The Victorian government's plan to allow the development of dozens of new residential towers near suburban transport hubs will turn Melbourne into a "fourth-rate city", a leading urban planning expert has warned.
Michael Buxton, a professor of environment and planning at RMIT University and a former senior bureaucrat with the Victorian government's planning department, also said the ambitious housing reform was "pulling down what makes the city great" and would "not provide any affordable housing".
The forecast comes as the government presses ahead with its plan to rezone dozens of areas within Melbourne's suburbs and allow for 50 new "activity centres" — or areas with residential towers that could be between four and 20-storeys tall.
"We'll end up with a completely different city," Professor Buxton said.
"We'll end up with a standardised high-rise, medium-rise city based on apartments.
"We'll lose much of what attracts people to Melbourne and makes Melbourne a liveable city.
Michael Buxton spent 12 years working for the Victorian government's planning department. (ABC News: Sean Warren)
"What we're going to get is a third or fourth-rate city.
"We're going to end up with a city that is boring, that isn't going to work."
The government disagrees with the assessment, with Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny describing the criticism as "completely wrong".
"My focus is on building communities and providing opportunity for more Victorians, particularly young Victorians, to be able to buy or rent a place where they want to live," she told 7.30.
"And where do people want to live? They want to live in communities that have great access to public transport, that have wonderful parks, open spaces, trees, services, [and] schools."
Melbourne could become 'difficult to live in'
Professor Buxton, who has been studying the government's Activity Centre scheme for more than a year, also expressed concern over the pressure on public infrastructure that the huge influx of housing stock might cause.
"It will lead to incredible traffic congestion and we'll lose that interesting edge that makes Melbourne such a wonderful place, and we'll replace it with a city that is going to be very difficult to live in," he said, adding that the government should look to Melbourne suburbs Southbank and Docklands as cautionary tales.
"Original planning for places like Docklands and Southbank was to create really high-quality liveable suburbs, low-to-medium-rise housing with a European model of development, and we ended up with high rises and the development industry making the decisions about what goes where.
"Now what the premier is doing is putting that approach on steroids for the entire city of Melbourne.
Michael Buxton is concerned the government has not learned from past mistakes. (ABC News: Michael Barnett)
"By adopting this model, the government is not achieving what it wants to achieve.
"It's not going to achieve affordable housing. It's going to achieve a city that's very difficult to live in, and it's incomprehensible the government would throw away what makes Melbourne so great."
Professor Buxton's claim that the housing plan will not deliver affordable dwellings has been backed by developer Max Shifman, who has applauded the government for "engaging in the housing conversation" but has cast doubt over whether the scheme will deliver affordable homes.
"It is quite expensive to build apartments at the moment," Mr Shifman said.
"Builders have been disproportionately impacted by the cost inflation we've seen over the past four years since COVID.
"What that means now is for a normal apartment in Melbourne, a developer needs to be selling that for around $14,000 a square metre for the end product to be viable, and if you translate that into a modestly sized three-bedroom unit, then that translates into roughly $1.4 to $1.5 million for that house."
Some developers remain doubtful about the scheme's ability to deliver affordable homes. (ABC News: Keana Naughton)
Mr Shifman said the current market forces would mean the government would find it almost impossible to find developers eager to invest money and build the centres.
Ms Kilkenny told 7.30 she was confident that zoning more areas for residential development would provide cheaper housing.
"If we are going to make homes more affordable, we need to build more of them, and lots more of them," she said.
Residents in the dark
The planning minister has also been forced to defend accusations of "window dressing" during the consultation process with residents for the first 10 activity centres.
Stacey Harley, a resident of Essendon, a suburb in the north-west of the city, told the ABC many of her neighbours had no idea the residential buildings had been planned.
About 10,000 new dwellings are planned for her area.
Stacey Harley lives in the north-western suburb of Essendon. (ABC News: Sean Warren)
"I'm informing people. I start talking about it and they're like, 'What's an activity centre?' I'm doing the informing, not the government," she said.
Across the other side of Melbourne, Camberwell resident Julie Mulhauser also took part in community forums.
She said she submitted 70 questions and, more than two months on, she had "not received a single answer to a question".
The government said in addition to community forums, it consulted widely with residents through letter drops, online surveys and social media posts.
"We got 10,000 community responses. It's probably the largest response we've ever had on an engagement of that nature, which suggests to me that people are engaged," Ms Kilkenny said.
"If we want to give opportunity to young Victorians the same opportunities their parents had to get into the housing market, then we need to be pulling all the levers we can to support industry."
Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays at 7:30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV.