Matthias and his wife, Nicole, want to have another baby, but their plans have been stalled by Sydney’s housing crisis.
The couple, who asked to remain anonymous, have one child and are thinking of having another, but feel limited by the lack of options for families seeking larger apartments.
“There are no apartments of that size,” Nicole says, adding that most of the three-bedroom apartments they find available are penthouse-style units. “And it’s definitely been a factor in how we’ve thought about whether we would grow our family or not.”
Families across Sydney are struggling to find apartments, with few affordable three-bedroom units available in the city, according to a University of Wollongong study. And demand far outstrips supply for family-sized places, upending assumptions about high-rise living and how people think about apartments.
For example, half of the apartments in the CBD of Liverpool – a suburb in Sydney – were occupied by families with children, the study found. Experts predict the demand for family-sized apartments will keep growing.
The lack of family-friendly apartments has forced families to come up with “complex strategies”, says Dr Sophie-May Kerr, a research associate at the City Futures Research Centre and one of the authors of the report.
“Families are struggling to make everyday life with children fit into dwellings that are not built with their needs in mind,” she says. “The physical and emotional work involved ultimately leads parents to question their ability to live in apartments over the long term.”
Forced into a ‘compromise’
Nicole and Matthias live in a two-bedroom apartment in Sydney’s CBD. They would like to buy a home, but say the jump from renting to buying a three-bedroom unit is just too far for them.
“The leap from a two-bedroom apartment in an ideal location to a three-bedroom is so significant that I think it prices families out of the option,” Matthias says. “In some cases, it was up to a million dollars more, which is just unaffordable.
“And options just feel so limited in this market, it’s either having an extremely luxury apartment or having nothing at all.”
The couple say they feel forced into a “compromise” by the lack of options for larger apartments in Sydney, feeling they need to plan around the city’s housing crisis – not what they want as a family.
“There just isn’t a diversity of options for us, particularly if we want to continue living close to the CBD. The only option you have is either no second child, or move out to the suburbs,” Mattihas says.
Apartments not just ‘stepping stones’
Although apartments are often seen as “stepping stones” for singles and couples before they buy detached houses, the families the University of Wollongong researchers spoke to prioritised large, central apartments over detached “car-dependent” dwellings.
Researchers spoke to a number of families living in the Liverpool CBD, in Sydney’s west, and many cited the conveniences of apartment living.
One key takeaway from the study was that the birth of a new child did not lead to families seeking a detached car-dependent home, instead triggering a search for a larger apartment near the CBD.
But the report found supply was not matching demand, with an “overproduction” of one- and two-bedroom apartments. In the 2011 and 2016 censuses, just over 15% of high-rise housing stock in Liverpool’s CBD had three or more bedrooms. That fell below 14% in 2021.
Just like much of the rest of the city, the development control plan for Liverpool’s CBD requires 10% of stock to be three-bedroom apartments. But Kerr says the proportion of families choosing to raise children in apartments will only continue to rise as houses become less affordable – and apartments need to be designed with that in mind.
According to Kerr, families in apartments face a number of challenges including “inadequate storage space, lack of family-friendly communal spaces within complexes and inadequate soundproofing, leading to tensions with neighbours due to children’s noise”.
“We need to be designing apartments that take into consideration the diversity of households who call them home,” she said. “Assumptions that families will not live in apartments are built into dwellings during the construction phase.”
“This impacts on not just the lived experiences of current residents – but also future generations who will live in these apartments in years to come.”
Changing our thinking around apartments
Dr Nicole Cook, another of the authors of the report and a lecturer in human geography at the University of Wollongong, said a key part of the solution was shifting perceptions on property investment.
“An owned, detached home is fast moving out of financial reach for people without inherited wealth in Sydney. Apartments are therefore crucial to ensuring families have opportunities for secure housing.”
“Housing has been turned into an investment product for both large institutions and small investors. Both types of investors ask the same question: how can I maximise housing as an income stream?
“The answer to that question doesn’t include the needs of working families,” she said. “Nor does it consider social and public housing as part of the housing solution. Instead, it produces poor quality towers comprising one- and two-bedroom apartments where larger apartments are marketed as ‘penthouses’ at a premium.”
She said that in the short term, families will be forced to adapt to “small, poor-quality” apartments – and in the long term, declining home ownership will make apartments less affordable.
“As long as housing is primarily used to generate wealth for investors it will not meet the needs of communities,” she said.
