“This is the sound of the suburbs” Song written by Nicky Tesco and JC Carroll for the long-lived UK punk band The Members. Re-issued on an album of the same name that captures the best of 80s punk. Also listen here.
Last week I painted a grim picture of how changes in house design have led to the decline in the quality of suburbia; in environmental and social sustainability, not to mention affordability. It’s happened over the last 60 years through a process I’ve called 2x2x2x2x2x2, which goes like this.
Houses have doubled in size; built on sites half the area; necessitating two storeys; which robs privacy and overshadows neighbours; glazing ratios have doubled with indiscriminate orientation; increasingly relying on air conditioning; houses have twice the number of fridges and other appliances; as does the non-solar HWS; garages have twice the number of cars. Despite this, on average houses have half the number of occupants in 2020 as they did in 1960.
If you are a rusted-on devotee of ‘Save Our Suburbs’, thinking suburbs aren’t broken and don’t need fixing, you need read no further. On the other hand, you may be asking for some positive solutions. And there are many. In fact, that may well be the difficulty - there is no silver bullet, but rather very many, varied and often entwined solutions. But they all lead back to one key issue: DENSITY.
Density
No matter whether you measure suburban density as dwellings / hectare (Dw/Ha), or people / hectare (pp/Ha), there is no escaping that the density was too low to start with, and has been decreasing ever since.
The public investment in infrastructure for roads, water, electricity, stormwater, curbs and gutters, communications are underutilised if they only serve single houses on large blocks of land.
We need to find solutions that in can increase the number of people and services within the suburbs without losing the things that make suburbs so attractive in the first place.
More occupants
There is an almost ‘too easy’ solution to housing at a greater density: add one or two people to every household. We could accommodate many more residents, without changing the physical suburb at all, if we went for a ‘share-house’ solution.
Lest this seems too preposterous, remember that we’ve been there before, ‘boomers’ remember it as the ‘good old days’ when kindly landladies took in boarders, and many immigrants coming to Australia regard sharing some rooms before they get established as the norm. I’ll wager economic imperatives will make this approach more common soon, despite the twin lines of resistance of lifestyle and diversity.
Granny Flats
One increasingly popular solution to increase the number of people living on a site, without losing the space and privacy is the ‘Granny Flat’. They may have originally been intended to increase familial connections, or create a muti-generational house, but they are now far more than having a granny in the back garden.
A ‘mini house’ or ‘garden studio’ can provide a space for grandparents, but also a place for children who want, or need, to stay at home before getting their own house, or a place for a ‘nanny’ to look after children whilst both parents work, or a source of income (to defray mortgage costs) by providing homes for students, or locally employed key workers.
But these additional ‘homes’ are opposed by the suburban NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) and NOTES (Not Over There Either). Planning controls need to be amended to allow a modest single storey building with decent setbacks to be built in any back garden (not a yard, that’s where you keep sheep and cattle, not children).
But I would go further and argue that they would be even better in the front gardens, which are often extremely space wasteful, intended only to impress the mayor and councillors driving around the suburb. Councils are far too precious about the visual quality of the streetscape without regard to the amenity and sustainability for the residents. Rather than a display of roses and zinnias we should house both vehicles and people on that site area. Maybe a garage with a studio over.
More houses on the same sites
Larger sites in older areas often have smaller houses, where councils often enforce some ludicrous heritage order. It could be a timber cottage (old but decrepit) or a Federation house. We don’t have to keep them just because they were built when the founding fathers (as they were) hammered out a male based white Australia policy. The politics were wrong and the houses not much better.
A better approach would be to relax the front setbacks (see above) and to allow duplexes or triplexes to be built with reasonable setbacks. The ‘ziggurat’ envelope can be very useful in ensuring that the built form allows for solar access to neighbours without a loss of privacy. Both NSW and Victorian governments have programs, but you can drive a monster McMansion through the controls, which should be much better framed.
More houses on the amalgamated sites
Many years ago, architect Peter Myers suggested a way to amalgamate the footprints of a row of demolished houses so they could be joined together to provide a site for two or three storey walk-up apartments. This would leave the front and rear gardens intact, to provide external areas with shade and carbon sinks, all the while increasing the population in the apartments.
However, our planning systems only recognise gross increases in scale when zonings change. We need to develop more nuanced codes that can allow for more sympathetic changes in scale in suburban settings - not a sudden jump to six or eight storeys, right next to single storey houses.
Age in place
We need to ‘age in place’ so older Australians can remain in familiar territory. One way could be by subdividing or subletting their house, to share with family members or others. Minimal changes could yield big benefits if the planning and tax laws encouraged it.
Another way is to move to a smaller apartment with better support services within their suburb. One irony has played out on Sydney’s leafy North Shore in the last twenty years, as residents fought tooth and nail to prevent four to six storey apartment buildings being built along the Pacific Highway.
Only when they were built did they discover that there was a huge demand from local families to move into these apartments, releasing the houses for other families, but enabling them to remain ‘in place’, close to friends, clubs, societies, shops, and services that they knew for most of their life. We need to facilitate people changing their houses when their needs change, which brings us to the evils of Stamp Duty.
Stamp out stamp duty
Surely one of the stupidest names for a tax. It must be replaced by an annual payment based on the house and its contribution to sustainability. I would suggest people should be encouraged to sell their home to downsize as they grow older or their needs change, or to upsize into a multi-family home, to look after the children and grandchildren who can't afford a house of their own.
The cost of Stamp duty encourages older people to remain in their house, an inefficient use of space, and encumbrance and requiring services to be driven to them. Alternatively, they could be co-located with friends and sharing services as you can in a medium density development, now being developed across our big cities, despite the Nimbys and Notes.
Less tax, more trees
Instead of Stamp Duty, a once-yearly tax could be tweaked to promote greater sustainability. One idea could be to promote trees on otherwise hard paved sites. There is already a greening program for Western Sydney to alleviate the urban heat island effect created by thousands of dark roofs, dark bitumen, and paved areas, older suburbs. What if there was a tax break if you planted trees, or vegetable and fruit gardens, or took in a lodger?
Stop sprawl - build smarter
We need to draw a line at the edge of our cities and stop the urban sprawl. Every Australian city can find ways to increase the density inside the outer limits. It could be ‘shop top housing’ as a form of TOD (transport-oriented design) as promoted by Rob Adams in Melbourne. Or low-rise apartments around new suburban centres at train stations in Sydney. Or nodes along the southeast Queensland corridor.
But we are making a hash of these initiatives by not building the higher density housing at the beginning. We need to learn from the Canberra conundrum where suburbs of low-density housing were fully developed whilst the land that was set aside for ‘future medium density housing’ was undeveloped. Residents became so accustomed to the open space that they protested vehemently when that housing was being built.
At Schofields and Riverstone in the northwest corridor of Sydney, apartment buildings are miles away from the centres whilst low density housing is close. Nearby at Rouse Hill there is a progressive shopping mall, with inside and outside shops, but it is hard up against a six-lane road with a huge cemetery opposite, preventing development in that direction. It’s not a centre but an edge.
End land speculation
Land speculation is a rotten Australian tradition where windfall profits from re-zoning go to the owners who often do nothing but invest, or rather gamble, on the changes. Or worst still, corrupt the political process with their greed. Before land is rezoned for housing it should be compulsory purchased by the government at the fair value of its original zoning to prevent the speculative profiteering.
The government can then set the value of the land and benefit from the ‘uplift’. It was the original idea in the leasehold land in Canberra, but that was bastardised to resemble the Torrens title bonanza elsewhere. In Singapore, the government has controlled land sales and there is 90% home ownership. A very socialist approach in a very capitalist economy.
Much of the solution to affordable housing now being proffered at national and state level is based on the use of government land, as a way of controlling the value and the outcome. What if the governments controlled far more land, with far better outcomes. That’s the future in the 2020s.
Goodbye
This is my last Tone on Tuesday column. Together with the earlier +one, AAA looks at and D+ columns I have written over 200 articles for A&D in three years. I thank my editor, Branko Miletic, for the advice and encouragement, and I thank the many readers who corresponded for their support over three years. I’m now turning my attention to irregular treatises called Design:Process.
Tone Wheeler is an architect / the views expressed are his / contact at [email protected]. Reference: Tone on Tuesday 160: Solutions to Fix Suburbia.
