Opinion
There’s nothing wrong with raising kids in apartments - let’s embrace it
Michael Koziol
Sydney editorThe new boss of the state’s planning department, Kiersten Fishburn, lives in a 49-square-metre terrace with two children. As she told an industry lunch on Thursday: “Just imagine what every evening in my house is like.”
Fishburn puts her money where her mouth is on higher-density housing. “I’m proud to live in a dense area and I think it’s great for people,” she said. “Density is actually a social good, as well as environmental. But it has always been a challenging sell in the Australian context.”
NSW Department of Planning and Environment secretary Kiersten Fishburn at a lunch hosted by the Urban Development Institute of Australia.
That context would be the so-called Australian dream; the quarter-acre block in suburbia, with a backyard, Hills Hoist and perhaps a white picket fence. It was cast as the best – indeed, the only – environment in which to raise a family.
This attitude persists, albeit dulled, even as our cities become denser and our policymakers talk about pumping the brakes on urban sprawl in favour of consolidation – “up not out”, as Premier Chris Minns says.
A recent academic paper examining this phenomenon through the lens of Sydney’s Lane Cove indulges this very point. It starts with the declaration that children living in apartments is “an anomaly” and an “unplanned-for consequence of planning” – even though one in five Australian apartment dwellers are now families with children.
“There is no suggestion here that there is anything ‘wrong’ with children living in higher-density dwellings,” write authors Jacqueline Tyrrell and Stephen Wood of the University of New England. “The point is more that planning policies would do well to acknowledge that current trends amount to something of a mini-revolution in expectations about what it means to raise children in Australian suburbia, and to explore ways of easing any accompanying stresses, particularly through addressing the ‘missing middle’.”
The paper – Out of the box: the hidden impacts of urban consolidation and apartment living on households with children, and future implications – notes planners and developers have typically perceived high-density housing as “a luxury item catering for an elite, childless subclass or as an investment product”.
Further, “providing apartments with childless consumers in mind aligns neatly with neoliberal agendas for urban economic growth, competition and commodification”, the paper contends.
Suburban backyard or high-rise apartment? For parents on a budget, there might be no real choice.Credit: Wolter Peeters
Tyrrell and Wood interviewed 14 parents in the local government area of Lane Cove, on the lower north shore, where apartments have flourished recently. In 2021, 63.7 per cent of its homes were medium or high-density, compared with a Greater Sydney average of 46 per cent, and the number of households with children living in Lane Cove apartments doubled over 10 years.
The complaints from parents were predictable: not enough open space for the kids to run around. “They do get a bit cabin-feverish,” one apartment renter said. “Because the outdoors is not an option, we do turn to screens to resolve that. So there’s definitely more screen time.”
One parent in an apartment put their son in childcare earlier than expected because the centre had a large play area. Another said: “I physically have to take them to a park or something, and then I’m supervising that all the time.”
It’s tempting to see some of these gripes as the ultimate First World problem; after all, plenty of children around the world are not being raised in apartments but in poverty. Nonetheless, maybe there are ways to improve the state of play.
As Tyrrell puts it, the “missing middle” might comprise townhouse and villa-style developments with small, private outdoor spaces at ground level, and shared common areas. Not quite the full suburban backyard, but more “home” than the local park.
The government’s current approach to housing targets sets a quantum for each council, but gives little regard to diverse housing types. Efforts by the state to increase medium density have been frustrated by councils – including Lane Cove – enacting restrictions on lot size and heights.
Townhouses in Auckland, New Zealand, where “missing middle” reforms have been enacted to drive up housing supply.Credit: Ruth McDowall / The New York Times
The result of this, say Tyrrell and Wood, “is an increasingly polarised housing stock – detached dwellings [or] high-rise apartments”, with only the latter affordable for many families.
“The ever-expanding gap in the Sydney housing market is currently being driven by an acceleration in transit-oriented high-density development in pursuit of meeting economic objectives, housing targets, and achieving the 30-minute city ideal, justified through the lens of sustainability and liveability,” they argue.
“A significant increase in park-oriented, medium-density housing such as townhouses and semi-detached dwellings with private outdoor space at ground level, with flexibility in integrating these housing typologies into existing low-density residential zones, is recommended.”
Needlessly demonising high-density as that might be, when it comes to housing, variety is not just the spice of life, it’s crucial. And the government is poised to act, having flagged reforms to make subdivisions and semis easier, even if it means mowing down local controls.
Fishburn, the planning secretary, is aware of the need to give density a makeover. “We need to make sure we get the amenity piece right, so density becomes not just tolerable, it becomes desirable,” she told the lunchtime crowd on Thursday.
“If we don’t get the amenity piece right, we will not have a housing crisis, because people will not choose to live here anymore.”
Michael Koziol is Sydney editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.
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