Developers in the outer suburbs promise the moon. The reality is often much less rosy. Credit:Eddie Jim The fear among residents, councils, planners and infrastructure experts is that Clyde is not alone in the forgotten neighbourhoods of our sprawling outer urban fringe. Unprecedented population growth is transforming Melbourne from a sleepy regional capital of 3 million only 20 years ago to a megalopolis of a forecast 8 million by 2050. By then, Casey municipality will be more populous than Tasmania. Politicians right and left love the growth. As The Age revealed on Saturday, population is propping up an otherwise stagnant state economy, generating property-related taxes that account for almost half of state-raised revenue. Victoria is hitched to population and property as an economic strategy – at direct odds with government planning policy.

Green fields on the outskirts of Melbourne are being transformed into suburbs at an alarming rate. Credit:Eddie Jim Adding a city the size of Ballarat each year is pushing Melbourne upwards and, contrary to decades of planning policy, outwards. Melbourne continues to spread like no other capital in Australia, pushing neighbourhoods beyond the transport, services and jobs that allow a successful city to work. Already Melbourne stretches 150 kilometres from Bunyip in the far south-east to Wallan in the north. The further it expands, the more difficult the task of keeping people connected becomes. Rapid growth is transforming Melbourne from a sleepy regional capital of 3 million only 20 years ago to a megalopolis of a forecast 8 million by 2050 Credit:Eddie Jim Sprawling dystopia

Rather than shaping a sophisticated 21st century metropolis, current trends point to the world's move liveable city morphing on its frontier into a sprawling dystopia. The village of Clyde could be the location for a TV soapie about a close country community. Student Jake Cullen has launched a petition to Premier Daniel Andrews demanding more spaces at Tarneit railway station. Credit:Pat Scala It's set among trees near fields of celery, leeks and spinach and centred on a slightly ramshackle general store/post office with an old-fashioned lolly counter opposite the former train station. On a sunny winter's morning, it's a bucolic scene. Not for long. Despite a long campaign by the Casey council to protect the township and the rich loamy soil – the heart of Melbourne's food bowl – Clyde is about to be trampled by a stampeding metropolis, its fields of leafy greens mown down by houses in their thousands. Cranbourne East will be home to 140,000 by 2041.

Jake Cullen and vehicles overflowing from the railway station into neighbouring areas. Credit:Pat Scala Store owner Tracey O'Brien says real estate agents have been lurking with sales contracts. "You know kids still come here after school for lollies and spend half an hour going 'I'll have one of those and one of those'. They won't be able to do that when Westfield comes." "You know kids still come here after school for lollies and spend half an hour going 'I'll have one of those and one of those'. They won't be able to do that when Westfield comes'': Tracey O'Brien. Credit:Eddie Jim It wasn't meant to be this way. Not according to planning policy, anyway.

For decades, governments Labor and Coalition have talked urban consolidation. It's clearest expression was the Bracks Labor government's Melbourne 2030, which promised a firm urban growth boundary to halt to our geographic expansion. Tracey O'Brien, owner of the Clyde Village Store, fears the village's days as a bucolic oasis are numbered. Credit:Eddie Jim We were to be reorganised to live, work and play around state-of-the-art public transport. The Baillieu/Napthine Coalition tweaked Labor's plan to include the idea of "20-minute city". The Andrews government's Plan Melbourne 2017-2050 "refreshes" the Coalition vision. The bipartisan consolidation project has partly worked. Population is growing again in the central city, especially in the apartment forests of the CBD and former industrial sites of Docklands and Southbank. Fringe factor

New "brownfield" sites – Fishermans Bend to the south west of the CBD and the Arden/Macaulay precinct – are in the pipeline. More apartments and townhouses are being built, and smaller housing lots for detached housing help slow the city's spread. Yet the sheer number of newcomers, more than a 100,000 a year, has resulted in more people settling on our fringe than ever before. A record 22,700 housing lots were sold in outer areas in 2016, where a 3.2 per cent population growth was double that of established suburbs. Our four largest municipalities are all growth areas: Casey, Wyndham, Whittlesea and Hume. "If the city continues to expand, the natural environment will be impacted," warns the government's new planning blueprint Plan Melbourne 2017-2050. "Commute times to employment and services will grow longer, and socioeconomic disparities across the city will increase." But what is foreseen is already upon us. "Train station coming." That's what the billboard promises over a backdrop of a field of vegetables bursting with growth in dappled sunshine. It's advertising Eliston, one of the new estates bearing down on village of Clyde.

Those buying at Eliston are in for a disappointment. The station is not coming. No time soon, anyway. In 1999, Labor leader Steve Bracks vowed to reopen the old South Gippsland line closed by Jeff Kennett. The Clyde station would have been re-established opposite the general store. In office, Bracks failed to deliver. A rail line to Clyde is just one of many projects on the Andrews government's unfunded, you-beaut transport ideas list for 20-30 years hence. Despite some recent improvements, buses also remain stubbornly aloof. Many new neighbourhoods across outer Melbourne have no bus services. From the south side of Berwick Waters estate in Casey it's about two kilometres from the nearest bus stop, where the peak-hour "service" is every 40 minutes. Later in the day, it's every two hours. Miss the bus and your day is shattered.

Daily ordeal Drive and park at the nearest train station? Good luck. Car parking at rail stations – where they exist – across outer Melbourne, from Berwick in the south east to South Morang in the north and Tarneit in the west, is now a daily ordeal for commuters, residents and local councils. Tarneit railway station opened just two years ago with a 1000-space car park, far too small for a burgeoning population. Student Jake Cullen says the car park is full by 8am, so commuters park on public spaces including footpaths, risking fines, or they park far away, adding long walks to the daily drive and rail grind.

The struggle for a park often gets heated. "Four or five times I've seen people get into pretty good arguments in the car parks, you see people get frustrated in their cars doing laps of the car parks." Cullen has launched a petition to Premier Daniel Andrews demanding more spaces. He struggles to understand why a new rail station was not better planned. So the only realistic option is the very thing contemporary planning is not supposed to encourage: the car. In the post-war years, Victoria's extensive manufacturing base was dispersed across the suburbs and regions. Young families could build or buy a moderately priced house near a new factory or workshop with ample job opportunities.

'Knowledge' jobs The transformation of the economy from manufacturing to services has concentrated high-paying "knowledge" jobs in finance, information economy and health in the inner city, where housing is prohibitively expensive. Employment has almost doubled since the mid 1990s within 10 kilometres of the CBD, compared to compared a 51 per cent increase citywide.

"The economy has shifted to one focused on the central city," says Terry Rawnsley an economist with prominent Melbourne consultants SGS Economics & Planning and a trusted consultant to government. "But we are still growing the suburbs, so the reality we are creating for ourselves is a frightening one." Every working day, seven out of 10 Casey residents with jobs travel out of their own municipality to work. The smaller the housing lots, the more the cars. They drive, slowly, mostly westwards into old Melbourne beyond Dandenong, many to jobs in the Monash area. From his home at the Beaumont Waters estate, it often takes Casey mayor Sam Aziz half an hour to travel 1500 metres in his peak-hour crawl to the Monash freeway entrance. And he has it good. "It's going to be much worse for the 140,000 coming in the (Cranbourne East/Clyde) estates behind me," he says. Wynne's answer to Casey's transport and work woes is the government's vision of a network of National Employment and Innovation hubs, including at Dandenong and Monash University.

The problem with that solution is that the Dandenong and Monash areas are where many of Casey's commuters already head, by car, each day. Getting to work, school and play is just one of many frontier challenges. Infinite improvement Minister Wynne says he is "absolutely" confident that detailed planning for new suburbs is ensuring human and health facilities are provided for. "I think we've improved infinitely from 10, 20 years ago when you were getting developments stuck in the middle of paddocks with no services to them." It's probably true, if a slight exaggeration.

However, as The Sunday Age reveals today, confidential state data points to a $250 million annual gap across some government-funded human services in growth areas, compared to metropolitan Melbourne – the kind of help taken for granted in the inner city including mental health, alcohol and drug counselling and domestic violence services. (The study was funded by the outer suburban councils, covers a limited range of human services and doesn't include big-ticket items like hospitals and schools.) In a separate study, researchers at the Grattan Institute warn that in the five years to 2021, secondary schools will have to accommodate more than twice the growth in student numbers seen in 2011-2016, with outer growth areas the major pressure points. Wyndham in the west is bracing for a 67 per cent increase in demand in the coming 10 years. In the cafes around Spring Street, where ministers and their young advisers gather, negative commentary about growth areas is frowned upon. Those who live and lead in these neighbourhoods are less squeamish. "Developers and government are selling a dream to young families," says Aziz. " 'This is your only chance to buy a home. Come here and bring your family up in open air where we have space'. But people get here and the reality is nothing like that. In fact it's often a nightmare."

Sydney and Melbourne dominate the Australian economy, especially so since the mining boom faded. In their ongoing economic arm wrestle, Melbourne proudly spruiks its relative housing affordability. It can do so for one reason. Melbourne's edge Melbourne's edge is its edge – our ability to carve up cow paddocks, market gardens and grasslands in the name of housing affordability, is what we have over geographically constrained Sydney. Sprawl is core business, even if it is at direct odds with planning policy. The Andrews government has a wider strategy for tackling affordability including abolishing stamp duty for homes up to $600,000, a $1 billion social housing growth fund, loans, and reworked residential zones to boost housing density in middle ring suburbs. It's a longish-term plan whose real-world impact on housing costs will be unclear for some years.

But Wynne confirms that ample greenfield land supply is Labor's primary answer to the affordability problem. Amid fanfare in February, the government announced release of 100,000 new greenfield housing lots. "It (acting on affordability) is about supply, absolutely," Wynne tells The Sunday Age. "There's no question about that." On the other hand, the minister insists, also "absolutely", that the Melbourne's urban boundary is now set and will not move. Well, not in this term of government or the next, if Labor is re-elected. Planning ministers always say that – until politics and the powerful development industry persuade them otherwise. In the 14 years since the Bracks government legislated the boundary, it's been extended three times, twice by Labor. Last week's census release showed Victoria's population growing 146,600 in 2016, smashing official forecasts – and the modelling used for land supply projections, planning and transport – by at least 25,000 people. The pressure to keep sprawling will be intense and, probably, irresistible.

Professor Peter Phibbs, a geographer at the University of Sydney, says the experience of both Sydney and Melbourne is evidence that managing growth is much harder than governments admit. Moving out He flags the option of the governments encouraging or even requiring newcomers to move to centres other than Sydney and Melbourne – cities and towns crying out for people and economic activity. In Victoria, both Labor and the Coalition are pondering such ideas. Inducements include the Andrews government's $1.6 billion upgrade of regional rail services. Opposition leader Matthew Guy has a taskforce looking at incentives to divert newcomers and businesses to the regions. Rawnsley has crunched the numbers on the regional option and is unconvinced. Such is the magnitude of growth into Melbourne that even if the regions doubled their growth rate over the next 20 years – a "Herculean" task he says – it would hardly make a dent in the growth of the capital.

"Bendigo would have to almost double in size, which would create all sort of growth pressures for that city. Creating more opportunities in regional Victoria won't change the Melbourne growth story." Like most politicians, planners and economists, Phibbs is wary about broaching the subject, but he says a review of immigration numbers at the federal level may now be the only realistic option to ease the housing and infrastructure demands on the two major capitals. "We're probably not thinking enough about the pressure on our cities from large immigration intakes," he says. "If you get to the same number of people (eventually) but do it a bit more slowly it makes the problem simpler for everyone." Wynne concedes the "challenge" of accommodating "inordinate" levels of international and interstate immigration into Victoria. But he welcomes the influx; the more the better. "We're very happy with where our state is at. We're unambiguously about population and unambiguously about growth for our city, and our state."

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