Density targets are only as good as the follow through.
In recent weeks, the State Government has published hard evidence of where its housing strategy is falling short and announced a reform package aimed directly at that shortfall.
However, whether the reforms align with the ambition is yet to be seen, because delivering more infill housing has never been simply a matter of adjusting planning rules.
Where greenfield growth depends largely on land release and subdivision design, infill sits at the intersection of existing land values, construction costs and community expectations – all of which planning settings can only partly influence.
According to the Western Australian Planning Commission’s Perth and Peel@3.5million Health Check 2026, greenfield development was performing close to target as at 2024, averaging 24.9 dwellings per net site hectare against a goal of 26 – up from about 15 in 2010.
Infill, by contrast, has lagged well behind, with just 69,340 dwellings delivered between 2011 and 2024 – only 18 per cent of the 380,000 required.
Encouragingly, the annual infill rate lifted from 34 per cent of target in 2023 to 39 per cent in 2024.
Closing that gap further is the aim of the State Government’s latest response, which targets Perth’s Residential Design Codes directly.
Proposed reforms would abolish the average lot size requirement for R20-zoned land, dropping the subdivision threshold from 900sqm to 700sqm and opening up more than 50,000 existing Perth properties to subdivision.
Approval timeframes for single homes would fall from 60 to 30 days, minimum parking requirements for apartments could be scrapped and R40 areas could move from two storeys to three.
These are genuine attempts to remove friction from the kind of small-scale incremental infill that has proven hardest to shift.
But what these reforms do not touch is the economies of scale in alternative construction methods or the labour constraints which have been identified as the harsher handbrake on infill.
That is not a criticism of the reform, which is well aimed at the part of the system that planning can actually influence.
It is instead a reminder that regulatory friction and construction economics are two separate problems and only one of them has been addressed so far.
If the encouraging uplift from 34 to 39 per cent is going to continue, the next phase of attention needs to fall on the cost side of the ledger.