The death of the 1/4 acre block / 4BC
Farewell to the great Australian dream of the quarter acre block, we will miss you – you served us well, sheltered us wonderfully, helped bring our family and loved one together and sent a message to the world that we had succeeded in life by attaining you, but this is where we must part company.
In my regular on air catch up with 4BC’s Clare Blake we explored Australia’s future housing landscape and how over the next few decades it will look very different from the recent past and that the default housing option for most Australian’s would no longer be the 1/4 acre block.
As we grow our population, increase our housing prices, change our demographics, see more young adults live at home longer, have numerous generations living together under one roof, and see many other co-habitating models rise we are slowly beginning to talk ourselves out of the necessity to live on a detached block complete with garden and garage.
Instead we will increasingly choose to live in semi detached, row style and apartments, predominantly 4 – 6 stories high, in mixed purpose buildings (shops, offices and residences) which is a return to the 1940’s and 50’s when many people lived above the shop, but then the great dream was to get out of there and into a stand alone dwelling and now it is to return to it.
That’s not to say we won’t have stand alone houses, but rather that the great cultural norm of having to have it will disappear and it will increasingly not be seen as necessary, or important.
These new dwellings of tomorrow will be smaller in size and have to pack a lot of purpose into smaller spaces and to achieve this we will borrow heavily from our Asian neighbours who through necessity have lived in smaller spaces that perform multi-purpose uses.
This is not just a question of housing, but it speaks to a changing life and work style where we will not all work 9-5, where more people will be using the home throughout the day for a multitude of purposes, where technology will be able to digitally change the internal decor to suit the immediate needs before instantly changing to suit the next set of purposes.
In this new world of housing it is also likely that we will adopt the Asian habit of eating out more and using our neighborhood and its parks and infrastructure as our backyards, where local shops become important as meeting places and the people around us become our extended family.
As always a great chat, have a listen now (15 minutes 49 seconds) and then share your thoughts on the future of the 1/4 acre block (housing starts at 5 mins 40 secs).
Farewell to the great Australian dream of the quarter acre block, we will miss you – you served us well, sheltered us wonderfully, helped bring our family and loved one together and sent a message to the world that we had succeeded in life by attaining you, but this is where we m.
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