Not dead yet!

(For a detailed analysis of family and household types, this report (PDF 459KB) by the Australian Institute of Family Studies is worth a read).

But standards have changed somewhat in that time also. I can’t think of any developer who would bravely build a new house of a 1960s design with only one toilet, three smallish bedrooms, and a relatively cramped kitchen and dining room. (A movie worth watching is a recent Australian flick called Subdivision which weaves into the plot the tension between old and new style housing.)

So while households are getting smaller, the trend has been to demand more space per person. And given that the majority of household types remain couples (with children, or without - the latter predominantly in the pre-child phase or empty nesters) it is just too early to predict the demise of the family home.

Households like the lesbian couple featured as “the face of the future” can tend to feature disproportionately in social and market commentary. But if the real bread and butter demand for housing is going to continue to come from couples planning children, or with children at home, or with children who have left home but who may want to visit, then how comfortably does that sit with the current crop of planning schemes which are directed to provide housing choice which is the inverse of housing demand?

Will there be enough families buying the proposed volume of high density living units to sustain the market? Or will these become temporary abodes, rented for a period until the family can move out to join their own “like minded people” in the burbs, with children who have room for some backyard cricket and the pet dog?

It’s fine for the commentators to predict the demise of the family unit household. But it’s not dead yet - far from it. The challenge for the market is to avoid the distraction of predictions and forecasts based on changes at the margin, and to supply the housing needs of the majority, notwithstanding the constraints of planning schemes that may sit uncomfortably with majority consumer preferences or needs.