10-12 Storey Flats Not Sensible

Chris Day thinks that building 10-12 storey flats on busy main roads in the inner suburbs is "sensible" ("Rising population pressures city" Eastern Courier 3/4/13). This is despite international evidence that housing people on polluted main roads causes higher rates of asthma, heart disease, premature births, underweight babies and childhood leukaemia.

Air pollution now causes more deaths in Australia than car crashes, according to the AMA. Our State government's housing policy is set to accelerate this tragic trend in Adelaide for several generations to come.

Dwarfing heritage cottages of the inner suburbs with Soviet style blocks of flats will be an unwanted and ugly intrusion on our oldest and most historic suburbs, along with worse traffic gridlock and large-scale overlooking and overshadowing.

Mr. Day says that the State government has been silent in response to hundreds of residents' objections because it "hasn't got the room to move". But politics is the art of the possible and governments always have room to move. It's called compromise. It's the bedrock of democracy.

The government should direct 3-4-5 storey apartment blocks to less heavily trafficked main roads and take its hands off imposing multi-storey blocks of flats on quiet residential areas next to the Linear Park. Lining the Linear Park with concrete towers will result in vastly increased loads of pollutants into the River Torrens and coastal environment, according to marine experts, as well as compromising the biodiversity and calm beauty of our main city river asset.

Evonne Moore (spokeswoman) St. Peters Residents Association