Maria Palumbo, chief executive of community housing provider Junction, believes Adelaide is “falling victim to an ideal that no longer exists – that we can keep spreading and everyone gets a house with a big backyard”.

“We’re traditionally a city that cherishes our ability to have housing with big yards and quarter acre blocks… that’s kind of the highest value proposition for home ownership,” she told InDaily.

“But what’s happening now is that the aspiration for growth and prosperity requires population growth, more jobs and those kind of things.”

The former Renewal SA director points to San Francisco and Los Angeles as cautionary tales of cities that have had significant population growth without a requisite change in attitudes towards planning and urban development.

She is particularly concerned by a Demographia report published earlier this year which measured housing affordability in 94 cities across eight countries.

The report found Adelaide has the eighth least affordable housing market with a median house price 9.7 times the median income – equal to San Francisco and only marginally better than Melbourne (9.8), Honolulu (10.5) and Los Angeles (10.9).

“Cities [in] Australia and America are very similar because there’s more land mass and those cities had more land around them,” Palumbo argues.

“They’re not landlocked like European cities, they kept just doing urban sprawl, everybody can have this half acre block if we just keep going further and further out.

“What happened there is that the cost of infrastructure – to put transport, roads, water and all those things as you keep sprawling – needs to actually be maintained and upgraded.

New housing in Riverlea in Adelaide’s north. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

“And no local government or state government had enough reserves to maintain, so when it got to a point where they couldn’t maintain it anymore, they put this onus on developers and developers just added this cost to the price of housing.

“So it made things really unaffordable. These are common elements of these cities that sit in the top 10 (least affordable housing markets).”

Greater Adelaide is currently home to around 1.5 million residents spread over 10,873 km², housing 139 people per square kilometre – much lower than Greater Sydney’s 428, Melbourne’s 508 or Los Angeles’s 799.

Palumbo said cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles had planning policies that were about “preserving the old and not thinking about new forms of housing”.

“That locked out a whole bunch of people who service those communities that wanted to preserve their lifestyles,” she said.

“And I’m talking about your hairdressers, your baristas, your retailers, your childcare workers, your teachers, all of those people in those cities couldn’t afford housing anymore.

“And this is where Adelaide is now sitting at the cusp of that.”

Restrictive planning policies in San Francisco “locked out a whole bunch of people” – and Adelaide risks going down the same path, according to Maria Palumbo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Palumbo will speak at the Planning Institute of South Australia’s State Planning Conference on Friday, urging South Australia to “think bigger” when it comes to housing.

Given she leads an organisation that delivers higher-density, affordable housing projects close to the city, perhaps her criticisms of urban sprawl aren’t surprising.

But Palumbo also argues it is incumbent on developers to deliver higher quality projects to shift negative community attitudes towards density, adding that “governments can’t do much when the community is going to be a barrier”.

A computer render of Junction’s $36 million affordable housing development in Tonsley Image: Junction

“I think the onus is on us to actually create beautiful developments that look like those beautiful cities that people visit,” Palumbo said, pointing to the German city of Munich as an example.

“And we’ve got to look at those cities to say, okay, how do they do density well?

“The way we build in Australia now is somebody builds whatever, right? If they’re building high density or medium density, they sell it all off and there’s a whole bunch of different owners and nobody’s actually responsible for the place, the precinct, or how that place is managed.

“And because we don’t think about it this way in the way Europeans are doing it, it’s not done well. And because it’s not done well, communities don’t love it, and so they resist it.

“So we have to think of multiple fronts on how do we create the kind of housing that those beautiful cities have? How are those places managed?

“Because it’s very different to the way we do it here, and that way that starts to convince communities to change.”