Exploring The Space Between Sprawl And Tall.

I’ve spent much of my life asking simple question like, what alternatives exist? Why do we accept the artificially narrow choices provided by the market? What social, cultural, and economic preconditions gave rise to alternative models? What might it take to create these options so a single mother and child, widower with carer, childless couple, single young adult and downsizing retirees could all find forms of housing that aren’t currently the right fit for a four-bedroom brick veneer in Ocean Shores. This has led me on a journey across cities and regions to find home grown examples, as well as places as diverse as Japan, the USA, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and France. While inspired by the many possible ways of living better, what I've really learned is that it's up to each society to set their own social contract with government and the private sector to establish the terms on which housing is built and whose interest it really serves.

What excites me are the plethora of models that translate to Byron Shire. Low slung, compact homes clustered within a landscape setting. Compact manor houses with a collection of two or three single person homes stacked together. Homes that prioritise the courtyard over the car, the common garden over the backyard, and shared workshops over private garages. Homes that encourage people to be neighbourly when they choose and afford the discretion to be intensely private when required.

Drawing lessons from our own backyard.

The answer isn't going to be found by importing Amsterdam to Alstonville. It would be remiss of us to look immediately beyond our borders because so much of this vision can already be seen in the Shire’s culture of multiple occupancies, communes, and other legal and informal collective living experiments of the post-Aquarius era. We can also look to the '70s experiments of co-operatives and cluster housing in Canberra, and the artists squats and share houses of '80s and '90s urban Australia. Far from radical experiments for the eccentric, there's much to learn about how these examples from our own history can translate to serve a far broader demographic. Many of these smaller, more modest forms of compact living come with lower build costs and simpler construction methods that are far better suited to the region’s housing needs than international examples of seven storey cold climate concrete apartment buildings. They also promote smaller community scales that support improved attachment and community resilience outcomes.

Is there a reason these alternative models remain at the fringe? Why is our urban development dominated by either developer-led house and land packages, or apartments built for maximum profit? The issue lies partly in our regulation, which tends to make it hard to build the unfamiliar, but it's a lot more to do with our poor understanding of tenure; the options that exist between the institutions of ownership and renting.

Weaning ourselves off the inevitability of ownership.

Since the era of Robert Menzies, where the politics of housing was dominated by the idea that "people who were committed to home ownership and mortgages tended not to become revolutionaries" we've been culturally trained to believe ownership is a central pillar of Australian society, and any form of rental tenure is markedly inferior. We now find ourselves in a situation where 92 per cent of renters aspire to buy their own home and yet 50 per cent of young people are unlikely to ever own one.

This system of a freehold house for all, in a context like Byron Shire, is outside the reach of even middle-class people, so we'd better look harder to find the alternatives.

Luckily, by learning from both local and international examples, there are so many options in between: from rental co-operatives where the profit-seeking landowner is eliminated, to co-living where the private dwelling size is minimised, to shared equity and rent-to-buy, which provide long term tenure security while building a deposit. There are many opportunities outside unattainable ownership and the instability of the traditional private rental market. The diagram on the following page attempts to chart these pathways that could be available to a resident if we truly understood and had access to all the possible permutations of tenure.