Adelaide City Council plans for 50,000 CBD residents without 'destroying the city'

South Australia's first appointed town planner, Charles Reade, was a prominent exponent of "garden cities" — an early 20^th century urban planning movement that emerged in response to the overcrowding in British cities during the industrial revolution.

Mr Reade, a New Zealander, envisaged cities surrounded by green space, combining the best of urban and rural living.

In 1914, before his appointment by the SA government, he toured Australia to spruik the concept, and the Adelaide City Council gave him access to Town Hall to deliver a lecture.

Unbeknownst to the council, the title of Mr Reade's presentation was: "Garden cities versus Adelaide slums and suburbs".

It was to be an exhibition of the poor state of the city's housing with images of dilapidated alleys and overcrowded backyards projected to the audience on lantern slides.

It caused outrage.

"NO SLUMS IN ADELAIDE," read The Advertiser front page the next day, quoting an indignant Acting Mayor of Adelaide Alderman Cohen.

"We have long held the reputation of being the Garden City of Australia," Mr Cohen reportedly said on October 5, 1914.

"I therefore give this statement as to the existence of slums in Adelaide a most emphatic and strong denial, and I defy Mr Reade or anyone to point out the existence of any slums in our city."

The slums controversy came in a year when the population of the Adelaide CBD had swelled to a record 43,000 people – more than double the population estimated to be living within the CBD today.

Now, the council wants to return to its 1910s population peak.

Town Hall adopted a "City Plan" last year that targets 50,000 residents living in the CBD and North Adelaide by 2036.

Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith said the target reflects "the need to repopulate the city".

"Setting a target of 50,000 means we'll be going back, back to the future, back to the sort of numbers we had in the last century," she told the ABC.

Finding space for 50,000 people

Returning to 50,000 residents does not mean returning to the days of slums, Dr Lomax-Smith argues.

"There's always progress in building development and the way people live," she said.

But the population growth will, according to others, require a fundamental change to Adelaide's skyline.

A 2023 council report found that accommodating even just 46,300 residents by 2041 could require building thirty-six 36-storey towers. The city currently has three.

Meanwhile, the City Plan outlines that 1,000 new dwellings a year — or 2.7 homes a day — will be needed to reach the 2036 target.

"But there's a massive amount of potential latent developable sites in the CBD, particularly if you think about the western end."

The City Plan forecasts that the West End, including areas around Grote Street, West Terrace and Whitmore Square, can accommodate more than a third of the population growth needed to reach 50,000 residents.

But other areas like North Adelaide, North Terrace and the East End are earmarked for much less growth, partly due to their high-level of heritage protection.

"To get to 50,000, we don't want to destroy the city," Dr Lomax-Smith said.

"It would be easy if we just demolished every building in the city and built tower blocks — 50 tower blocks, easy, get to 50,000 — but they would probably be mainly single-person units, and it would damage the character of our city.

"One of the most important things is to protect the quality of life."

Does the CBD appeal to families?

Finding space for 50,000 residents is one thing — getting them to live in a city is another.

"Australians on the whole have not been used to living in a house without a garden and off-street parking," Dr Lomax-Smith said.

In the decades after Charles Reade lectured Adelaide about its slums, families flocked to the suburbs in search of more space.

From 1947 to 1972, the city's population dropped from about 35,000 to 14,000, according to the council's archives.

"Everyone was concentrated on building a house on a quarter-acre block and having their own place to live with their families," said Professor Emma Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Housing Research at the University of Adelaide.

"So, there was kind of a gutting out of the city over those years, and it probably reached the kind of peak in the 1980s."

While the CBD's population is growing again, it is more to do with migration and international students than suburban families attracted to city living.

Most City of Adelaide residents either live on their own (40.8 per cent) or with their partner (25.6 per cent), according to the 2021 census.

Just 8 per cent of city households — 970 in total — are couples with children.

"The city has become a place where young people live maybe temporarily while they're studying," Ms Baker said.

"So, we're a student city, we're a rental city, and people tend to … move into the city, live there for a while and move out later on as they get older."

It's a vastly different picture than the early 20^th century when big families lived in small city houses, or "slums". 

The average size of an Australian household in 1911 was 4.5 people; it is now just 1.7 in the City of Adelaide.

Planning Institute of SA president Cate Hart said without families in the city, "what the city council is trying to strive for won't occur".

"Single bed apartments to meet a student demand is not going to reach your 50,000 people," she said.

"You actually need to build development that will accommodate three and four people per household."

Ms Hart, who supports the council's plan, argues the public and private sector need to drive a "culture of living in the city" through good design and a diversity of housing.

"Apartment living is not for everybody, and cookie cutter apartments will not drive a new culture," she said, adding that the city would need townhouses, "shop top living" and mid-rise development.

Who will build the houses?

The council will need help from the private sector to reach its target, but pulling off a major housing project within the CBD is not always easy.

"It's not enough to just zone an area and think 'job done'," said Planning Minister Nick Champion.

"Because the nature of private development is it comes in fits and starts, they have to get feasibility and capital, and they have to struggle against construction costs which are quite high at the moment."

Further complicating matters is that the City of Adelaide is not the only local government area with housing growth on the horizon.

The whole of Greater Adelaide will need another 315,000 houses by 2051, according to the state government's 30 Year Plan released last year.

Around a third of this growth is earmarked for the sprawling northern suburbs.

Jamie McClurg, executive chair of a real estate developer, said the suburbs are "typically a safer investment" for developers.

"Certainly, those sort of markets are easier to produce and deliver stock," he said.

It comes as his company nears completion on a major mixed-use apartment development on the former North Adelaide Le Cornu site.

The land stood vacant for more than 30 years after various development plans fell over.

"There's available land that can be just developed on straight away — it tends to be caught up in a lot of conversations and not probably enough action to my mind," Mr McClurg said.

He is sceptical that the 50,000 population target will be reached.

"I think that we have seen through the last couple of decade people set targets and not be responsible for achieving them," he said.

"I just would expect the people that are leading us to understand the math that they're committing to and deliver on it."