Death of Suburbia?
Who can’t fondly look back on the days when our suburbs were havens for the warm smells cosily wafting over the hardwood paling fence with Donna, Ernie’s wife from next door, passing some freshly baked scones? Soon after, Ernie would start the Victa and the rattle of many mowers would join all over the place in a peaceful chorus. This idyllic suburban symphony would be repeated in all our suburbs and in all our cities and at every week-end. We knew who we were and where we were.
All this is now coming to an end. Mowers and their associated gadgetry, motorized leaf blowers, leaf suckers, edgers, whipper snippers, hedge trimmers; all being pushed to city’s outer limits miles away. Those still hanging onto their dreams are doing so with grim determination bordering on the heroic, but being pushed to the edge of tolerance. How long will suburbia with its endless rolling out of subdivisions into the distant sunrise continue to last? Is suburbia’s sun sinking below the horizon? In its last death row, gone forever?
More and more, the rise of medium density with apartments and town house/villas are being rolled out at an ever increasing pace. The closer to the city the more unlikely any of us can afford to live in the separate free standing house with garden and trampoline for the kids. There would hardly be a free-standing house under the one million dollar mark within 5 kilometres of our main cities.
The push away from a free standing 3 bedroom house with enclosed louvre glassed veranda and big garden is on in earnest. The change of demographics and peoples living choices are inexorably moving towards a more maintenance free mode of housing and towards overcoming the tyranny of having to drive to overcome distance. No matter how we increased the size and bulk of our cars, we seem to have become thoroughly fed up with the endless driving to and fro work, child-care, our al fresco dining experience and entertainment. We are voting with our feet and the weekly footage on TV with queues at the Real Estate Auction for inner city living, proof of seeking a new way of city living.
Free standing houses that still survived the roving eyes of the spec. builder keen to convert a single block into a dozen townhouses are fetching millions, becoming totally out of reach of the average battler. Not to worry though. Most of those seeking to buy into a closer more intimate inclusive, dare I say it, ‘life-style’ are happily snapping up the town/house/villa or apartment with courtyard or balcony, but within the inner city. They do so because they want to be able to stroll to all the amenities that through the last few decades involved the owning of the cars and subsequent driving…It just became intolerable. Many, especially for those arriving at our shores from other countries, expect to see people on city streets with coffee lounges and cafes, theatres and shops. They reject the idea of mowing or crouching on grass, prising out unwanted bits of other grasses or weeds.
Some might feel nostalgia over the demise of suburban housings but those have still the choice of going where suburbia still flourishes, and ‘choice’ is now more available than ever before.
The European migrant in the fifties and sixties could only buy or rent into suburbs. The block of land and own house was portrayed, and sold, as being so desirable that rejection was sometimes seen as heresy. Own block, own house, was proclaimed Australia-wide as having reached the very pinnacle of an achievement and dream bordering on a Nirvana. Without most Australians ever having seen much else in the form of city housing elsewhere; they would often state that our suburbs were the envy of the whole world. Indeed, the ‘best of the Southern Hemisphere,’ the more geographically enlightened, would proclaim with Anzac pride.
There has been some solid arguing with both the defenders of free standing housing and their opponents. http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/sydney-lets-stop-the-rot/2005/09/16/1126750124219.html Both sides seemingly as eloquent in portraying survival of endless suburbia with free standing housing, with those that predict that more people will choose to live closer to work and other amenities including closer to other people. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/life-in-suburbs-drives-up-emissions/story-e6frg6no-1111117525526
Some defenders of suburbs and free standing housing are even suggesting Australia should consider de-populating ourselves. Well, I’ll be lining up with great curiosity to see how that could happen.
It will be safe betting that our choices will be widened as ever before, but that most of us will move towards a form of housing less reliant on driving.
The choice is ours and isn’t that what it should be all about?
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I enjoyed your ambitious feet first into this subject of housing density Gez. I wondered what you mean by the proposition ‘choice’ is ‘now more available than ever before’. I got lost and I am not sure if it’s the structue of the sentence or I am provoked desperately to find the right trail to ‘choice’ (o, I do so want choice). Is the statement entwined with a notion of accessibility (roads, rail) or are you saying technological change provides more ‘choice’ regards where we live looking at the population overall? Or are people more relaxed about the mores of where we live? Has ‘fashion’ changed? I just missed it perhaps.
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The choice is now between different modes of housing ourselves. The trend in cities seems to now be concentrated towards medium density, town-houses, villas, apartments etc. The free standing block with separate house is now available at an affordable prices but only at the outer edges of the city and in smaller towns.
The hardest ‘choice’ of all is to find housing close to amenities within walking distance. So often, the center of cities and towns become surrounded by derelict or empty vacant areas. The stretch from Broadway here in Sydney towards Town-Hall a good example.
Parramatta Rd towards Home-bush a semi- derelict slum stretching out for miles. Those areas are seemingly doomed forever to remain as they are. I remember from the fifties and sixties that very little has changed except that the car yards have changed from flagging their wares with open bonnets to balloons or large Santa like figures swaying in the wind…
Don’t worry about my obsessions. It has all to do with Revesby and the era of the Dunny man.
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We walk a lot, and not just because Milo is staring at our feet and more or less forcing us to put our walking shoes on.
There are many beautiful old and newer houses here, but what I really like are the fantastic huge old gardens, no doubt all work done by gardeners.
So I am very puzzled when we pass this old weatherboard house, it’s spick and span, the grass cut almost daily, no plants in the front garden, but the grass looks like the owner combs it every morning.
What is also strange, is the strong smell of bleach wafting about from the house. It must be someone obsessed with cleanliness living in that house. I can’t wait to spot him/her one day. I’m getting very curious.
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I have to confess to having a fondness for the suburbs. That’s where I grew up, and where I now reside. The housing estate in which we reside is well designed fitting in between two large parks. Every cul-de-sac has access to either a park or the next cul-de-sac. The blocks are between a quarter to half an acre, so there are plenty of gardens, but, as Viv pointed out, lots of opportunities for Mcmansions.
West of Newcastle, and Maitland, we have western Sydney style suburbs with huge houses on little blocks. At least the council has forced the developers to preserve some parkland, install bike paths, etc. However, there are no local shops, service stations, post offices, and so on, so everyone drives!!
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I noticed some lovely old houses in Mailand last time we drove through to Dungog. Large gardens and freestanding houses work well in small towns around the shopping centres but when they are built more than walking distance from infrastructures you inevitably get people to either stay indoors or drive somewhere and makes for a certain deadness when one hardly ever see people about.
We had a job to find something suitable here in Bowral. What seems to happen is that near shopping centres they put in lots of parking lots for people who live too far to walk. If they would just replace those parking lots with medium density housing people would walk to the shops.
Those medium density housing places still can have gardens, privacy and if well designed with enough open space for children to meet up in.
In those far-flung suburbs one doesn’t see people about nor children.
It’s a bit of a bug bear for me. I grew up in Revesby, then on the outer edge of Sydney, with the neighbours only ever visible on ‘bon-fire’ night or picking at their lawns.
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There are still some beautiful Federation or Art Deco style mansions to be had in the Hunter Valley, but, as you say, the village has evaporated, to be replaced with large shopping malls, which are often difficult to access by public transport/bicycle, but have great parking!
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I agree with you Gerard. However, we still have sprawling suburbia in the country though we have two types – smaller and smaller blocks for one house with tiny bit of garden or a bit further out and the choice of 1 or 2 hectares of bloody lifestyle living. Some of it is rather yuck – sorta unreal.
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I agree. That same malaise has been imposed on the country towns and villages as well. We lived on a farm near Marulan. Marulan has a few hundred people and subdivisions sprouted up miles from shops. People snapped up 5 acre blocks and built hideously large monsters of houses. The result was that Marulan spread out, hill after hill of ‘suburbia’ and, even though Marulan has a small population, everyone drives to the local shop, post office etc. Big parents dropping of big kids at school, no-one walked.
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Actually Gerard, the lifestyle blocks are 1 or 2 acres – got my size wrong. We have 3 hectares amonst 100 ha and bigger farms. Over 30 years ago – just scattered small blocks. What happens now is a whole farm gets cut up into as many lifestyle blocks as possible and, like you say, miles from a shop and everyone drives more and more and school bus operators thrive on it. But I should add that in the inner Albury area there are blocks of apartments going up and some of them are rather nice and ideally situated close to the CBD and people walk everywhere instead. We have a crazy mix of good and bad and the not so good but not all that bad. As in Sydney we too have people doing up old houses in town and doing it well too – preserving Federation houses and some even older.
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They won the cricket.
I walk around the Bradman oval daily. It is a very nice walk but this morning, hidden and tucked underneath a timber beam on which spectators sit, I found butchers paper wrappings with a box of half eaten negelected potato chips. That’s not quite cricket is it?
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No, one at the cricket always eats their chips 🙂
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Where’s the condoms? 🙂
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The fruits and peelings of love are always chucked out of car windows after the cricket is over.
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Sad indeed
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Surely your sentiment here is at odds with your unfettered immigration (refugee/asylum) stance.
You can’t have it both ways. More carbon footprints, need more housing.
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Where am I saying we need less housing?
I was pointing out for ‘better and more denser housing’ and that when cities grow we cannot house more and more people in the much loved free-standing house with quarter acre blocks that many were housed in at earlier times. By ‘suburbia’ I meant the continuous expansion and release of subdivisions spreading out even further and further away. Cities can’t work like that. Hence the complaint that we are full and the resentment by many allowing more people to live in Australia.
Our cities are relatively small compared with many other world cities but very large in surface area. That is the problem. They are without planning, without a structure or vision. They just roll on endlessly.
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But who won the cri….
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