Should Boomers be legally required to rent their spare room?

If we’re ditching the sewing room for visiting relatives, then perhaps we’re taking the advice of the departing Reserve Bank boss.

I used to feel guilty about continuing to live in our family home. In the years after children left, it seemed selfish to rattle around in a house made for five when only two people remained.

It didn’t help when government, economists and housing experts all waved their fists at my generation of stay-at-homers.

I don’t feel as guilty now, because we’re not rattling around as loudly. We have a flow of people visiting for days, or even weeks, and we’re happy to accommodate siblings, children and their family, friends and the odd nephew in spare bedrooms. Call it a boomer B’n’B.

This is a modern condition. Short of a few hundred thousand homes, swamped by an inflow of new residents, stung by an escalation in rents and stumped by persistently high real estate prices, homeseekers are zeroing in on the biggest pool of idle real estate – the 13 million spare bedrooms scattered across suburbia.

One of the newest marriage markets for renters and linen landlords, Flatmates.com.au, has just recorded its biggest few months with 70,000 sign-ups a month. While there are often 100 renters bidding on each room, more empty-nesters are joining up to become mini landlords.

If we’re ditching the sewing room for visiting relatives, then perhaps we’re taking the advice of the departing Reserve Bank boss. To paraphrase Philip Lowe, young people should live with their parents for longer, working people should keep sharing housing, and professionals shouldn’t expect to live on their own. Sensible advice but brave considering the source.

If homes are filling up or operating a turnstile of hospitality, then it’s a turnaround from the post-war trend of tight family households and single apartment dwellers – but it’s also a return to the way we treated homes a century ago.

In the early years of the 20th century, households often had itinerant inhabitants. Apart from the nuclear family, there was often a maiden aunt or ageing parents in residence, and as the country emptied into cities, there were cousins or uncles moving in to gain a foothold in the city.

Many homes resembled hostels and, indeed, there were many more hostels, both casual and commercial, in operation.

While we’ve yet to return to tenement housing, there are other old-fashioned elements to the housing squeeze.

The bank of mum and dad – the 10th biggest home lender in the country – is reasserting the role of the family in setting up the next generation.

The bank of mum and dad – the 10th biggest home lender in the country – is reasserting the role of the family in setting up the next generation. And it’s not just boomer parents who are coughing up but grandparents and, indeed, younger parents who don’t want their young children to face the same pain.

According to a survey by Australian Unity, two-thirds of parents are investing to give children a financial kickstart, if only because they’ve lost hope in governments’ ability to fix the market. Another angle to this 19th century nostalgia is less likely to show up in surveys.

According to a Guardian story in the UK, property poverty is affecting the dating scene.

The quest for a home or, at least, a place to rest a while is prompting couples to show inordinate interest in the home ownership status of their dates. First, ask them what they want to drink and then ask whether they have a mortgage.

It’s called the Jane Austen marriage market and not just because it conjures the frantic matchmaking of Georgian England but because housing affordability hasn’t been this bad since then.

If we’re quoting Jane Austen to explain the 21st century property problem, it would appear we have gone way beyond a smashed avocado problem. But at least there’s no pride, nor prejudice, in this class struggle.

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