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The recent trend of Australians flocking to regional areas seems to be reversing, with new data showing that 93% of the country's population growth over the next 20 years will be concentrated in its four largest cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.
Data from Informed Decisions (.id) reveals that Australia's population will increase by 7.4 million by 2041, necessitating an additional two million houses in the four major cities. These urban areas are expected to account for over 65% of the forecasted population growth.
The past five years have seen significant growth in regional areas due to COVID-19 and the rise of remote work. However, urban population growth is expected to continue as national borders reopen.
“What we found was that the regional growth we’ve seen over the past few years was caused by an interruption to regular programming,” said Lailani Burra, CEO of .id. “Where these areas typically lose population–predominantly young people, to larger cities–COVID and university lockdowns had put a halt to. So most of the growth was not from people coming, but from people not leaving these regional areas.”
What is Australia to do with this information? To help, .id has identified every development site across Australia for the next 25 years and organized them by location, capacity, and development sequence with the goal to “pre-empt what the shape of our future cities will be.”
“We often talk about population and housing challenges at the national, state or local government area level, but this work quantifies the impacts at the much more detailed suburbs/community/local area level,” Burra said.
Victoria is leading the way, with a forecasted addition of 2 million people. The majority of this growth, 1.6 million, is expected to occur in Greater Melbourne. This growth will necessitate the construction of an additional 723,000 dwellings.
New South Wales is not far behind with 1.7 million people to welcome. Greater Sydney is expected to account for 1.2 million of this growth, requiring an additional 582,000 dwellings.
Greater Brisbane in Queensland and Greater Perth in Western Australia will need 381,000 and 334,000 additional dwellings, respectively, to accommodate the surge in population growth.
