Melbourne Water plays an important role in supporting housing growth across Greater Melbourne while ensuring communities are protected from flood and climate risks.
Our updated Housing Roadmap – Resilient Growth, Enabling Housing: Scaling Impact for Tomorrow's Housing Needs – outlines how we are improving planning, services and infrastructure to support housing delivery, increase development certainty and build resilient communities.
Building on improvements already delivered, the Roadmap focuses on practical, repeatable actions that help unlock housing while maintaining Victoria's long-term flood and climate resilience.
Our approach
The Roadmap focuses on:
- Supporting the timely delivery of homes and infrastructure
- Providing greater certainty and transparency for industry and communities
- Improving planning through better data and information
- Balancing housing growth with flood and climate resilience.
This approach supports low-risk development to proceed efficiently, while providing earlier certainty and improved coordination for more complex sites.
Roadmap pillars
The Roadmap is structured around four key pillars:
1. Improving services and processes
- Making our services simpler, faster and easier to navigate, helping reduce delays and provide greater certainty.
2. Strategic flood and climate intelligence
- Making flood and climate information easier to access and understand, so better decisions can be made earlier.
3. Enabling development in growth areas
- Working with partners to help unlock housing in growth corridors and priority development areas.
4. Enabling Resilient Inner Urban Communities
- Supporting precinct-scale planning that enables more housing while managing flood risk and protecting liveability.
Shaped by engagement
The Roadmap has been developed through extensive engagement with industry and government partners.
Stakeholders consistently highlighted the need for:
- A system that is faster, clearer and more predictable
- Stronger upfront planning, clearer roles and better coordination
- Reduced complexity and more consistent guidance
The engagement also reinforced the importance of:
- Risk-based, decision making
- Clearer standards and expectations
- Improved access to flood and climate data
- Stronger coordination and capability across the system
This feedback has helped shape the Roadmap and ensure its actions are practical, targeted and focused on improving housing outcomes.
The Association of Land Development Engineers (ALDE) said:
'Melbourne Water's updated Housing Roadmap builds on the collaboration with ALDE and the broader development industry. ALDE acknowledges the progress made and supports the ongoing work to reduce delays, improve certainty and streamline development servicing. We look forward to continuing to work with Melbourne Water to deliver practical outcomes that support housing delivery.'
The Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) said:
'UDIA Victoria welcomes Melbourne Water's continued focus on improving certainty, transparency and efficiency across the planning system. We're pleased to see a strong commitment to clearer pathways, streamlined processes and practical reforms that support housing delivery across Melbourne's growth areas.'
Supporting resources
Stay in touch
For updates on our upcoming implementation plan and reporting scorecard, sign up to the Planning and Development Sector Hub on Let's Talk.
Contact us
For more information, call 131 722 or email [email protected].
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