Regional residents have long lampooned city slickers for the fact too many kids don’t even know where milk comes from or have any idea about the growing of a lot of our agricultural produce.
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But latest research shows even more of the metropolitan masses won’t even live in a home environment where they can feel the grass under their feet or even have a backyard to play or ponder in.
It appears now that many young families in Sydney are facing a future without backyards because empty-nesters are not moving on from their freestanding homes.
Backyards will soon be unattainable for the majority of children born in Sydney and Melbourne, according to an explosive new report which blames a build-up in the number of largely-empty houses occupied by Australians over the age of 50.
Fairfax Media economics editor Peter Martin has reported that, in fact, a report by academics Bob Birrell and David McCloskey from the Australian Population Research Institute finds Sydney will need an extra 309,000 homes by 2022 and Melbourne will need an extra 355,000.
Half of those needed in Sydney and two-thirds of those needed in Melbourne will be freestanding houses if families with children are to have the same access to backyards they have now.
But census data unearthed for the report shows an astonishing 50 to 60 per cent of freestanding houses in the middle suburbs of Australia’s two biggest cities are occupied by Australians aged 50 and older.
Almost all Australians in these houses stay there until beyond the age of 75. Even when they move, they typically switch to other freestanding houses, rather than to flats or apartments.
The report says the number of freestanding houses occupied by older Australians will swell by 65,000 in Sydney and 76,900 in Melbourne as more Australians age.
Report co-author Dr Birrell said their houses served all sorts of important functions for older people, including providing for grandkids, gardening, becoming a locus for friends.
The report says young families in Sydney are being forced into units.
In Sydney it’s got to the stage where around 30 per cent of young women with children live in flats and apartments. In Melbourne it’s still half that, and in the rest of Australia it’s half again.
It is another sobering reflection on just where we are heading, and certainly another very real validation of the value of decentralisation – if only to give more Australians a sense of another place.
