buying in are cooked goose....
If Straya’s towering infernos don’t cook you our “solar oven” houses will
at 12:08 am on December 12, 2016 | 21 comments
By Leith van Onselen
Over the past 18 month, there has been numerous reports decrying Australia’s poorly designed and built high-rise apartments.
Last year, there were several reports (here, here and here) about how cheap combustible cladding had been used to cover potentially thousands of buildings across Australia, which in November 2014 sent a Docklands building into a towering inferno.
The problem is so bad that Engineers Australia released a report last year claiming that 85% of strata units built in New South Wales were defective on completion, whereas the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in Melbourne identified up to 50 Melbourne city towers as being high fire risks.
Back in February 2016, it was reported that some multi-storey buildings recently constructed across the ACT are so shoddy that they would be cheaper to demolish and rebuild than to repair.
Then in September, The SMH reported that a new 400-page review by former treasury secretary Michael Lambert found practices for ensuring apartment fire safety were “totally ineffectual” and had caused unsafe buildings to be approved.
It seems that the poor quality housing is not confined to the apartments space, however, with experts now warning that Australia’s detached homes are so poorly constructed that they could become “solar ovens” that cook their inhabitants on hot summer days. From Domain:
Much of the state’s housing falls well below minimum energy efficiency standards; meaning heat is easily trapped inside houses, forcing a reliance on airconditioning, which overstresses supply and creates blackouts
Inside “hotboxes” in which they cannot cool, humans face deadly heat stress.
Hot weather killed 374 people during the heatwave preceding Black Saturday in 2009 — more than double the fires themselves…
Climate scientist David Karoly expects the number of days above 35 degrees in Melbourne to double in about 50 years.
Projections showed suburbs such as Laverton, which hit about 47 degrees during 2009, could reach up to 50 degrees…
The problem is the industry is geared towards a developer’s bottom line, experts such as RMIT planning professor Michael Buxton and the Alternative Technology Association’s Damien Moyse say.
Many new builds did not consider sun orientation, eaves or shading, and featured large amounts of glass and energy-guzzling appliances.
Surely some of the blame for Australia’s shoddily built homes must fall to Australia’s rampant land cost inflation, which has seen the median cost per square metre across the capital cities climb nearly six-fold in around 15 years (see next chart)?
With such high land costs, builders have had little choice to cut corners and supply inferior product in a bid to retain a semblance of “affordability”.
Another issue driving-up temperatures in our homes is our government’s fetish with urban consolidation, which has seen backyards and green space disappear in favour of infill development, thus creating a ‘heat island’ effect.
An ever-growing population being squeezed into an existing urban footprint means that trees, lawns and other green infrastructure will inevitably make way to buildings and roads, thus raising temperatures.
At the same time it forces-up land costs, thereby making building affordable and energy efficient homes more difficult.