Billie Giles-Corti

There's a whole range of reasons why, from a cost point of view, living in a walkable neighbourhood has got its advantages.

Even though it will cost maybe a little more to move in there, the long-term cost that you'll spend over the course of living there will be lower, potentially, than living out in a suburban area where you've got to drive everywhere.

Well, the reason they do that is that they recognise that if you live in an area where you've got very good public transport, where you can walk everywhere or you can bike everywhere, the cost of living is lower.

And so people can afford a slightly higher mortgage because it's an efficient, a location efficient area so that you can use an alternative to having to drive everywhere.

So you don't need to run two or three cars.

You can actually use public transport.

I live in a

a very walkable area.

I'm very fortunate where there's three different choices of public transport.

I really don't need a car.

The other thing that's important about if you live in an area where there's, and I think developers need to get onto this, if you live in an area where there's lots of choices, you don't really need to have, if you live in an apartment, for example, two car bays.

By having one car bay or no car bay, that could actually reduce the cost of the apartment.

So if you're doing apartment living, living somewhere where it's very walkable, where the developers are not providing so much parking, could mean that you reduce your own daily expenses for living, but also the cost of your apartment.

So there's lots of benefits which I think we need to get onto to reduce the make housing more affordable and also to reduce living costs.