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Australia's cities and suburbs have evolved in this way and our planning has followed, he said.
In Minneapolis, that meant 70 percent of the city couldn't help create more housing because nothing could change in the suburban areas.
Brisbane is similar: a car-centric city, with a high-density CBD and inner suburbs, and suburban residential areas, Garred said.
The Minneapolis 2040 plan in 2018 was that “change has to happen throughout the city,” not just in high-density areas, he said.
“So they removed the planning restrictions and allowed people to build up to three homes per block everywhere in the city.”
In the past five years, 21,000 units, townhouses and duplexes have been built in Minneapolis, and parking spaces have been reduced in some parts of the city, an issue now being explored in Brisbane.
The lesson for Brisbane is that by encouraging “salt and pepper” across the city, “it means you're not going to see significant changes on any street,” Garred said.
“On a street of maybe 20 houses, you might see one or two duplexes on that street, or maybe a triplex,” he said.
“But it's not a whole triplex street, and it doesn't necessarily significantly affect the fabric of the street.”
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He said it also prevented certain sectors of the city from doing “all the heavy lifting” of dealing with population growth.
“By doing that, it takes away from the idea of supporting the idea only if it's not in our backyard because it's in everybody's backyard and everybody's doing a little bit of the lifting.”
Garred suggested Brisbane focus on a mix of housing, in all parts of the city, so people can downsize to an area they know.
“Most people in Brisbane live north or south, we very rarely cross the river,” he said.
“But as you get older and your kids leave, you don't want to leave the suburb you've lived in for 20, 30, 40 years.”
Minneapolis also provided a lesson in changing the conversation about infill developments, he said.
“It became about welcoming new neighbors to your street, not just a block of units.”
A third lesson for Brisbane was not strictly about affordability, but about housing mix.
Garred now leads Colliers' planning and urban design team. He won the Planning Research Award from the Planning Institute of Australia for his paper Planning for housing diversity.
