NEWS FROM THE FRONT DESK: Sometimes in this job you interview someone who quietly, subtly, turns everything on its head.
Ravi Krishnan is such a man.
He heads the local arm of a Malaysian company that’s only been here since 2014 and yet he’s gently skewered some of the biggest shibboleths of this country with the clear insights of someone who’s at home enough to pick up colloquialisms and embedded politics alike, and sufficiently detached to observe there’s actually no particular reason we can’t do much better.
On housing for instance.
We ended up with our surprise interview because something in media release about the Gold Coast project claiming to be highly green caught our attention. That’s not exactly usual, and apologies to Queenslanders but yes, we’ve not been exactly bowled over with green achievements from our Sunshine State in the past, but we can see a change coming so we are super alert to any green news at all.
And innocently we booked a time to learn more about this developer’s ambitions and why the media release mentioned the Gold Coast City Council’s proposed new corporate plan on sustainability. Both were good pieces of news. We wanted to hear more.
We say innocently because, fessing up, we failed to pick up that the company, MRCB is actually the massive Malaysian Resources Corporation Berhad, a big adherent of transport-oriented developments, along with a range of other sustainability ambitions.
Its KL Sentral project is a 20 year long reclamation of space above old rail yards made live with seven big transport connections. It’s a truly mixed use precinct with residential, hotels, commercial (tenants include Google and Microsoft) and a shopping centre. A true work/life/play option.
With buildings relying on cross flow ventilation and very little aircon, even in Kuala Lumpur’s steamy climate.
Other ambitions include a trial to build concrete modular apartments onsite then hauling them up to an allocated spot somewhere in the typically 50 storey tall buildings by “one of the biggest cranes in the world”. Plus tests on aerating concrete so that it’s lighter in weight and on carbon.
But the biggest take away from Krishnan’s views (among many), was on affordable housing in Australia.
Our problems are not unique and other countries have found solutions. He points to the UK with its 40-50 per cent inclusionary or affordable housing requirements for new resi developments. Everyone complains loudly he says, “we can’t make the deal work….blah blah blah…but they do.”
In Singapore, they have managed to find the magic middle path between recognising that public housing is a social and economic good and allowing tenants the motivational option to buy their properties after a time. But the clincher is that the money from sales is ploughed back into more public housing. In a country where nearly 80 per cent of the population in 2020 lived in public housing, there’s no social stigma attached to this model, Krishnan told us.
By contrast the inclusionary zoning in the UK is trying to redress the imbalance when public housing was sold to tenants and was not replaced.
In Australia we too went down the neoliberal route to get out of public housing almost altogether.
Now governments have been saying – until lately – it’s not their job; that it’s the private sector’s job and skill set to deliver efficient public housing. But this is the job of government, no less than the provision of other essential infrastructure that we need and expect in a modern wealthy state.
Former NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes recently told an architects’ forum that the private sector is indeed good at housing provision in normal times but what sort of housing does it provide best and is it the sort we need? What we don’t need, he said, is a lot more $1 million flats.
Krishnan’s view is that no government in Australia is currently capable of building the thousands of public housing stock we need because it outsourced so much of its talent that was capable of this.
Krishnan also points to New York where there is no height limit for buildings, possibly the only place on Earth, he says. And housing authorities are given air rights that they can sell to developers and use the proceeds to build housing.
When we visited NYC a million years ago we were amazed at how non invasive, open and non claustrophobic it felt at street level. So you can do density well. The problem is not density but badly designed density.
Later, on a tour bus to Harlem the tour guide explained: the entire New York was once hilly, but the site was razed and properly planned from scratch. The result is a dense city that is a global magnet but from which, as Krishnan points out, you can jump on a subway and 10 minutes away you are in suburban paradise – if that’s what takes your fancy.
Now that’s rational thinking.
Just like treading the middle ground between self motivation, individual agency and taking care of people who need a leg up.
It occurred to us the other day that perhaps small developers are intrinsically inefficient, like many farmers. It’s hard to invest in sustainable or quality outcomes if your horizon is short term and dependent on quick gains. In today’s big world challenges, perhaps it’s time to think at the precinct or even regional scale.
But why is it we are still battling ideologues who spout rubbish and fake news about our housing system in the face of its imminent collapse if the market’s purpose is to provide housing for all?
Trouble is, it’s not.
This system is not designed to provide equity or equal access of opportunity, but the strange thing is everyone would benefit including the lords and masters of the universe if we all collaborated on better outcomes.
Instead, as Krishnan notes, we have a mountain of charities to take care of those the system leaves behind, (but with no particular lasting success).
But he leaves us with an interesting thought, something he heard recently and likes: charity is a failure of government.
What we need is not charity but a government that’s doing the job we pay it to do.
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