Pick up a property. Demolish the building. Rebuild what was there, but better, and make more spaces for more people.
A crucial piece of the puzzle of trying to transform a neighbourhood, is how to get hold of the land in the first place. The Nightingale 3 project in Melbourne took the above approach, you can read about it here.
But how about suburbia? We don't have the option of taking a single-storey building and adding space by building up, but could we take a similar approach? Could we find four connected titles, demolish, and rebuild with eight households?
It could be possible if we used the following principles:
More shared spaces: Shared laundries, storage, workshops, maybe even ditch the cars and use a fleet of electric vehicles.
Smaller spaces: Design for what we really need, learn to live with less, and just generally do bette design.
Common ownership: Whether it is a body corporate, a company structure or some other legal delight, sharing more requires a shift from a 'my house, my castle' property mentality.
Energy efficiency: Environmental considerations aside, this is a smart financial move. Keeping running costs low not only makes a higher build cost/mortgage affordable, it provides longer-term financial security by making living costs less tied to market variations in energy costs.
Around here, a typical section could be around 600 sqm. Four sections would give us 2400 sqm to play with.
I'm sure an architect could come up with an 8-household development using the principles above on 2400 sqm, even if we're limited to two storeys.