The Wire

Not enough new housing is being built near jobs, and transportation in major cities is already at or near capacity. The federal government’s infrastructure department says that the increasing urban sprawl is so bad that its beginning to hurt Australia’s productivity and quality of life.

At the launch of a report detailing these problems today the Federal Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese called for urban planners to make a priority of narrowing the distance between where people live and where they work. But experts say that this is a problem that Australia has long been facing, and fixing employment in major cities requires more than housing people close to transportation hubs.