Across Perth’s established suburbs, a familiar pattern plays out with striking regularity. A new apartment development is proposed, residents object, and the project earns the label of ‘controversial’. It may ultimately be approved, since Perth rarely kills density outright – but the path to approval runs through months, sometimes years, of consultation and design revisions, adding significant cost and delaying the delivery of housing the city cannot afford to wait for.
Whose voices decide what is controversial?
Rarely asked, however, is whose voices are deciding what counts as controversial. Research published by YIMBY Melbourne in August last year offers an uncomfortable answer – planning consultations often do not represent the communities they claim to serve. YIMBY Melbourne’s report, Community Consultation is Unrepresentative and Biased, found that just 0.2 per cent of each community participated in 17 consultation processes across 7 councils, with those most likely to benefit from new housing – renters, younger residents and those seeking well-located apartment options – excluded from decisions about density.
The research also found the planning conversation was largely being conducted by those who already had housing, with homeowners overrepresented in 100 per cent of consultations where housing tenure was measured. In Perth, the outcome of that imbalance is visible in the zoning map, with Grattan Institute’s analysis of state planning data – published in its 2025 report, More homes, better cities: Letting more people live where they want – showing three-quarters of the city’s residential land was zoned for two storeys or fewer.
Majority of Western Australians not opposed to medium density
And a 2024 report from the Property Council, Close to Home, showed almost three quarters – 74 per cent – of Western Australians were not opposed to medium density development that was well designed and added to local amenity. The response to this is not to dismiss the concerns of existing residents, but to ensure that planning conversations are balanced by the voices of those who stand to benefit from more housing, and to challenge the assumption that density and liveability are fundamentally at odds.
Vienna, Copenhagen and Toronto are substantially denser than Perth, and each matches or exceeds Australian cities on quality-of-life measures. Well-designed apartment projects do not diminish suburbs, they strengthen them – and the evidence from cities that have embraced density makes that case convincingly.
What Perth needs now
What Perth needs now is a planning conversation that includes everyone with a genuine stake in the city’s future, not just those who already have a foothold in it. Apartment living, delivered in the right location and to the right design standard, is not a compromise of last resort. It’s a genuine first choice for many, and Perth’s housing debate will not move forward until it is treated as such.
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