Ode to a Nightingale - Responding to the Unaffordable Housing Crisis in Melbourne
Photo credit: Peter Clarke. Source: Archdaily
Housing unaffordability
House prices in most big cities are enough to make anyone’s headache, especially first time buyers. Or to borrow a line from John Keats‘ Ode to a Nightingale poem: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense…” The cost of housing does make our collective hearts ache and only some kind of “drowsy numbness” can explain why people put up with this situation.
For instance, in 2023 the average house price for a first-time buyer in London was £462,000 (up from £125,000 in 2000). The Office of National Statistics in the UK estimates that the average annual salary in London in 2024 was around £46,000.
The median price for a property in Melbourne, Australia, as another example, stood at AUD$780,437 in 2024 and the average yearly salary is around AUD$90,800.
So clearly we are witnessing a situation in both cities where house prices are close to ten times the average salary.
Last year, as part of my course on Ethical Cities at Osaka University, Toby Dean, Head of Community at Nightingale Housing, a not-for-profit based in Melbourne, explained that it now takes 11 years for the average family to save the 20 percent deposit required to obtain a mortgage (see YouTube video of his talk). Clearly something has to change.
Nightingale to the Rescue
What is the change we need?
Back in 2016, when I was working on the development of the Ethical Cities massive open online course, I collaborated with Citt Williams to tell the story of The Commons project developed by Jeremy McLeod and his associates at Breathe Architecture.
We were attracted by the idea of an architectural firm that places ethics at the center of its business model. The Breathe website contains this statement: “We approach our work with integrity, humility, equitability and transparency. We work to our established values and moral compass.”
The Commons apartment building was completed in 2014 and is located about six kilometers from Melbourne’s Central Business District, adjacent to a railway station. It has been described as Australia’s most sustainable apartment building. The list of awards that The Commons has received is impressive and reflects its innovative and holistic approach to sustainability.
The Commons is a prototype development that has since been followed by a series of apartments called The Nightingale, initially designed by a number of architects.
Nightingale 1, however, had to go through a very painful planning approval process and objections meant it was brought to the VCAT – the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal – responsible for deciding civil and administrative legal cases. One concern related to the lack of car parking spaces and this was something that other developers were very upset about.
Following the approval of Nightingale 1, numerous Nightingale developments have been completed across Melbourne. These new apartments reflect the triple bottom line approach emphasizing people, the planet and profitability.
They connect good design and sustainability to fundamental long-term prosperity. The growing influence of this housing development model is addressed in the talk from Toby Dean.
The challenge for ethical housing developers is to scale-up their activities. Given the housing needs for Melbourne as a whole, what has been achieved so far, while extremely significant, is still just the beginning.
Innovating within the Status Quo
A great deal has been written about The Commons and Nightingale Housing. Perhaps one of the best assessments of this initiative was undertake by Trivess Moore and Andréanne Doyon of RMIT University back in 2018 with the title “The Uncommon Nightingale: Sustainable Housing Innovation in Australia.”
They found that occupants in these dwellings were realizing a range of social, economic and environmental benefits. They also noted that the broader housing industry in Australia was beginning to adopt various elements of the Nightingale Model.
They state that Nightingale 1 was completed in 2017 and includes 20 one and two-bedroom apartments across five storeys with ground floor retail. Prices for the apartments, according to Moore and Doyon, started at around AUD$415,000 (while still expensive this is more affordable than the median property price in Melbourne).
The same researchers published another paper on this topic in 2019 examining the potential to accelerate expansion of the Nightingale model as a sustainable housing niche. They concluded, however, that the trajectory for future upscaling of the model was unclear and that it would prove very difficult to challenge the existing house building regime - the status quo.
More recently, in June 2022, David Kelly and Libby Porter from RMIT University published a report on the social mix at Nightingale Village. They argue that Melbourne needs 1.6 million homes over the next 35 years to meet demand of which a large proportion will be for low income individuals. Hence, projects like the Nightingale Village could offer an effective option to promote social housing within private developments.
Elsewhere at RMIT University, the PlaceLab team has been examining the Nightingale model potential and produced a very interesting video about the development from the occupants perspective, as shared below.
Beautiful, naive visions
Various myths about the Nightingale apartments have emerged which the architect, Jeremy McLeod and others have sought to dispel. These new apartment developments, however, are designed to meet the needs of a particular segment of the market and they may not work for everyone.
Jeremy McLeod also came to recognize that the development model had serious flaws. He is quoted as saying that “This vision of ours, this beautiful, naive vision doesn’t actually work. You can’t scale it.” He was talking about the reliance on small equity investors and the risks placed on individual architectural firms.
This ultimately led to reconfiguration of the model and establishment of the Nightingale not-for-profit that Toby Dean described in his talk. While these changes have consolidated the business model, there are still occasional examples of push-back from local councils and residents. The Nightingale team has also seen prices rise as a result of supply chain issues caused by the Covid19 pandemic.
As with many examples of local innovations covered in my Ethical Cities course (digital currencies, community wealth building, doughnut economics, participatory budgeting, etc), the core challenge remains how to sustain, mainstream and upscale them in the face of systems that don’t want to change.
Beautiful visions sometimes seem like a waking dream. On that note, what better way to end here than with the words of John Keats.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats