One good thing about the GFC

There had to be something good about the GFC, and about Adelaide, and I have finally found it!

The GFC was the beginning of the end of the McMansion – those ugly monstrosities that purport to be family homes but are really a statement of belligerence about the consumption of our planet’s resources.

In America, the number of houses with three-plus bathrooms has been on the rise since 1992 – that’s 19 years. In 2008, at the start of the GFC, 28 per cent of family homes had three-plus bathrooms. In 2010, that fell to 24 per cent, according to a new survey published by the National Association of Home Builders in the US. It’s called The New Home in 2015. Bits of that survey are available free here.

OK, so that is the US and we are here in Australia but of course it does have 300 million people, which kind of puts us in the shade.

In Australia, where building uselessly enormous houses in the middle of nowhere vies only with eating death-defying quantities of junk food and binge drinking until hospitalised as the national pastimes of choice, we have been outdoing the Yanks for years. The average floor area of a new free-standing house is 243.6m². The Yanks have been tracking the other way for three years.

Now our homes are getting smaller, by 10 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and CommSec. However, it is a bit of smoke and mirrors. We are scoring smaller averages because of the big growth in the number of pokey little apartments we’ve been knocking up in the past couple of years.

Which brings me to Adelaide. As regular readers know, I don’t like Adelaide. Sorry. It is more boring than Canberra but it doesn’t have Canberra’s excuse – 250,000 people, mainly public servants. Adelaide is home to more than 1 million people and still absolutely nothing happens there, apart from the occasional world music festival.

But I have just discovered that they build our smallest houses in South Australia. For that, they get one big tick against all my black marks.

Last year, it was 50 years since architect Robin Boyd published The Australian Ugliness (a good review in The Monthly, here). It is a critique of our new nation’s lack of insight into design, Boyd also said our house were too big. (And that was back in the 1960s, when they were tiny by comparison.) Me, I am willing to forgive a bit of an ugly house so long as it is modest in size.

If the GFC is going to help to shrink the size of houses, here and there, then it was the GFC we had to have.

It is the very best thing that any of us can do to help the environment: live smaller. Actually architects reckon that each adult really needs about 40 square metres (more details on the ABC’s By Design program). I’m for that.

Do you agree? Write and tell me your views.

BRW

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