this was in the australian a few weeks back as a full page editorial about Perths growth and future, just came across it in online form tonight though.
Growth pains for a city on the edge
PAIGE TAYLOR | The Australian | November 05, 2012
PERTH residents have not yet reached broad agreement about what they want their city to be when it grows up.
This became clear to Committee for Perth chief executive Marion Fulker when she oversaw a four-year research project about how the city would and could look in 2050, the year in which it is predicted to have doubled its population to 3.5 million.
Launched last month, Towards a Bright Future looks at Perth's people, its economy, planning, environment, education, decision-making as well as its property market and who can afford it.
The topic of Perth property is vexed.
The report found the gap between rich and poor is widening in Perth. A house is something well out of reach of many Perth workers and there are about 22,000 people on the state's public housing list.
Despite a big slump last year followed by a plateau in Perth's real estate market, Perth property remains attractive to investors, particularly investors from Asia.
This week China's 21st Century Business Herald sent a reporter to Perth to examine the city's property opportunities, why there is so much interest in buying in the west and whether such investments are promising.
September was a bumper month for the independent West Australian property buyer specialising in finding investments for Asian clients, Momentum Wealth.
The company's Perth managing director Damian Collins said results were 23 per cent up on the last record month.
Perth's strengths as a property investment option are formidable and well understood. It is perfectly positioned as a gateway to Asia and its resource wealth makes it the engine room of the nation's economy.
It is ranked by The Economist Intelligence Unit as one of the top 10 cities in the globe to live in and it is Australia's fastest growing capital.
Though governments are shy of the "B" word, the Committee for Perth claims its research shows Western Australia's economy has been booming for the past 10 years.
This has been the result of the expansion of major economies in Asia and the Indian Ocean rim. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Western Australia's economy doubled in size between 1990 to 2006.
The report, Towards a Bright Future, states that the economic influence of the state and the Perth region is expected to continue to grow despite well-publicised redundancies and project delays announced across the resource sector in the past few months.
"Of the existing $231.8 billion in committed capital investment in Australia's resource industry, 64 per cent is earmarked for investment in Western Australia," the report states.
"This unprecedented economic expansion has driven and will continue to drive population growth.
"From 1991 to 2010, the population of the Perth region grew by nearly 50 per cent from 1,143,249 million to 1,696,062 million.
"Perth's population is projected to reach 3.5 million people or more by about 2050."
This means that Perth will have more than doubled its current population in about 40 years and will be a region of comparable size to Melbourne or Sydney today."
At Momentum Wealth, a large percentage of Asian clients looking to invest in Perth are businessmen and women who already have a connection to the city.
Mr Collins says those clients are Malaysian or Singaporean couples who had been to university in Perth, often buying something for their children to live in while studying.
Mr Collins said residential and commercial property in Perth was appealing to Asian investors because of low interest rates and an understanding that, despite a recent slowdown in the resource sector, the West Australian economy would continue to grow.
"Long term, they see it as a safe place to put their money and they still see it as a very strong place for growth," he says. "There is a lot more investor confidence back in the market and rents are up."
Residential properties in Perth yield 5.5 per cent. In commercial property, prime office space yields 7 per cent to 7.5 per cent and the yields are slightly higher in secondary locations and in industrial areas of Perth.
Mr Collins said there was no doubt this was having a driver effect. Some apartment developments in and near the centre of Perth were not just aimed at overseas investors, they were built because of them.
Perth's changing skyline, and the increasing number of people moving into the city to live, is of great interest to the Committee for Perth and its chief executive Ms Fulker, who was raised in Sydney and made her move west in 1986.
"There is something about Perth and its lifestyle that gets under your skin," Ms Fulker said at a lunch of her peers at the launch of Towards a Bright Future.
"There's an attachment to Perth that is often maligned by those on the east coast. Perth citizens are very loyal.
"There's also a degree of protectiveness about it too.
"As a fast-growing region we wanted to understand Perth's strengths and opportunities and its weakness and challenges.
"At the same time we also wanted to find out what the aspirations of Perth people were because with growth brings challenges and we are all starting to regularly experience some growing pains, things like traffic congestion, overcrowded public transport, housing and rental affordability and urban sprawl.
"Now is the time to take positive action to define and deliver a bright future for the Perth region."
Ms Fulker says her organisation's research found a "bright future" scenario is a realistic aspiration for Perth. But a "business as usual" scenario was the most likely outcome if Perth did not seize the opportunities and rise to the challenges before it.
"We simply can't have the same Perth with more people in it no matter how much we might want to," she says.
Ms Fulker is sure Perth can be the city so many residents want it to be; positive, tolerant, easy to get around, thriving economically but with housing at every price point.
She points to Melbourne's transformation after it lost its manufacturing base in the 1980s. It made itself into a sporting and cultural capital. People wanted to live downtown and Melbourne was later recognised as the world's most liveable city.
Ms Fulker believes changes need to come in four ways - vision, innovation, collaboration and adaptation.
She believes this is critical because, while Perth's growth creates chances to improve the region and quality of people's lives, it creates challenges for those West Australians concerned with balancing social, cultural, economic and environmental objectives.
www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/in-depth/in-the-zone-2012