Sydney could become a “city with no grandchildren”, the New South Wales Productivity Commission has warned, but analysis of census data shows similar trends in most big capital cities.
Australian cities are being hollowed out as younger families are priced out, leaving many inner ring suburbs getting older.
Families with children make up a smaller share of households in the inner cities in 2021 than they did a decade before. The median age was similar in much of inner Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in 2021 when compared to 2011, but declined in some outer suburbs. Outer suburbs have also seen some of the largest increases in dwelling construction.
While many families move out to the suburbs to afford a freestanding house, the productivity commission says the answer is to increase density in the inner city.
High-density living could save residents thousands of dollars a year, the productivity commission says, with easier access to jobs and other amenities such as libraries and playgrounds, and shorter and cheaper commutes. But this is increasingly unavailable to young families.
“When you start having a family, your expenses go up, right, that’s when you have to pay for all kinds of stuff for children. And then that’s also when you need a bigger house,” says Dr Dorina Pojani from the University of Queensland.
“So you have this double increase in expenses … something has to give. So then people go for lower housing costs. And that means going to the suburbs. As far out as is affordable.”
Guardian Australia combined census data from 2011, 2016 and 2021 to find changes in dwellings, population and demographics over the past decade.
Census data can be problematic as it relies on snapshots in time – the data is all collected on one night. The 2021 census was also conducted during the pandemic, when many Australians were stuck offshore by closed borders, many temporary migrants had left, and we were all attempting to find more space. Some boundaries for suburbs and those used for data collection have also changed slightly over the decade.
But a similar trend can be seen when we look at the entire inner city as a block. The share of households in inner Sydney that are couples with children has stayed flat or declined in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney over the past decade. The share of the population aged 0-4 and 15-19 has also declined.
Pojani says some the decline in younger families is also due to the type of housing being constructed, which can be self-reinforcing. Land costs so much for developers to acquire in the inner city that they can be restricted in what they can build if they want to make a profit.
“We have this phenomena, the so-called ‘missing middle’ in our housing system,” Pojani says, “where we have single family homes and 30-storey apartment buildings, but [almost] nothing in between, like the nice three-, four- or five-storey apartment buildings that were happening in the art deco era, in the 30s.
“If you’re a family with kids, you can make it work if it’s kind of a low rise, like a four-storey thing where the kids can play downstairs and you can show up in the window. If you live in a 30-storey building, you can’t have that kind of control over the children. So it’s not as conducive to family life.
“So then developers figure, if families aren’t going to live here, then it’s going to be retirees, couples without children, singles and people with a bit of money. So then they will only put floor layouts like one bedroom, two bedrooms. But a family [often] needs a bit more than that.”
Pojani’s research has found that the “new middle class”, which might previously have looked to the inner city are instead moving to outer suburbs.
“The inner cities aren’t gentrifying any more,” says Pojani. “They’re pretty much solid rich. So change is not happening [apart from] little pockets here and there. So gentrification, that change of being poor and becoming wealthier in all the three big cities on the east coast, is happening in a ring around the inner cities.
“Another problem is the kind of housing that we offer in inner cities. We’ve got this older stock of single family homes. That’s how we built our cities historically. And that worked while our cities were small.
“But you can’t have a megacity of Melbourne’s size, or even Brisbane’s size, all populated by single-family homes.”
The census data reflects that, with the share of dwellings that are separate – think a standalone house – staying pretty constant across much of the inner city suburbs over the decade.
“More housing is the single best move we can make to lower the price of housing,” says the productivity commission’s report.
There are a number of things councils can do, Pojani says, including changing planning rules around the size of apartments and the number of affordable units in new developments.
“If councils want to they could intervene, and they should intervene in a major way now that we’re in the middle of this crisis. Obviously the market isn’t working. It was working for a while. Now it’s no longer working.”
