The Australian Dream Died Alone in an Apartment
As high-rises replace traditional single-family homes, the housing market is becoming a lot less nimble in the face of a downturn.
Our house is a very, very, very fine house.
Photographer: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg
For people in the U.S., the American Dream is a vision of broadly shared prosperity, freedom and opportunity. Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream focuses on rising incomes and national renewal. Australians once had a simpler aspiration: owning a detached suburban home on a quarter-acre of land.
That vision died a while ago. Back in the 1980s, single-family detached homes comprised about three-quarters of building approvals, and even through the 1990s and 2000s the proportion was still around two-thirds. Since then, it’s plummeted to less than half, with high-rises taking up an increasing share of Australia’s traditionally single-story skylines.