Residents in some parts of Australia's fastest-growing region will have to get used to living in more crowded quarters under a plan to limit urban sprawl.
Queensland Planning Minister Stirling Hinchliffe said growth in Queensland's southeast corner would remain strong, with an extra 754,000 homes needed over the next 20 years as the population grew from 2.8 million to 4.4 million.
The amount of rural land to be protected from urban development has risen from 84 per cent in the previous plan released in 2005 to 85 per cent now, with specific areas being preserved to encourage the koala population.
Mr Hinchliffe said the previous plan aimed to have 40 per cent of all new houses in existing urban areas, but the updated South East Queensland Regional Plan, which will govern how the region is managed from this year to 2031, revised that upwards to 50 per cent.
He said the regional plan would encourage development away from the coast and towards a corridor west of Brisbane.
Mr Hinchliffe said the plan set an urban dwelling target of 15 homes per hectare.
“That is a style of housing and a style of residential accommodation that people in southeast Queensland know very well if they know suburbs like New Farm, like Coorparoo,” he said.
Mr Hinchliffe said he was committed to protecting “the great backyard” as a housing option.
“But we can't have that across the whole of the region without breaking out and creating that sprawl that we don't want to have, without damaging the 85 per cent of the southeast that's being protected,” he said.
The plan also contains a strategy to protect koalas, whose habitat is gradually being developed.
The region covers an area of 22,890 square kilometres, stretching 240km from Noosa in the north to the Queensland-NSW border in the south, and 160km west to Toowoomba.
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