The ACT government's plan for subdivided Mr Fluffy blocks will limit many new homes to just 104.5 square metres, much less than half the size of today's new homes, a prominent local architect says.
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Architect Bryn Challis, from Philip Leeson Architects, said a 105 square metre home would be too small for a family room, or a second bathroom, and unlikely to appeal to families with children. At that size, the Fluffy replacement homes would be more likely to be two-bedroom units, not in keeping with the larger family homes surrounding them, he said.
His comments come as the ACT Government prepares to release the addresses of the 1022 Fluffy homes across the city on Wednesday, July 1. The Asbestos Taskforce emailed and wrote to all owners this week advising them of the release date.
It coincides with the end of the buyback offer, with owners of the asbestos-contaminated homes having until June 30 to opt into the scheme. After that, owners who don't opt in are on their own, responsible for the demolition of their own homes, and also subject to stringent rules about managing their homes - including a requirement to tell every visitor of its Mr Fluffy status.
The Asbestos Taskforce estimates 30,000 people have lived in a Fluffy home over the past 40-plus years. The release of the Fluffy addresses will impact also on tradespeople and others who have worked on the homes, where asbestos fibres remain in roofs and wall cavities, and in many cases also in the living areas.
The government is changing the Territory Plan to allow the cleaned Fluffy blocks to be subdivided and sold as separate titles to help fund the enormous cost of the scheme. For other suburban blocks, the minimum size for dual occupancy is 800 square metres, and even then the blocks cannot be sold as separate titles. The Territory Plan change will allow Fluffy blocks of just 700 square metres to be divided in two and sold separately.
The proposed rule will allow homes of up to two storeys and a plot ratio of 50 per cent - meaning buildings can cover half the land - if both have direct street frontage. If one house is built behind the other, the maximum plot ratio will be 35 per cent and both homes can only be single storey.
Mr Challis has made a submission on the proposal, which is currently before the planning directorate. He said most suburban blocks were about 20 metres wide, making it very difficult to get direct street frontage on both, other than for a semi-detached pair of homes - which will be allowed under the rule change.
When one house was behind the other, splitting the plot ratio between the two would limit each house to 122.5 square metres, including the required 18 square metres for roofed parking. That meant either a larger house in front and a granny flat behind, or just 104.5 square metres for each home.
While that was the size of homes 50 years ago, there was so little demand for houses that size now that his firm was effectively never asked to design them, he said.
"Given that the average new home being built in Australia at the moment is around 250 square metres, that seems rather small," he wrote in his submission. "... Such restrictions will lower the value of the blocks and reduce the government's ability to offset the cost of the Mr Fluffy buyback".
The divided blocks were likely to appeal not to families, but to investors wanting to rent the homes out, Mr Challis said.
The government's proposal was inconsistent, because single dwellings were allowed to cover half the block, considerably more than two dwellings without direct street frontage under the Fluffy rules.
"Why is that allowed but a dual occupancy in the backyard has to be so much lower scale when it has less impact that a single house could if someone chooses to max out the plot ratio?" he said. "It's almost like we're phobic about dual occupancy which means it needs to be tamed in a harsher way than somebody building a big house."
It would make more sense to allow the front house to be two-storey and limit the rear house to a single storey, he said.
Mr Challis said other than the inflexible plot rules and the likelihood of the houses appealing to investors rather than families, the community had little to fear from the expansion of dual occupancy through Fluffy blocks, given the limited scale and intensity.
