In a rare display of unanimity, politicians, economists, journalists and assorted commentators all seem to agree that the solution to the present housing crisis is to increase supply. There might be disagreements about what kind of housing, how much of it should be social housing, the desirable level of density, or where it should be built, but there’s widespread consensus on the urgent need to build more houses.
At the risk of sounding economically illiterate, I suspect the chief villain in the housing crisis is not supply, but an unsustainable shift in the pattern of demand.
Consider three salient facts about the Australian housing market.
First, our shrinking households. In the past 100 years, the Australian population has increased fivefold, while the number of households has increased tenfold. In other words, we’ve been creating households at twice the rate we’ve been growing the population. Over this period, the average Australian home has shrunk from about 4.5 to 2.5 occupants.
Today, more than 25 per cent of Australian households contain just one person. Single-person and two-person households between them account for well over half of all Australian households, and the former is now our fastest-growing type.
Second, our bloated houses. While our households have been shrinking, the size of our houses has more than doubled in the past 75 years. In 1950, the average Australian house occupied about 100 square metres. Today, the average is about 250 square metres.
About 36 per cent of all Australian homes contain three bedrooms, and almost one third has four or more. Many, if not most, of our single- and two-person households occupy three-bedroom dwellings, so we have become a nation of spare rooms.
The third fact is that, on the night of the last census in 2021, more than one million Australian houses were empty. There are many plausible explanations for that: some occupiers were away on holiday on census night; some of those empty houses were holiday homes not currently in use; some were the “other” house of people wealthy enough to divide their time between two dwellings; some were investment properties whose owners were content to watch the value increase without having the hassle of tenants. (Imagine offering negative gearing as an incentive to multiple home ownership! In France, you’d be taxed for owning more than one dwelling.)
Put those three factors together – shrinking households, expanding house size and underused houses – and it’s surely an oversimplification to say that Australia has a housing shortage. It would be more realistic to say we have been distributing the people among the houses in ways that promote waste (overinvesting in bigger houses than we need), drive inequality (multiple home ownership at the top of the heap; an inability to buy into the market at the bottom) and increase the risk of social isolation and loneliness.
It’s strange that we have for so long been pursuing housing strategies that are bad for our economic and social health.
Why are we so enthusiastically opting for smaller – especially single-person – households? It would be dangerous to generalise about this. Some solo householders have deliberately chosen to live alone as a symbol of their freedom and independence. They may say: “I have family, friends, work colleagues, neighbours – I can socialise all I want, but I like nothing better than coming home, shutting the door behind me, punching the air and saying, ‘Alone at last!’ ”
At the other end of a very broad spectrum of solo householders are those who ache with loneliness. Pitchforked into “singleton” status by bereavement, relationship breakdown or some other change in their circumstances, they yearn for someone to share their space. They may turn the TV on before they leave the house so they won’t feel as if they’re returning to an empty, silent space.
While it would be wrong to characterise all solo householders as lonely (and of course, it’s possible to feel lonely in a marriage or a crowded house), the risk of widespread social isolation is greatly increased in a society where every fourth household contains just one person.
“We are not meant to live alone.” That was one of the most common remarks I heard from solo householders on the many occasions when, as a social researcher, I listened to their stories. They have a point. As members of an inherently social species, we need each other, and we run the risk of damaging our mental health when we spend too much time alone.
It’s no secret that our society is in the grip of epidemics of loneliness, anxiety and depression, and social isolation is often a contributor to such mental and emotional malaise. It’s also associated with a heightened risk of hypertension, inflammation, sleep disorders, vulnerability to addiction and even reduced life expectancy.
There are many contributors to social isolation – not least, paradoxically, the excessive use of social media – but solo households must be close to the top of the list.
As our households continue to shrink, we can assume that the incidence of social isolation will increase. So we need to recognise that, by the housing choices we’ve been making over the past half-century in particular, we’ve actually been driving a social trend that is bad for our mental health as individuals, and likely to erode social cohesion as well.
In some ways, the rot set in in the 1930s when the nuclear family – mum, dad and their kids – became fashionable as the household unit. There are good grounds to wonder whether that was a socially healthy trend – for parents or children – but that’s another story. What it has meant is that the falling birthrate has further contributed to household shrinkage, and that “empty-nesters” has become a new and increasingly common household type.
There was a time when we thought of households quite differently: more complex, more fluid, often three-generational, with assorted aunts, uncles, grandparents or lodgers coming and going.
So what is the solution? While there is some creative thinking about housing among urban planners, too many local councils are rushing to the conclusion that high-rise apartment blocks are the answer to the housing crisis.
My own research has consistently pointed to the conclusion that, given our contemporary patterns of living, medium-density housing is the most socially healthy way for us to live – dense enough to promote the incidental social encounters that are the lifeblood of “the village” but not dense enough to encourage an obsession with security and privacy – the common effect of packing too many people into too small a space.
Even the traditional suburban house and garden is no longer the “golden mean”. With our low birthrate, two-income households now the norm and children typically in before- and after-school care, such housing is less likely to promote a healthy neighbourliness than the medium-density options of terrace houses, townhouses and low-rise apartments.
The present high cost of housing could well be the catalyst for more creative, more flexible – and socially healthier – thinking about households, as a way of easing the demand for housing and thereby lowering house prices. Already, more adult offspring are living in the family home for longer, and many families are beginning to ponder the three-generational possibility.
Perhaps we need many more “granny flats”. We might even begin to reverse the trend towards either warehousing the elderly in institutional settings or leaving them to live alone – as one third of women over 65 currently do. Knowing what we know about the health hazards of solo living, when did we decide that would be a good idea?
Within my own circle, some people have been re-examining the lodger option – perhaps taking in a student or two, or nurses from a nearby hospital – though regulations about renting may have to be eased to facilitate more of these arrangements. Others, especially close friends approaching retirement, are weighing up the pros and cons of shared housing.
The former governor of the Reserve Bank Philip Lowe once remarked that one solution to the housing crisis would be to increase the number of people per household. Though his remarks were widely criticised, he hit the nail on the head, economically speaking. He may also have indicated a pathway to improved social health.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
November 23, 2024 as “The big empty”.
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