Making It real
My story in attempting to bring a new housing type that improves affordability, livability & community resilience
Moving to a new house can be an exciting event, particularly if you’re fortunate enough to own it. Whether it’s because it’s your first, it’s newly built, it’s a favored location or it’s the beginning of planning for a new family, there is much to celebrate about moving. Yet when considering multi-generational living as mentioned in the previous article (no 3), I wondered what a house would look like if it was designed for every stage of family life, so you didn’t feel the need to rebuild or move so often. I started to think of the benefit this arrangement would offer for those within the house as well to its immediate community. In order to better understand this, I needed to map out the entire life-cycle of a typical family’s household to identify the stages where family dynamics could encourage the search for an alternative living arrangement. Considering at the time there was a heightening concern on affordable housing, I started from the position of a young couple on the verge of starting a family. After putting it down on paper (see table below), I was surprised to see just how often our living arrangements needed to adjust. Of particular note was the proportion of our lives that was in contact with some level of child and aged care. Considering this last point was becoming an increasing concern for many, I was starting to consider whether a multi-generational house was more of a necessity than a good idea. The stages a typical family may go through.These stages are not experienced by all but the table above provides a snapshot of what many of us ignore, particularly some of the undesirable yet inevitable ones. A common reason for neglection is often and simply because we have things that are pressing now, and our current resources can only stretch so far. This, however, doesn’t take away the fact this living cycle is predictable, yet it is not commonly reflected in the houses we build today. This leads me on to think deeper about the typical Melbournian house design and how many of these stages of the cycle it takes into account. The answer, unfortunately, is not many. Often new homes are focused only on a few stages of this cycle because it’s difficult to design the necessary flexibility needed to cater for the full circle. Plus, who wants to delve and think too much about stages of life that seem uncomfortable and undesirable. As a result, we have homes in our suburbs that cater only to specific parts of this cycle meaning at some point many of us will need to pick up our lives and relocate. At this point, we expose ourselves not only to the cost of moving but the under valued cost of disconnecting ourselves from the relationships we have established around our current home. Then again, we might be living next to a nightmare so moving in some cases might be welcomed! Does a lack of dynamic homes lead to less resilient communities?I am no sociologist but I suspect that increased dilution of traditional connections in the community is having an adverse effect on the community's well-being and resilience. This was of particular interest to me when considering the increased tendency of pushing our elderly to aged care facilities that removed them away from those networks they helped nourished over decades. With working experience in the aged care industry and knowing how soul destroying these places can be, I couldn’t understand why this wasn’t more of a concern to others. I suspected that one day it would be and I was adamant we would soon be challenging our designers and planners to find design solutions in how we could better address some of life's challenges. As many other cultures around the world increased the ability for their homes to cater for all stages of life, why couldn’t our society look ahead now and confront the challenges we will inevitably face and find solutions to ease the bumps that exist throughout our lives? Why couldn't we embrace a more flexible design mindset allowing our houses to adapt so we can maintain our community connections? Could the way we design our future houses increase our community's reliance? As I was discovering, the more I embarked on my journey the more questions I had. Is this what a resilient community looks like? A neighborhood of adaptability.A key consideration of resilience is not solely about being connected, but our ability to live comfortably whilst utilizing minimal resources to increase access to other resources and/or services if and when we need them. More on that in the next article.
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As much as I want you to experience my captivating writing style by encouraging you to read the entirety of this blog, I’ve already given you the core message within the title: Time. Of course, there is much more to it, but the importance of this indiscreetly abused resource can be highlighted in this one simple question; How much would you value if you were given an extra 4 weeks of free time per year? What would you do with it? This is not as far out of reach as you may think. When I reflect on what I enjoy the most about being alive, it’s never the experience of sitting in traffic or knowing I had close to an hour travel before I would arrive at my front door. The time lost in daily commuting is a complete failure of our city planning and I wanted nothing more but to protect this non-replenishable resource. This placed extraordinary value on local amenities to ensure that everything I needed or wanted, would be within walking distance or could quickly be accessed. Like many inner suburban areas, Northcote is blessed with a richness of amenities as it was designed when car possession was not a right to exist as it is by some newer communities today. The suburban arrangement where amenities are within walking distance is increasingly not the norm as such constraints as affordability, planning, and population growth have driven us further from where daily services and loved ones are located. Yet when thinking deeper about it, I was becoming convinced it wasn’t just the commute that was sucking our free time. When considering our environment in conjunction with the full cycle of family life, there appeared to be a whole raft of challenges that if you looked at each in isolation, you could easily miss that they were all contributing pixels to an unforgiving time vampire. It was the sum of a range of life demands and challenges which was indiscreetly sucking our time and inadvertently exacerbating modern dilemmas such as; family fragmentation, community disintegration, dementia and mental health issues stemming from loneliness. It was almost as though we had forgotten what was important as we slogged away at trying to reach a preconceived expectation of what home ownership should be as defined by an inflexible planning system and reality TV. At around this time, I was also contemplating what would happen to my aging parents and those of others who would soon need more attention and care. On the flip side to this, demand for childcare services was exploding as more and more families were needing dual incomes to stay afloat of life expenses. I would often hear of the challenges of drop off’s and pick-ups, but this was also dependent on how lucky parents were in finding a center close to home or one at all! The way we were choosing to live seemed to be out-of-sync with the systems we were forced to work within, and I couldn’t help but feel that if things didn’t change, social issues would eventuate. Counter-intuitively, this was not being helped by strong economic growth.
Increased property prices were only forcing many further away from friends, families, services and work. Increasingly our time was being spent running from place to place or working to support our growing families whilst also keeping an eye on ensuring we had enough retirement funds to support a longer life for both ourselves and our parents. This was leaving little time to enrich important relationships or allowing us the time to do those activities that we desired to do but kept putting off. As I was reflecting on this, I remembered my time in Europe where I lived with my Cousins family which was in a house containing 4 generations. Even though at times personal space was a premium, there was an inherent balance and evident teamwork where every household member would share daily chores and assist each other where needed. Dropping kids to kindergarten and taking grandparents to a doctor’s appointment was easily coordinated allowing a deeper focus on other matters. Obviously for this to work the way it did, there needed to be a broad understanding and respect between all the household members but there was one other key contributing factor that contributed to the harmonious relationship; the way the house was designed. Even though the house had an external form like other homes, internally it was designed with separate living quarters allowing a sense of ownership whilst offering a personal sanctuary that families of different generations needed. Even with these separate living quarters, much of the household activity would revolve around the ground floor kitchen where grandparents would often care for the grand-kids while the income generating parents could focus on other matters knowing their children were in the best of care. There was something both magical yet uncannily logical about this arrangement that clearly demonstrated that everyone in that household had more time to do what they wanted to. I arbitrarily estimated that each person would have been saving between 1-2 hours per day as a result of shared chores and expenses. That’s a whole 4 weeks free time returned back per year. It was here I started to wonder why such an arrangement was not commonly discussed or considered within the context of Melbourne, especially when pressures from spatial constraints were becoming more evident. Knowing that I wanted a house project that would have an impact beyond its boundaries, I embarked on exploring the property market of my neighborhood of choice, Northcote. I should also state that my journey to concluding Northcote was to be my home is not common to many. To get here, I lived within 13 suburbs of Melbourne exploring every point on the compass. From Vermont to Yarraville, Carlton and St Kilda, I covered a fair bit of ground whilst coming familiar with the different cultures that made each of these suburbs unique. Yet with Northcote, it took just 5 minutes one sunny Autumn’s Saturday afternoon whilst sitting in the front bar of the Wesley Anne that determined my fate. As I listened to the live stringed band in the sunlight with a beer in hand, I felt a general calmness that reverberated from within and outside the establishment that made me feel at home. That feeling was what gave me the fuel to pound the streets back in 2008 as I raced from opening to opening in search of my own slice of heaven. It wasn’t long before my excitement quickly turned into frustration, exhaustion, and utter despair. At that time, the market was hot and real estate agents didn’t care if you were Arthur or Martha. Any house would sell and all they had to do was wear a nice tie, drive a fresh sports BMW and show up. I started daydreaming that when they would go back into their cars, golden hay would simply spew out onto the road as they opened their car doors. Not unlike what happens to many, my expectations dropped and I started looking further afield where prices seemed more acceptable. Even though at this time I was looking on my own, I was in conversation with many friends who were also going through the same process, yet they had different needs for a house. They were either on the cusp of starting a new family or needing a place to house a growing one. On top of this, it was becoming evident that the inner-north was going through a gentrification process as many of the original inhabitants were aging and could no longer take care of their dilapidated homes that were also not suitable for their aging needs. Even though this presented an opportunity for others, it made me wonder where these long-established community members were going, where their families were and whether we were building or renovating homes that in the future would prevent this from happening again.
There are challenges in all stages of our lives yet it's not hard to just focus on those that affect us now whilst delaying confronting others that we will inevitably face. As I knew there were housing affordability issues on the horizon, I was convinced an approach to buying a house needed to have more emphasis on the full gambit of life expenses that are not often considered when we first look at buying a house. And it was these expenses I thought I needed to better understood before determining what my future house would need to resolve. My next entry will focus on these indirect and direct cost of living and how a house, through design, might be able to address these. I won’t deny that I am someone that hungers and loves a project. Back in 2008 I found myself in a time in my life where I had a strong desire to tinker and deliver on a housing idea. I was not clear at the time what it would be, but I knew I wanted it to be more than a house that was just for me and my current needs. During this period of contemplation, there were rumblings of a looming housing affordability crisis with different voices increasingly promoting their views on alternative solutions to the broader audience. This discussion was gaining traction as it was being coupled with the increasing concern of the generally living expenses in such things as power bills, aged and child care. Unfortunately, I was finding that these conversations were becoming circular as the theory was rarely matched by action.
Then the mini Global financial Crisis hit in 2009 and as is common in such events, the hatches of business shut temporarily but for long enough to take some of the sting out of the residential property market. Even though the concern quickly shifted away from the environment and housing affordability to jobs and the economy, it was not long before living affordability would soon rise again to become a key public issue of concern. It was becoming clearer to me that unless there was a fundamental shift in how we supplied housing, it would result in long term social disadvantage of which would take decades to reverse. This was a challenging worthy of solving and one where I thought I was somewhat qualified to add value contribute and work on a solution. Unfortunately, as is seemingly customary with public affairs I also found myself being caught up in the never-ending cycle of having conversations, going to round table meetings and visionary workshops which typically ended up at where it all started. It was almost as though we didn’t want to change for fear of what it might bring. Back in those early days, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the people who had the power to make change where it as needed the most, would not for one of three reasons. They did not believe there was a housing problem to solve, they did not want to disrupt the current market economics for fear of retribution from existing property beneficiaries, or the planning changes needed were too great a sell to the public at large. Regardless of what I considered a lack of leadership, I didn’t want to believe that a small change that I might be able to introduce, wouldn’t make a difference. I wanted to see if I myself could find, design and deliver a real live solution that might be replicated by others. My idea was forming as the problems where clear. I decided that my house project would be one that was both affordable and would more effectively meet the needs of future families, regardless of what stage or circumstance of life they found themselves in. At the time of writing this first entry, the journey of the delivering the concept was 8 years well progressed but still not over. Due to the length of the journey and the obstacles that I have had to maneuver around, I thought it might be of value to record the whole process of ideation, design, delivery and hopefully a post review from those living within the house to see how much of the original objectives were meet. Perhaps one day it might be useful manual of what to avoid or an outline in how we can improve a system that is designed to improve community outcomes. Hopefully (not too far in the future) when I write my last article, I will have succeeded in delivering the home and the idea is replicated elsewhere. Welcome to my journey in seeking to increase the resilience of my community. |
Over 25 years experience in both the private and public sectors o f property
A lover of technology and design that is practical, beautiful and improves the way we live not as a individuals but as a thriving community. Archives
January 2021
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