Breaking the two storey ceiling
Why is it exactly that we ban three storey tall standalone homes basically everywhere?
Canberrans have a thing about tall houses. Not *big* houses per se - those are fine, so long as the house otherwise complies with set back and site coverage rules, but tall homes are out. Most canberran suburban homes are single storey affairs that over the decades have been renovated and expanded to consume most of their backyards.
This is a hard and fast rule in both the current and proposed rules for RZ1 and RZ2, which together make up more than 90% of Canberra’s residential land. Maximum height - two storeys. It’s not until you get to RZ3 that a third storey is allowed.
On the train between Berlin and Prague yesterday however one of the most striking features of Czech and German small towns, outer suburbs and non-urban housing forms in general is how common three (or even four) storey tall houses on narrow footprints are.
Small footprint houses, on fairly small plots, but with large amounts of greensspace and yards because the building goes up not out are the norm, not the exception in rural german housing (at least in Saxony and Brandenburg it seems).
Now of course there’s other reasons why German homes look this beyond simple questions of zoning and political preference. In a part of the world where it snows, roof design will differ.
But this begs the question about why we’ve accepted 2 storeys as the upper limit of suburban residential development, rather than allowing taller builders on narrower footprints that allow for more greenspace. It’s not inimical to a “village atmostphere” or anything like that, as pretty much all of rural Europe proves. Neither are there financial or construction related barriers to doing this in a housing market as overheated as Australia.
Instead, the main barriers are a aesthetic hangup about homes being taller than they are wide, and an obession over strict solar access. My own hot take on this front is that if we are in a “pick two” situation of choosing between housing, greenspace and solar access, solar access is the one we should compromise - it’s okay if your neighbour casts a shadow onto your yard or window for two hours of the day in June if we get a more liveable and greener city out of it.1
We could choose a Canberra where houses are still big by floor area, but take up a substantially narrower footprint, allowing for more greenspace and more homes in a given space, making it easier to hit our tree canopy targets while allowing for more homes.
So let’s embrace german suburbanism and allow people to build three storey tall homes if they want to, to allow for more greenspace to be retained while increasing housing by area.
Recently, the ACT government amended the Territory Plan to explicitly clarify that trees do not count as blocking solar access (in response to a tribunal decision that briefly suggested this would not be the case in Allen & Ors v ACTPLA & Ors [2021] ACAT 88). There’s an obvious tension between pursuing canopy cover (that inherently practically blocks solar access). Time to just bite the bullet and let us buld taller buildings and plant more trees.