If swearing doesn’t raise too many eyebrows in polite Perth society, there is one thing that will – the admission that you choose to live in a city centre apartment block.
Anyone who has watched Neighbours or Home and Away will have an image of what the average Australian house looks like. In most British TV series, the homes are far grander than the average person can afford. But in Perth, the average home really is that big.
Perth folk have always had plenty of space to play with. The city has taken advantage of its relatively small population, and the fact there are no other cities nudging it on the shoulder.
Single-storey homes on big blocks have for many years been the norm. Those that can afford them have pools, while those that can’t usually still manage a double garage with room for the ute and the beer fridge. If you aren’t cashed-up from the latest mining boom, you might have to live in a slightly rougher area, a bit further out from where you work, but in a city where the car is king (despite its above-average public transport system), what’s the big deal?
But that’s not sustainable. Partly due to immigrants like me, Perth’s population is growing fast. All these people will need somewhere to live, and while coastal towns like Mandurah boom, and new towns are created, they are at the limits of a reasonable commute to the businesses in the CBD.
In the city, single homes on single blocks are becoming rarer, as the developers move in and transform the space formerly occupied by a single-storey home into three or four two-storey houses. A house on a single block next to the house we rented in Victoria Park recently sold for around $1 million. It looked like it would benefit from demolition – and I expect that is what will eventually happen. In Perth it’s often the land you’re paying for, not the property on it.
So homes are becoming smaller and taller, but the detached dream holds strong. I have viewed beautiful houses that are so close to the one next door that the planners insisted on obscured glass in the master bedroom, such is the risk of your neighbours catching you in your underwear (or worse). Then there are the mini-mansions that have four bedrooms, three bathrooms and a home cinema room but a postage stamp of a back yard, hemmed in by the neighbours’ walls.
Regeneration projects and the development of smart apartment blocks are drawing more people to the city centre. I’m one of them. Driven by a (somewhat pompous) desire to be part of the solution, not part of the problem, I’ve abandoned the Australian dream of a big detached house and purchased an apartment in East Perth, close to public transport and other facilities and designed to minimise the cost of heating and cooling. The block has a great mix of residents – but it is perhaps notable that very few of them are Australian.
So now the truth comes out. It’s all your fault that we’re being squeezed out of our homes. 🙂
I grew up on the then typical quarter acre block. The house was very modest but we had plenty of room outside.
The house we started our own family in was a nice home but didn’t have such a large yard.
Last year we moved to a newer suburb where our home is bigger but we have very little yard. We’re not quite as jammed in as some of the homes you described but it is quite different from the sprawling blocks of land that both my wife and I knew as children.
I suppose that we’re slowly getting the message that we can’t sustain the kind of suburbs that we were used to but most of us are not yet ready to give up our amazing suburban lifestyle for apartment living.
Oh … by the way. I’d love to see a reduction in car usage too. That’s why I cycle to work every day and enjoy Perth’s growing cycling lifestyle on the weekend. 🙂
By the way, thanks for the 9/10 rating on Blogged!
Hi Rodney
Yes, it’s all my fault! Coming from the UK where space is at a premium I found it very odd seeing all these sprawling homes. I also find the lack of proper ‘town centres’ a bit odd – a shopping centre off a main highway does not a community make. But things are changing, and while we all might be a little more cramped, I do think there is a positive side to higher-density living that perhaps Perthites just haven’t discovered yet!
[…] if I ever needed another argument in favour of high-density living, it would be the number of incidents involving vehicles ploughing into houses. At least living […]
Perhaps there’s an economic boom kicking in downunder. I hope it isn’t going the way of the boom we had here in Ireland over the past number of years which was based solely on property values and brought us super-inflated land prices. We’re going to be paying for that debacle for generations to come.