My 4 year old son lives in an apartment. A unit. Or if you want to use the pejorative, “a flat”. On the third floor, up six small flights of stairs, far away from a lush green backyard. He has no cricket pitch, no cubby house, and no place to make mud pies.
We live in a beautiful old corner building built in the 1920s. It has high ceilings, polished floors, atmosphere to burn. But it is on a busy road, opposite a train station, above the shops. Not a place where kids would’ve lived a generation ago. No patch of lawn with sheets flapping on the hills hoist or a jacaranda tree dropping its blossoms. Our outside world is concrete and bitumen, with a couple of trees planted along the old-fashioned shopping strip. Our only backyard – a small, dank shared courtyard. Just the other day my husband spied some of the local wildlife lurking. A dead rat – he said as he snapped on the rubber gloves to get rid of it – “as big as a cat”. Kid friendly? Not so much.
Before you snort, what a pack of w*nkers, pretending to live in New York when you live in Oz, I admit that in Australia, apartment dwelling can seem weird in a country with such great weather. But aside from the joy of not having a soul-crushing mortgage, at the moment, I take a perverse pleasure our small family unit living in a unit. Because not that long ago that they were thought as rather immoral. In 1920, when Australian poet Kenneth Slessor was a young man, he rented a flat. And In Slessor’s words, his mother believed that was “only one step away from announcing that he was going to shack up with a prostitute, because flats in those days were looked upon as evil, something really evil.”
Although that view seems old fashioned today, there’s still a view that apartment living isn’t suitable for children. And if you don’t live near to a good local park, green spaces or something like a skate park across the road, which is our lucky situation, it can definitely be tough. But the reality is that with housing affordability at record low levels, apartment dwelling kids are a much more common group of children in Australian cities. It’s happened fast, in less than a generation. When I went to put my little boy’s name down at the local school, there was a problem. “Your building doesn’t appear on our map” said the woman at the front office. Yes, because in the 1950s when the local area maps were drawn up for schools in NSW, no children lived in apartments, or above the shops. Now, there are 9 kids in our building, most under school age.