In this week’s Saturday Paper, prolific social researcher Hugh Mackay claims to have discovered “an overlooked cause of the housing crisis”.

“By insisting that Australia’s housing crisis is all about supply, governments are ignoring the decades-long trend of shrinking households…bloated houses…and more than one million empty houses”.

Overlooked? To which I say ‘derrrr’, architects have known this for ages. Any visit to contemporary suburbia will reveal those trends. Located far from the city centre and water, without public transport, schools or shops, the tiny blocks of land have huge, sealed-up two-storey houses with no backyards or gardens, no trees; social isolation in suburbs five degrees hotter than the city.

In the last sixty years every critical characteristic of suburban houses has changed by a factor of two: sometimes doubled, sometimes halved, but the net effect has been the loss of all the good qualities of suburbia. I’ve called it 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2, and I’ve been writing about it since 2009 in Architectural Review, and more recently in Tone on Tuesday in A&D and on an Ecogradia podcast.

So, here’s my take on some of those reasons for the housing crisis.

Land is so expensive at the edge of the city that subdivisions are half the size of the 1960s quarter acre (1000 sqm) block, often smaller at 350 - 400 sqm. The sites are skinny to minimise the length along the street and sites so small that the houses are oriented to the boundaries, not the sun. The houses are so crowded on the sites that passive solar is not possible, and cross ventilation breeds a loss of privacy, so air conditioning is the norm.

Meanwhile, the house area doubled from about 120 to 240 sqm, prompted by both a reduction in the quality of construction materials and the demand by purchasers for houses as large as possible. Children may have shared a bedroom and one bathroom in the past (I did), now they have a bedroom and ensuite each; one living room for the whole family has given way to separate family areas just for the children.

When a house, twice the size, goes on a block half the size, it can no longer be a bungalow. It doubles to two storeys, and even then, it has a tiny garden, with no room for trees. The two storeys built to the boundaries overshadows the neighbours and invades their privacy. The increased bulk and absence of trees creates dominant forms in the street where once street trees hid the single storey bungalows.

The narrow fronts, with much of the frontage occupied by a huge garage doors, tells of another doubling. In 1960s-80s the family had one car, Holden Commodore or Ford Falcon, (my family were anarchic separatists with an AP6 Valiant), now the family has two or more cars, bought as soon as you can drive. Parked on the front driveway, the front lawn, the nature strip (weird term), cars are necessitated by the lack of public transport in the outer suburbs: no trams, no trains, and privatised bus services that are hopelessly inadequate.

The houses are now doubled in glazing area. Project homes of the 60s had glazed areas 10- 15% of the floor area, as dictated by Ordinance 70 and the like. Not only has the area doubled, but the glazing ratio has also increased to upwards of 30%. To pass NatHERS, it should be double glazed, but often isn't.

Where once one refrigerator in the kitchen was sufficient, now there are two or more refrigerators in the family room or garage to store booze, soft drinks, bait, fish and the like. The second fridge is often older, more inefficient, with polluting refrigerants. After hot water, refrigerators are the biggest consumer of electricity; their doubling in size in number and size has increased demand for electricity.

Where one TV in the house once sufficed, now it's one in every room. Many other appliances have doubled or proliferated: ovens, microwaves, blenders, computers, heated tower rails, hair dryers, fish tanks, along with many more lights. All doubling electricity usage in the house. You can buy refrigerators and appliances from bigbox stores, but not a good water heater (solar or heat pump), which is the best way to offset the increased energy demand.

But the sustainability killer is the number of people living in the house. In the 60s, the average occupancy was more than 5 people. Now it's less than half at 2.3. In the 60s, the majority was families, parents and children, sometimes multi-generational, and maybe lodging for a student (in every house I lived in). Singles and couples outnumber families, often in oversized large houses.

This change didn't take place overnight; it took 60 years for the vast, dark-roofed, treeless overheated suburbs built at the edges of our cities to undo the high quality design ideals of suburbia.

design-i #7, 27 Nov 2024. Researched and written by Tone Wheeler, architect / Adjunct Prof UNSW / President AAA. The views expressed are his. design-i is a new column that replaces Tone on Tuesday. Old ToT columns can be found here, and you can still contact TW at toneontuesday@gmail.com.

Tone Wheeler

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