In the 2000s,another seismic shift occurred,setting us up for the predicament we find ourselves in today. As Alan Kohler writes in a recentQuarterly Essay,around the millennial mark,Baby Boomers started investing in real estate to take advantage of negative gearing,invariably “bidding up the price of houses … depriving their own children of the ability to buy a house”.
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Havingrecently moved to Denmark,I was immediately struck by how alien this mindset of families needing abundant,privately owned space is in other parts of the world. Across cities,families of five or six live in apartments not much bigger than my home in Melbourne (85sqm). Here,statistics show the average size of a detached house is 154sqm,while the average apartment measures 79sqm.
Roughly one-third of Danes live in apartments. The rest are either semi-detached or standalone houses. The average family doesn’t have a separate living room for the kids or four bedrooms,and many don’t even have a backyard!
“Europe has a much longer history of living in apartments,and its cities are structured to suit that,” says senior lecturer in urbanism at the University of Sydney,Dr Laurence Troy. “You also get a lot more amenities outside the building,which compensate for the lack of amenities in the building.”
Instead of looking at Australia’s housing stock in binary terms – “it’s either a very large house with two bathrooms and four rooms or a small apartment” – he says we should consider alternative living arrangements,such as apartments built with more storage and family-living in mind,not just investor sale.
“It’s not an option for everyone to have two kids in a small apartment;we can hardly blame people for wanting the private space in lieu of not being able to get anything in a different form,” Troy says.
Larger homes also have a bigger environmental impact,as they use more energy to heat and cool all that extra space,leading to higher utility bills. On top of that,they require a lot more building materials to construct and maintain,and all those materials take energy to produce and eventually replace.
“For a typical new build in Australia,the materials and construction will have an embodied carbon of 660kgCO2e/m2. For the average house of 232m2,that means 153 tonnes per home,” points out Oldfield.
The quality of Australian homes is also worse than in Europe:air tightness and solar control are poor,while in Denmark,the insulation and geothermal heating is one of the best in the world,he adds.
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“We are also knocking down perfectly liveable apartments for bigger,luxurious ones,such as this plan to knock down 80 one-bedroom and studio apartments to construct a nine-storey tower containing 31 luxury apartments in Sydney,” Oldfield says.
As for us,we are going to stay in our little apartment,and continue with our plan to be mortgage-free by (hopefully) 50. We may not have the yard or the space,but we will have financial freedom – and with that comes a certain amount of relief.
Caroline Zielinski is a freelance writer.
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