Mingles

From Peoplebrokers

Mingles: a new key to suburbia?

JOHN STEVENS reports, "The Age, Saturday, June 22, 1992"

AMERICANS call them mingles, houses shared by singles. They make sense and I think we may be looking at a mingle-crowded future. Recently I wrote in another part of 'The Age' that Melbourne's houses, as comfortable as they are, no longer serve our needs. Most have three or four bedrooms and stand alone in quarter-acre gardens, yet half of today's households contain only one or two people. I was writing about the State Government's efforts to encourage greater housing density but Christine Kaine was quickly on the telephone to tell me the problem was not so much housing density as population density.

The flight of women from kitchen sink to workplace has wrought profound social change. The institution of the family is under siege. An imaginary balloon traveller riding over the eastern suburbs might be surprised at the emptiness he would find if he could peep beneath the roofs of the grand family homes of Kew and Templestowe.

In 1986 the average household size was down to 2.9 and declining at a rate which will see the figure at 2.5 in 2031. In 20 years the population of the inner and middle suburbs fell by 170,000 and a further loss of 92,000 is projected by 2011. Existing facilities will become under-used while the community pays more and more to set people up on the rural fringes.

What the declining household size means, according to the State Planning Department, is that we will have to provide new houses at a much faster rate than the growth in population. But need this be so? In the Kaine scenario you mop up a lot of people without resorting to smaller blocks of land or burying our beautiful suburban gardens under ug1y units. What you do is simply restore to these big, half-empty houses the numbers of people they were designed for. You do it by sharing occupancy. Mingling. Miss Kaine, who runs a house sharing agency in Armadale. has a vested interest in this subject, but she is not alone in her campaign. A working group has applied for a $44,000 grant from the federal Department of Health, Housing and Community Services to research shared occupancy. As well as Ms Kaine it includes staff members of the State Planning Department, Melbourne City Council and the Urban Land Authority, an architect and a lawyer.

House sharing is a trend that has snuck up on us. More than half a million Australians live in shared households. Many are professionals who were students in the '60s and '70s. "Liberated" from parental households, they mucked in together and got to like it.

Ms Kaine has helped 6000 people into shared housing over five years. She and some other members in the group are sharers and see it as a satisfying, if challenging, way to live ? sociable, secure, work-saving and cheap. It beats the loneliness of flat life spent next to neighbours not of one's choosing. "Family life may still be the ideal but for many the family has broken down," says Ms Kaine. "Sharing can be creating another kind of family."

The group is directing its efforts towards singles who are "income sufficient but capital poor," those who have never married, single parents, widows, divorcees and retirees. But houses can also be shared by couples, particularly those who have deferred parenthood and those who otherwise could not afford a stake in the home-ownership game. The single elderly can support each other as sharers. Any house can be a mingle but old houses in the inner suburbs, where demand is highest, are the most adaptable. The main problem is equality of accommodation. Most houses, particularly modern ones, have huge master bedrooms, perhaps with en suites. and clusters of tiny children's rooms. Sharers are usually happy with one kitchen and one dining room but a second sitting room is useful and most want their own bathrooms. Halls and passages avoid intrusion. Modern, open-planned houses with big walk-through rooms are bad mingles. Sharing can be by joint ownership, co-tenancy or by one or more sharers renting from an owner-occupier. The latter arrangement, Ms Kaine points out, should not be regarded as boarding, a demeaning term which she shuns. There must be full and equal territorial rights. There is no legal impediment to joint ownership but getting finance can be difficult. Banks are reluctant to depart from the conventional mortgage taken out by one party. Safeguards are available for onselling part-ownership ? the residual owner can have first option to purchase or veto rights over the new buyer.

Approval for improvements can be sticky. Nothing in the building regulations prohibits a second kitchen but some town planners deem such an addition the basis of a second dwelling. All second-dwelling requirements are then demanded ? fire separation, separate power and water metering, additional car parking, the full catastrophe.

All this leaves room for education and reform, not the least in the field of design. The family of two parents with a child or children makes up only 30 per cent of households yet it is for this segment that 80 per cent of housing was built. Convention dies hard, particularly when home ownership is structured as the first prop to financial security. A commodity, a form of self-expression or merely a place to hang your hat; a home can mean many things but what the market lacks is choice. The architect Graeme Gunn believes the Australian house has undergone little change since the Merchant Builders innovations of the '60s and '70s. He has recently designed a series of project houses capable of being shared. They are simple, cost-effective, with easily divisible spaces.

Another concept with new possibilities is the show house opened last week at 79 Peel Street, across the road from the Victoria Market, a joint venture of the Housing Industry Association, Jennings Housing and the City of Melbourne. Designed by Jennings in conjunction with Perrott Lyon Mathieson and built by Steve Wintle, it is aimed primarily at two generations of one family but could as well suit two unrelated people or two couples.