A family home doesn’t need to be a house: The case for European-style living

When we started looking to buy our first home, my partner and I knew it would not be a roomy, four-bedder with two living rooms, an entertainment area and a backyard.

If the prospect of cleaning it wasn’t deterrent enough, (neither of us is partial to domestic labour) we also knew we couldn’t comfortably afford it. After pooling our savings and borrowing some money from my parents – conditional upon repayment – we scraped together 17 per cent for a two-bedroom apartment in St Kilda.

Australia has a long-running ideology about housing.Credit: Rhett Wyman

To the confusion of many of our friends, six years later we’re still happily living there along with our daughter and cat.

“It’s a beautiful place, but don’t you need more room?” a friend invariably comments. “How can you raise a family in an apartment? You know apartments don’t appreciate in value like houses, right?”

It is these statements that perhaps give most insight into the Australian psyche around housing. Houses are no longer homes to live in; they are real estate, an asset class that, for many Australians, is the best and most secure way of growing wealth.

“For the past 40 years, the home has become a mechanism for wealth creation,” says Professor Philip Oldfield, the head of UNSW Build Environment School. “The idea that you can constantly upgrade to make more money in the future is part of the narrative.”

It wasn’t always like this. In 1950, the average Aussie home measured about 100sqm. This grew to about 162sqm in 1985. Today, the average home has blown out to about 230sqm.

There are several reasons for this. The end of WWII ushered in the Baby Boomer and post-war migration eras. At the same time, Australia had an abundance of land on the outskirts of cities and towns. Combined, this coalesced into the narrative so many of us still buy into today: that to live “well” in Australia, families need to live in a standalone home, ideally on a quarter-acre block.

In the 2000s, another seismic shift occurred, setting us up for the predicament we find ourselves in today. As Alan Kohler writes in a recent Quarterly 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”.

Having recently 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.

“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.

Our Breaking News Alert will notify you of significant breaking news when it happens. Get it here.