Nightingale Housing

Nightingale's Jeremy McLeod

At last count, the Nightingale Housing model for more affordable, community-focused and sustainable housing had notched up one completed project, another nearly finished, one about to commence construction on site, and 15 more teams looking for suitable locations in cities from Hobart to Brisbane, to Fremantle.

The altruistic venture is the brainchild of self-confessed left-wing do-gooder Jeremy McLeod, who as a child marched with his parents in Melbourne on social justice and environmental issues. As an architect, he was sure there had to be a way of helping middle and low-income earners onto the homeownership ladder, so he came up with a plan that he hoped would lead him towards affordable housing’s ‘Holy Grail’.

It started with The Commons, a housing development in Melbourne’s Brunswick, that McLeod used as the prototype for the Nightingale model, without realising at the time that he was founding a new movement.

“The idea of The Commons was that it would be a project for triple-bottom-line housing,” McLeod says. “We wanted to show the market that you could do triple-bottom-line - affordable, social and sustainable - and we wanted to share our knowledge. We saw The Commons as a standalone project that we hoped would encourage market change.

“Lots of people toured the completed project and it won a few awards, and was widely published, but even then it was seen as a blip on the radar, an anomaly, not the future or the new status quo,” he adds.

“The decision to ‘super-charge’ The Commons by creating the Nightingale model came later,” McLeod says. “That decision to make a replicable model that exists so that other architects can deliver the same affordable housing outcomes, that was an afterthought.

“The weird thing about Nightingale is that when we started this, we thought ‘This can’t be the solution, there must be a better model out there somewhere, why can’t we find it?’,” he laughs. “When we built Nightingale we thought we’d run it until we found the professionals who were already plugging this gap. We never anticipated for a moment that we would start a movement.”

These architects have tapped into a ravenous appetite for sustainable and affordable housing in cities around Australia, where housing affordability is at an all-time low.

Federal Governments have discussed introducing several structural measures to address housing affordability. For example, Ken Henry’s review of the tax system in 2009 devoted two sections to Housing Affordability and Housing Assistance.

Encouragingly, state and local governments have made some progress in the area of affordable housing: the City of Sydney introduced targets for 2030 around the provision of social and affordable housing, and has incorporated both categories in the development of two of its own sites in Ultimo and Pyrmont. Elsewhere, affordability remains a growing problem, especially for so-called key workers - including nurses, teachers and police - who in parts of Australia can no longer afford to live near where they work.

Nightingale is not the only answer to Australia’s affordable housing dilemma crises, but it’s a useful part of the puzzle, thanks to its reduced up-front apartment costs, re-sale prices that are pegged to average growth levels in the suburb, that apartments are quickly resold off-market to those on a purchaser’s list, and the in-built sense of community that results from common rooftop laundries and vegetable gardens.

In Victoria, where the model was born, Nightingale recently received a $100,000 grant from the Victorian Government to replicate and extend its sustainability achievements across the state, with funds earmarked for research on existing sites and for the development of the next major project, the Nightingale Village at Brunswick, currently being designed by seven architect-led teams.

“The new grant targets two things: sustainability and community,” McLeod explains. “On one side, we will work with Melbourne University to monitor internal temperatures, air quality and daylight quality, to benchmark that data against energy usage and carbon emissions from The Commons and Nightingale 1.0. That will help us determine whether those projects are achieving their objectives and how we might improve on future performance.

“The second part of the grant looks at how we might build meaningful communities,” he adds. “We want to engage with potential residents and work out how to build deliberative housing, so the second part of the grant is a loan to fund a piece of technology that we are having built that will provide real time info from resident groups about their preferences and price points, so we can drill down into the needs of the 3500 people currently on our waiting lists.”

The number of people who are keen to invest in the Nightingale Model product has surprised McLeod, although he concedes there is nothing he’d rather do than solve the problem of affordable housing. “We never approached this as a gap in the market, we looked at it from the point of view that our city needs this,” he says, “For us at Breathe, if we can’t build triple-bottom-line houses, we’ll wash dishes instead. If you talk to almost anyone aged 35 in our city, they all care deeply about sustainability and the future in our city, and about building meaningful communities.”

In another big win for the model, Nightingale announced that it is working with financial institutions including SEFA, Christian Super, Brightlight and NAB, to enable institutional investors to invest in the development of future Nightingale projects.

As well as being at the forefront of a social movement, Nightingale aims to be a leader in the design and construction industry and is supported in this endeavour by its partnership with BlueScope, having met with BlueScope’s Innovation team to discuss trends and provide feedback on some of the initiatives they are working on.