Australian House Sizes Dimish after GFC

Unpublished data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics documenting new house construction between 2001 and March this year show the rise and fall, or at least the expansion and the contraction, of the average Aussie new house.

In 2001 the average new home was 197sq m; by March 2009 new homes had swollen to 222sq m; but thereafter new homes recoiled (as if in horror) and contracted, and now sit at a modest 192sq m.

Like a bingeing dieter, middle Australia’s new home put on 25sq m, or more than 3sq m a year, in the lead-up to the GFC. Thereafter, the average new home shed unwanted space at a rate of 4sq m a year.

Australia, you are on a housing diet. Your houses are slimmer today than they were at the turn of the century. You are looking fantastic. How did you do it? Spurned the dreamy but creamy McMansion habit, did you? Trimmed the chunky but hunky home theatre now that family members are likelier to watch their own screens in their own space?

 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/bernard-salt-demographer/australian-house-sizes-diminish-after-gfc-peak/news-story/572e608f79e416d5798764144b1a64e2

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Why put up a subscription link only?????

The GFC was an obstacle to be overcome in American housing terms whereas for Australia it prompted a rethink about our housing preferences.

Sure, there are examples of big and bloated houses being constructed on the edges of Australian cities, but the evidence is that more and more smallish houses are also being constructed.

This is not connected into any fundamental shift in household size, even though households are gradually getting smaller. I suspect that the passing of peak house is a reaction to the affordability issue, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. It also may have something to do with a greater awareness of the cost of operating big houses: so much space to heat and cool, let alone furnish and clean.

Then there’s the logic that a greater proportion of new homes (not including apartments) in Australian cities is being constructed in infill and in brownfields locations.

City planning went through a metamorphosis soon after the turn of the century where more growth and better efficiencies were to be leveraged out of the existing urban footprint. It was a planning movement that spawned protest groups determined to save our suburbs from overdevelopment.

A decade or so on from landmark planning documents such as Melbourne at 2030 and Sydney’s City of Cities, and we find many more houses have been squeezed into underused nooks and crannies scattered across the urban landscape. You cannot build McMansions in nooks and crannies; you have to build smarter, tighter, leaner, fitter, smaller housing in infill locations.

The Americans seem happy enough to continue to push their cities to supersized Los-Angelean and Dallasian proportions.

Not so we Aussies. We’ve had quite enough of this supersizing of the suburban house nonsense; we are shedding space and cost wherever we can. I just hope those sprawling Darwinians are reading this and are spurred into doing something to help themselves. Come on, Darwin, you can do it.

But there is more to this post-peak-house world than a form of residential enlightenment by the Australian people.

From the time of the GFC the ethnic mix of metropolitan areas seemed to shift, as did the nature of work and the influence of global residential investors.

Sydney and Melbourne, in particular, were roped into an increasingly knowledge-worker world supported by a different form of housing and a different lifestyle model. Smaller, more European, better located apartmentia scattered throughout inner-suburbia now offers Middle Australia accommodation options.

Sell your house in Melbourne’s Mitcham or in Sydney’s Hornsby and buy a townhouse or an apartment closer in to where you work. And in so doing, allow your former quarter-acre block, originally carved out of a dairy farm in the 1950s, to be subdivided and reconfigured into townhouses or as a series of low-rise apartments.

Bingo, the average Aussie new house shrinks as a consequence.

It means fewer Australians are rattling around big empty houses. It means that more Australians get to live closer to where they work. And it delivers housing solutions that more people can afford, ranging from the Mitcham and Hornsby downsizers to the reconfigured suburban townhouse buyer.

It also means that our cities are tighter and are better leveraged off existing infrastructure.

Everyone’s a winner when the average Aussie house downsizes. Let the Americans continue on in their crazy quest for ever bigger houses. We Australians have been there and done that, but now we are quite happy with smaller, better located and more efficient housing.

We just need to solve the problem of delivering affordable housing to the young and finding ways to fund transportation infrastructure in our vastly bigger and more densely populated big cities.

Then we really will have the world’s most liveable cities.

Bernard Salt is a KPMG partner and an adjunct professor at Curtin University business school.

Sounds great in theory, however, more housing in same area means more people and vehicles.  I guess it's unavoidable but it seems our roads nearly everywhere (city and some regional areas) are grid locked.  I appreciate it's progress ...

Yes Cindy besides being grid locked they are also in poor state ot repair especially those in rural areas ...... we have a third world transport system

If it's unpublished data, how can it be here?

Talking of small houses;  has anyone ever watched that show called Tiny Houses on Channel 94.?

No way could I live in a house that small yet so many in America are embracing this latest "fad","gimmick"...wonder how long it will last.  I suppose if you have no other option at least it is a roof over your head but how on earth a family with 2  growing children live in them I have no idea.

http://www.countryliving.com/home-design/g1887/tiny-house/?

 

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