Here’s the real housing crisis – my kids might never leave home

What is it with the world at the moment? Global conflicts, lurking dictators—it’s enough to make you turn to the Australian property market for some good news. Like the revelation I came across earlier this year that Australian house prices had come down for the first time in nearly two years.

The news left me ecstatic. “Kids!” I cried, running through the house. “It’s finally happened. The grotesquely engorged Australian property bubble has burst. Everything will be alright now!”

The great Australian dream is rapidly drifting out of reach.Credit: Matt Davidson

My children sighed as they handed me a chamomile tea and tried to explain it was a false hope. Yes, property prices had dropped, but only by 0.1 per cent, amounting to less than $1000 off the average $800,000 price tag for a new home. I had to get a grip, they said, and stop obsessing over every piece of news about the housing market as though things were going to improve. And they have a point.

Since my children were born early this century, Australia has transformed from a country with one of the highest rates of homeownership in the world to one of the least affordable in the OECD. Across the capital cities, house prices have increased by 400 per cent and rents have more than doubled. In order to buy their own home today, my kids would need nearly 17 years’ worth of average household income, compared with only nine years’ worth needed 25 years ago.

There has always been some struggle in buying a house, especially your first home, when you realise you can afford only the one-bedroom dump on the corner of a busy road rather than the Vogue Living pad you had in mind. But that age-old conflict – the older generation resented for snaffling up all the good houses, the younger one dismissed as work-shy and indulged – is giving way to a more serious conversation about the demise of the great Australian dream.

My kids, I’ve discovered, have swallowed a hard truth about their futures that I’m still coming to terms with. The post-school rite of passage that generations have taken for granted – fleeing the family home for a wildly unhygienic existence in a share house or gradually climbing the property ladder to a blissful existence in a suburban dream home – is no longer an option.

As I lay on the ground letting my children spoon-feed me the last of the chamomile tea, they explained how many of their friends had already had “the talk” with their parents about how they would never own their own home and now they needed to have that talk with me. They explained that due to the housing affordability crisis, young people were adjusting to this seismic social change, swapping homeownership for things such as “doom-spending”, international travel and “extreme dining”.

Other countries have been confronting the crisis with a range of remedies – Austria with a housing tax, Germany with indefinite leases and Sweden with significant investment that has created a public housing sector three times the size of Australia’s.

Here, we are making some efforts, including increased investment in social housing, but the only place where unaffordable housing is being seriously tackled is within the four walls of family homes, and it’s not a pretty sight.

I thought about the adjustments that my own friends have tried to make to secure their children’s future. When your child is born, it’s no longer enough to lay aside a bottle of vintage port or put their name on the waiting list for a good school; now you need to seriously consider whether you can buy that starter house they will never be able to afford.

Families such as mine that don’t have a spare home or two are dealing with bigger problems than the emotional wrench of children leaving home. They face an unappealing set of alternatives, including the horror of endless intergenerational living. Households become suspended in time, children languishing in their bedrooms and denied the vital life lessons of independent living, such as the bill shock that comes from blasting the heating 24 hours a day while walking around in a T-shirt. Their “ever-parents” lurk about in the shadows of the kitchen, endlessly preparing nutritious dinners that nobody appreciates and screaming at the walls that nobody ever shuts the back/ front/ toilet/ fridge door!

And then there are the friends – hundreds of them, laying about the house at all hours of the day and night, doing God only knows what behind closed doors and making noises that I, for one, am desperate not to decipher because there are some things that family members should never know.

Or there’s the granny flat option – the government-subsidised kind that brings a teeny-weeny version of independent and affordable living into the backyard and potentially looks like a solution until the question comes up about who is actually going to live in it.

I wake at night from nightmares of eviction, unable to enter my home through any of the usually wide-open doors because the kids have finally shut them and changed the locks, citing medieval occupancy laws and something about natural justice. But I’m not a shallow, selfish Baby Boomer, I yell through the kitchen window. I’m Generation X, and we gave the world Midnight Oil and anti-nuclear marches and raves. Where’s their bloody gratitude for that? I demand the front door keys!

If Australia continues its lukewarm approach to addressing housing security, we run the risk not only of a cataclysmic homelessness problem, but a reality where multiple generations are denied the chance to enter vital life stages. And while I love my kids and would be devastated to completely lose their company, the thought that we might live together forever and ever is unbearable. In the most loving possible way, I want them to rack off and learn how to shut the door and turn off the lights, because that would be good for all of us, too.

Rosie Beaumont is a Melbourne-based writer.

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