The original note, as written at the time
I think that every property owner should indicate a target price that they are supposed to charge for in the development of residential units. During the building approval stage each developer will be required to indicate which target group the property is going to serve; that is, if it is going to serve low income this developer will be entitled to incentivised taxes, design services and approval fees - they will be required to provide feasibility documentation to that effect. Middle and high income targeting developers will be required to provide proof of the quality standards and commensurate design input in their apartments.
Ongoing development
I think every property owner should indicate a target price they intend to charge for the residential units they develop.
During the building approval stage, each developer would be required to declare which group the property is intended to serve. If it is meant to serve low income, the developer becomes entitled to incentivised taxes, design services and reduced approval fees — and would be required to provide feasibility documentation showing that the numbers actually work at that end of the market. Developers targeting middle and high income would instead be required to demonstrate quality standards and commensurate design input in their apartments.
The reason this belongs at approval rather than at sale is that everything is decided by approval. By the time a unit reaches the market at a price nobody in the neighbourhood can pay, the plan has been approved, the servicing has been sized, the density has been fixed and the incentives, if there were any, have already been claimed. The price was designed in months earlier.
And it is honest. Right now we grant concessions and wave through designs without ever requiring the developer to say who the building is for, so the market discovers it later, at the point of sale, and the discovery is presented as a natural outcome rather than a design decision. Asking for the target group at approval turns a market outcome back into a decision that a person made and can be held to.
The second half matters just as much. If you claim the low-income bracket to collect the incentives, your feasibility must show that the units will actually land at that price. That is precisely the document that gets omitted, because the incentives are claimed on intention while the numbers are quietly built around a higher return. A feasibility requirement is not bureaucracy. It is the only thing that distinguishes a commitment from a promise.
For the middle and high income end, the requirement is different but the logic is the same: prove the design input. If a developer is selling at a premium, they should be able to show what the premium is buying, in a way that can be inspected rather than asserted.
The objection will be that this adds friction and slows approvals, and it will. But we already have an approval process and it already takes a long time; the question is what it produces at the end. Right now it produces buildings whose actual audience is discovered afterwards. Making the audience part of the submission is a small addition to the paperwork and a substantial change to what the paperwork means.