As Australia’s largest cities densify, family-friendly apartments are in short supply

Enormous puzzle pieces were splayed across the tiny floor space.

In the cramped eleventh-storey bedroom in Collingwood in Melbourne’s inner north-east, it was playtime for Brielle Pope’s toddler, Evie.

Meanwhile, the single mother had begun a game of her own.

“So this is Evie’s room, which has been a constant game of Tetris since she was born,” she said.

“Originally, this was a room used for my business. As she grew, I had to move her cot out of my bedroom into here.

“Then, as she grew into a single bed, I had to find a way to fit it in the room.”

Today, the room is packed floor-to-ceiling with storage shelves and larger toys strategically tucked into any space made by the other furniture.

The adaptations have continued throughout Ms Pope’s apartment of eight years as she has adjusted the space for her daughter, who is three.

But certain features — like an oven handle within her daughter’s reach and an anxiety-inducing gap in the balcony railing — have been little match for Evie’s boundless curiosity.

“As a single parent, trying to keep her occupied while I’m cooking dinner is very challenging,” Ms Pope said, interrupted by a sudden strumming, as her daughter commandeered a guitar in the living space.

When the only elevator in her tower was out-of-order for about a month, Ms Pope had few options but to lug the toddler and her elderly 13-year-old dog up about a dozen flights of stairs — or leave.

When a nearby playground was redeveloped, she became so passionate about the removal of play space that she ran for local council campaigning on the issue.

These incidents added to a sense that her apartment had been designed with a different tenant in mind.

Apartments ‘not really seen as a home’

Australia’s major cities are in the midst of a boom in apartment living. 

The number of occupied apartments has grown by nearly 60 per cent since 2006, and the recent rate of growth has outpaced townhouses and houses.

Families have played a role in this rise, many motivated by affordability and lifestyle factors, according to some studies.

Data shows about one in 20 family households in Brisbane and Melbourne lived in an apartment during the 2021 Census.

In Sydney – where median house prices were more than 1.5 times higher than Melbourne’s – the figure was closer to one in five.

Other studies have found many families were theoretically happy trading backyards for quality communal space — but in practice, they end up making more significant compromises.

Research highlights an investor-driven proliferation of small, dark and stuffy apartments before more modern design standards were legislated.

Since 2017, two rounds of tightened regulations in Victoria have brought newer builds closer to what most people would consider a suitable long-term home.

But Associate Professor Fiona Andrews, a Deakin University academic, said certain gaps continue to exacerbate the difference between living in an apartment and living in a house.

“We interview people who store food in the bedroom, under the bed, down in the storage cage,” Dr Andrews, who provided advice to the Victorian government on child and family-friendly design considerations, said.

During a study that asked families to photograph problematic aspects of apartment design, the academic said she was overwhelmed with pictures of cluttered living areas and bleak communal space. 

Participants lived side-by-side in cramped quarters, but barely knew each other.

A similar study focused on kitchens yielded photos of awkward cupboards and benchtops so small they disincentivised home cooking.

Families would eat dinner on the couch because “the current policy doesn’t assign any space to a dining table,” Dr Andrews said.

Lawmakers in New South Wales and Victoria have been racing to meet housing targets by building Australia’s largest cities up rather than out.

In Sydney, rezoning will unlock space for nearly 60,000 new homes in eight areas within walking distance of transport links. A second stage of rezoning will target dozens of other areas across the state.

Similar plans are progressing in Melbourne, where draft planning documents suggest building heights in suburbs like Camberwell could reach six or more storeys.

Yet despite their centrality to easing the housing crisis, Dr Andrews said many apartments serve only a narrow set of needs.

“The current apartment stocks really seem to be tailored to people who are just moving through that apartment — not really seen as a home,” she said.

Three-bedroom apartment drought

Isabel Robinson has watched as friends and peers moved their young families from apartments to larger homes further afield.

By contrast, the writer and mother-of-two said, “I feel like we’ll probably live here forever”.

“Here” was a three-bedroom, art deco flat in what Ms Robinson called downtown St Kilda.

With high ceilings and spacious rooms, the apartment was comfortable even as the temperature reached 35.

Ms Robinson’s children’s bedroom window opens to a secluded garden rather than other homes — a contrast to her previous apartment.

“During the last year we lived there, while my little girl was a baby, there was a room being let out at the back of the flat next door to backpackers,” she said.

“Often I would put her down to sleep and I would look out the back door, and someone I’d never met would be smoking outside her room.”

Ms Robinson acknowledged her current home was a rarity and she was privileged to be there.

Three-bedroom apartments make up only a small fraction of the nation’s apartment stock. 

Development groups say simple economics are partly to blame.

“Three-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments have more square metres ,” Stuart Ayres from the Urban Development Institute of Australia’s New South Wales chapter said.

“You just multiply that additional number of square metres by the cost per square metre and you have a more expensive dwelling.”

Multi-storey developments less feasible, developers say

The same groups say current economic conditions have only made it harder to deliver family-friendly apartments.

In Melbourne, a six-storey building on the western edge of the CBD has successfully lured a mix of families and other long-term tenants by promoting cross-ventilation, a portion of three-bedroom apartments and appealing communal space.

However, developer Marcus Lyon from Brunswick Group readily admits it was a challenging project. He said taking a different approach “invariably costs more”.

“That all comes with a compromise in yield and additional cost,” he said.

Since the building’s completion in 2018, rising construction costs have been passed on to home-buyers while high interest rates have restricted borrowing capacity, the Urban Development Institute of Australia said.

By the time developers look to feasible prices for three and four-bedroom apartments, they can be “quite uncompetitive when compared to existing detached housing stock,” Mr Ayres said.

“The feasibility for many multi-storey apartment buildings is just not there under the current conditions.”

Governments in both New South Wales and Victoria have created fast tracks for specific development applications geared towards housing diversity.

But Mr Ayres said bigger levers needed to be pulled to bring down costs.

“We would definitely encourage governments to invest more in enabling infrastructure,” he said.

While leaders tackle a problem with few easy solutions, the stakes for children like Evie could hardly be higher.

“I don’t have the option to go elsewhere, and I really want to have the security that local councils and governments are considering that when they’re developing new high-rises and apartments,” Ms Pope said.

“As a parent you want nothing but the best for your child, and I struggle with that on a daily basis: to think I could be giving her something better.”