Home Units Causing Change In Australian Living Habits

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31087, 16 June 1966, Page 18

Home Units Causing Change In Australian Living Habits

(Special Crspdt. N.Z.P.AJ SYDNEY, June 14. Australians, who according to a television satirist inhabit a "vast grey suburb masqueraging as a country,” are gradually returning to live in the cities. In increasing numbers they are quitting outer suburban areas to buy flats near their work in the city. The flats, known here as “home units”, have sprung up all over the Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan and inner suburban areas in recent years, and produced a minor revolution in the Australian way of life. Australians, like New Zealanders, long insisted on having their own houses, set in their own gardens, even if it meant living 20 miles away from work.

This caused Sydney, particularly, to spread out into a vast suburban sprawl that scattered its 2} million people over 671 square miles of cheek-to-cheek houses in narrow streets.

The last 10 years showed up the disadvantages of this system, as it became difficult to extend services such as sewerage, roads, transport and telephones to the outlying suburbs. Residents also complained of the long hours and high cost of commuting and the lack of social and cultural contact.

Many saw flat-living as the answer, and today nearly as many home units are being built in the Sydney metropolitan area as new houses. Last year, in the city itself and in six popular suburbs, the number of new units built outnumbered new houses by 12 to one. An estimated 70,000 home units have been built in Australia since 1958, and about 80 per cent of them are in Sydney, housing some 200,000 people. They range in price from about £(NZ)32OO, for a oneroom fundamentally decorated bachelor unit, to £(NZ32,000 or more for fourbedroom penthouses with their own private lift and roof terrace.

The units mainly seem to appeal to retired couples or widows who can no longer maintain a large house and garden, single people, and childless business couples. Some real estate experts claim there is a growing demand from couples with young teen-age children, who want to live close to transport and shopping areas and be near to work and city amusements, while not wanting the growing costs and work involved in owning a house. The units have been nothing if not controversial. There have been outcries as developers tore down whole streets of houses in older suburbs, and early blocks were attacked, in the words of the song, as “little boxes made of ticky-tacky.” A judge in the Lands and Valuation Court said they were “ugly”, and advised home-owners to appeal against council approval of their erection. Newer units are better de-

signed, and many of the more expensive blocks have facilities such as sun-balconies, courtyards, barbecue areas and swimming pools. Many are built on prize harbour-side sections, which would be completely out of the reach of the individual owner, and which give each unit a view of the water. Many people believe the home unit boom, in Sydney at least, is over for the time being, and the number of “for sale” signs to be seen on newly-built blocks around the inner suburbs, supports this view.

Estate agents say that home-seekers are merely becoming more selective than they could afford to be when the boom began, and are prepared to “shop around” for a long time until they find what they want. Most people in the building or real estate businesses agree that Sydney has to build “up,” and that blocks of home units will continue to transform the face of the city’s residential areas.