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Life expectancy changing lifestyles

By Erle Levey
Property Editor

The change in where Australians want to live, how they want to live and who they may or may not want to live with will have a profound impact on the property market in the next 30 years.

Author and demographer Bernard Salt said governments and developers who ignored these trends did so at their own peril.

Mr. Salt, who identified the sea change phenomenon in his book The Big Shift: Welcome to the Third Australian Culture, said the next change would be based mainly on age and life expectancy.

He said that at the time of federation in 1901, there were four million Australians, with 52% living in regional and rural areas. It was very much the bush culture with corks hanging from bush hats ... it defined who we were.

Now less than 20% live in the bush and 12 million of the 20 million live in a city environment. This is the suburbia parodied in the 1950s by Barry Humphries and still being done so by Kath and Kim.

For the past 10 years we have been experiencing the big shift from capital cities to the beach lifestyle. A third of the population or 3.9 million is now living on the coastline.

The Sunshine Coast is the second largest concentration of this beach culture outside a capital city. It's out with RM Miller and in with Rip Curl and Billabong.

Mr. Salt said that for every 1000 new residents who moved to the Sunshine Coast, the retail capacity expanded by $8 million each 18 months. So 7500 people would bring with them $60 million of spending power. Much of that would be spent on products to improve our homes and the way we live.

Mr. Salt said the shift of population to the beach needed the building of new cities from scratch and that's the problem at the moment.

"People are not living close together in a ball like in Sydney. They are living in a 12,000km strip little more than 1km wide stretching from Port Douglas to Geraldton. It's a very inefficient way of doing things, but it won't go away. It's something we have to learn to grapple with".

He said development areas based around transit centres and corridors would be the main issue for the Sunshine Coast which is one of Australia's fastest growing areas. "WE cannot keep adding to those amounts of people and hope that freeways can cope with it. You cannot have a large city and not be serviced by rail. The Gold Coast, Newcastle and Geelong all have fast train links to their capital city".

"How can Western Australia, a state with half the population of Queensland, justify the funding of a new 80km railway to Mandurah, a city of 70,000 when we cannot-and still not look like-funding a spur line 20km to a city that will soon have 250,000 people?"

"We can talk about art centres but the thing that burns in the minds of the 212,000 people on the Sunshine Coast at present is traffic congestion. Every household makes 10 car trips per day and the issue is to raise the needs of the Sunshine Coast before the hierarchy. A big region needs big thinking."

Mr. Salt said the life expectancy of Australians was also changing. In 1928 it was 63 years. You went from a child of 14 years to an adult. The life form known as a teenager did not exist before 1945.

"In 1928, at the ager of 52 you were an old person, 10 years away from death. In 1968, the average expectancy was 71. The concept of living beyond retirement now emerges as a new proposition. In 2008, the average age will be 81 ... the concept is we will be living 16 years past the retirement age. It is time to create a new property model. The average Australian retires at 58, which means a quarter of their lifespan will be spent in retirement."

"Generation X picked up the concept of teenage phase ... and stretched it from 13 to the age of 29. The traditional measure of transition in the 70s has been kicked out. They are not willing to commit to marriage, a mortgage. They are not buying in the 'burps. Instead they are renting in a hip area, road-testing the idea of marriage.

Mr. Salt said we were also seeing a new teenage phase ... baby boomers in their 50s. It's a transition from their peak income earning period to retirement.

"Baby boomers are the new teenagers. When you were 50-something, it was a time to prepare for old age. Now, you've got 30-odd years of life left."

Mr. Salt said there were changes in the size and make-up of Australian households, with a significant swing away from the traditional family of mum, dad and the kids to singles, couples and single-parent families.

"In 1981, there were 3.2 persons per household. In 2001, it was 2.7. We have lost half a person in 20 years. There has been a social shift and we are not living in as big a housing environment. In the next 25-30 years it will drop to 2.38 .. another half a person."

The smallest households in Australia will be Harvey Bay. The Sunshine Coast will be second with 2.07 people per household. By the same time there will be more single householders than families or couples. In 1991, families occupied 41% of houses. By the end of the decade that had dropped to 33% and by 2031, it will be 24%. Single-person households will have climbed from 20% to 31% and couples from 24% to 29%. One parent families will change just 1% ... from 10% to 11%.

"There will no longer be the need for suburbia, yet the singles will not just be the young, hip individuals who inhabit Pyrmont and the like. They will also be old, lonely people who have seen their partner die."

"They do not want a three-bedroom brick veneer house on the fringe of suburbia but an apartment near transport and with secure lighting. These issues will have a profound impact on the property market and developers who ignore the trends will do so at their peril."