A recent survey produced by The West Australian has discovered a distinct housing gap is an emerging risk for West Australian seniors, as planning regulations stifle the industry’s ability to meet the growing needs of older individuals.

The results of the survey showed that while 70% of West Australian seniors would expect to receive in-home care, not enough retirement villages and aged care facilities are being built to facilitate the remaining 30%.

The Executive Director of the Property Council in Western Australia, Lino Iacomella, deduced from statistics that the state will need an additional 24,000 retirement living units by 2050 to meet the rising demand.

Moreover, current legislation pertaining to the restrictive memorials system further hampers the retirement industry’s efforts to change the current outlook.

“Placing a memorial on land earmarked for retirement living, hampers development efforts to incorporate retirement living with other uses such as mainstream residential, commercial etc.

“This can often make projects unviable leading to a shortfall of seniors housing.  It’s time the legislation was changed to reflect the changing needs and wants of WA seniors,” said Mr Iacomella.

Mr Iacomella also stressed the importance of adapting planning frameworks to embrace emerging trends such as vertical villages and inter-generational living. The benefits of such adaptations are already be observed in neighbouring states, where these modern and master-planned spaces allow older individuals to remain an active member of society and proves to be essential to their wellbeing and the betterment of the wider community.

“Vertical villages will allow seniors to embrace retirement living lifestyle, while remaining in existing suburbs in the area they already know.

“Embracing medium-density living can provide high-quality, low maintenance housing options, while still enabling all of the community amenity, such as polls and social spaces, available at traditional villages.

“There simply isn’t the land available to continue to develop lifestyle villages in the traditional way, without expecting seniors to relocate into greenfield outer suburbs,” Mr Iacomella said.

A proposed action plan to bridge this potential housing gap includes partially lifting of memorials legislation from the Retirement Living Act, enabling mixed-use and inter-general living spaces, updating planning regulations to allow for the construction of more vertical villages, and release more vacant land for retirement living development, through the sale of Government assets.