If you're building in Canberra right now, the conversation has shifted. It's no longer just about how many homes we deliver. It's about where they go, how they're structured, and what life looks like once people move in.

The Missing Middle reforms are built on a fairly simple idea: deliver more housing across established suburbs through terraces, dual occupancies, and small-scale infill, without relying on large apartment buildings to do all the heavy lifting.

That has a second-order effect that's easy to miss. It doesn't just change the form of development. It changes the scale of collective ownership. And that's where the conversation about strata really starts.

What the reforms say, and what they imply

The Legislative Assembly inquiry that preceded the approval surfaced something most developers would recognise immediately: strata is often seen as a barrier. Consultation pointed to the cost and complexity of body corporate arrangements as one of several deterrents to getting projects out of the ground. Community feedback reinforced that, with some residents clearly wary of being drawn into strata structures. And builders were direct about what they're hearing from buyers.

It's an easy line to dismiss, but it's not coming out of theory. It's coming from lived experience. The question is how you interpret it. Because it may not be a rejection of collective ownership in principle. It may be a reaction to how that ownership has been experienced in practice.

Density doesn't have to mean scale

For the past decade, most of Canberra's density has been delivered in larger buildings. More apartments, in fewer locations, with bigger and more complex strata schemes underneath them. That model works in a lot of ways, but it comes with a particular kind of operating reality:

• larger groups of owners
• more complex shared infrastructure
• higher budgets
• more layers of decision-making
• more points where things can go wrong

The Missing Middle reforms take a different approach. They spread density across more suburbs, through smaller developments - terraces, dual occupancies, low-rise buildings - each with fewer owners and simpler shared assets. You still get density, but you get it through distribution, not concentration. While the overall density goes up, the scale of each individual community comes down.

Scale changes the experience of strata

If there's one idea worth sitting with from all of this, it's this: the experience of strata is heavily influenced by scale.

In smaller developments, the dynamics shift, and you tend to see:

• fewer competing priorities between owners
• simpler assets to maintain and fund
• clearer lines of responsibility
• more direct and less procedural decision-making
• greater visibility between neighbours, which tends to drive accountability

None of that removes disagreement, but it does change the frequency, intensity, and cost of conflict. In larger schemes, issues can become structural as they get embedded in budgets, committees, and processes. In smaller schemes, they tend to show up earlier, get dealt with more directly, and don't compound in the same way.

That's not a criticism of larger buildings. It's a recognition that scale introduces complexity, and complexity introduces friction. The Missing Middle reforms, intentionally or not, start to rebalance that.

Different structures, same underlying questions

The inquiry pointed to alternative models such as shared equity, community land trusts, and cohousing as ways to improve how smaller developments operate. Each of these is valid, and each has a track record elsewhere. However, they don't remove the core questions. They just answer them differently.

Who makes decisions about shared property. Who maintains it. Who pays for it. How disagreements are handled. How the place holds together over time. Every form of collective ownership has to deal with those fundamentals.

What often distinguishes the models that work well isn't just the structure itself, but the scale at which they operate. Smaller, more human-scale communities tend to support better outcomes:

• participation is easier
• accountability is clearer
• issues are harder to ignore
• decisions feel closer to the people affected

Structure matters, but scale determines how that structure plays out in real life.

What this means for what you build

For developers now planning projects under the approved reforms, the practical question isn't which model is "best". The question is: what will this feel like for the people living there in year one, three, and ten?

Because whatever structure sits underneath the development, the experience will be shaped by a few things that don't change.

The first eighteen months set the tone

The people running the scheme early on aren't carefully selected. They're selected by default, because they're the ones who turn up. The decisions they make regarding budgets, contractors, priorities, and how issues are handled become the operating culture of the building.

In a smaller development, that effect is amplified. There's less buffer for poor decisions, but also more opportunity to get it right from day one.

Design decisions become operational realities

Every decision made during design turns into a conversation later:

• car parking layouts
• storage allocation
• drainage paths
• boundary definitions
• shared vs private assets

In larger developments, issues can be diluted across more owners. In smaller developments, they're felt more directly, which means they need to be thought through more carefully upfront. Done well, smaller schemes run with very little friction. Done poorly, problems become immediate and personal.

Handover is where patterns are set

The defect liability period isn't the end of the project. It's the start of the relationship between owners and what they've just bought into. The developments that hold together well over time are usually the ones where:

• the initial budget is realistic
• documentation is clear
• responsibilities are well understood
• support is in place early

That holds regardless of whether the model is strata, a community land trust, or something else.

Where this leaves us

The Missing Middle reforms won't remove collective ownership from Canberra's housing system. They'll expand it, and distribute it more widely. That creates a real opportunity to rethink how collective ownership works at a smaller scale, in more places.

It's not time to avoid strata or replace it entirely with alternative models. If we get that right - through better design, better early decision-making, and a more deliberate approach to how these communities are set up - the experience of strata can improve, even as it becomes more common.

That's probably the shift worth focusing on. Because in the end, the question isn't whether people want to live in collective ownership. It's whether the experience they've seen or heard about is one they're willing to choose again.