City Stories | Unley, Australia: Cohousing for aging well – Designing for aging in place
Libbie Cootes has a habit of moving house about once a decade. But as she ages, the 64-year-old part-time counselor has finally planted roots in Unley, a suburb of Adelaide, Australia. Why Unley? “I’m a cyclist, I don’t own a car, and I don’t have family as backup. I wanted to be somewhere in close proximity to the center of Adelaide because I’m a great lover of free lectures and the fresh fruit and vegetable markets,” she said. “My prerequisites were: I needed somewhere flat for cycling and close to the city. And for when I become old and decrepit, I need close proximity to public transport.”
The leafy suburb checked all the boxes and then some. “I also like the ambiance of where I live,” she said. “It’s not all high-rise apartments and concrete jungle.”
With a population of about 40,000, Unley is an increasingly desirable suburb just two miles from the Adelaide CBD with a hot property market. In the fourth quarter of 2020, the average Unley house cost A$1.095 million (US$840,000), making Unley the most expensive residential real estate market in metropolitan Adelaide.
Cootes considers herself low-income -- her previous careers included a teacher and a social worker -- so one of Unley’s current houses would be out of her price range. She entered the local property market back in 2000 when she bought a house on a 365 m2 lot. She demolished the house in 2016 and designed her current home, which has three bedrooms and two bathrooms with a garden. She anticipates ageing in place by living in the master bedroom with en suite bath and hosting an in-home care aide in her additional living space that is separated by a sliding door.
There are likely many more people in Cootes’ situation, said Judith Lowe, Unley’s Active Ageing Project Officer. “Unley is a longevity suburb,” she said. “People have grown up here and wish to stay, and we have the benefits of good health and long lives, with a median lifespan of 89.” Unley joined the World Health Organization’s Age- Friendly Cities Project in 2014, the first Australian city to do so.
But if other ageing Unley residents want to live in a home like Cootes rather than move into a retirement unit or residential aged care, they are out of luck. Unley has a strict zoning and building code, which generally requires a minimum lot size of 800 m2.
Those large lot minimums keep the property market valuable, which financially benefits existing homeowners, but create negative effects for Unley’s overall growth and development.
“In the business-as-usual model for suburbs, there is nowhere for older people to downsize to and nowhere for younger people to buy in,” said architect Damian Madigan, who has been advising the city as it seeks to overhaul its zoning code to accommodate infill development and cohousing geared toward ageing in place.
Changing what type of buildings are permitted in Unley is a contentious issue. Longtime Unley residents do not wish for new construction that in their view leads to the destruction of heritage buildings and reduction in tree cover, and that otherwise changes the so-called “character” of the suburb, which has become a prestige real estate destination with many properties considered luxury homes. Subdividing blocks to allow for smaller houses is difficult and when property developers can secure building permits for urban infill, the free market tends to replace single-family homes with multi-story townhouses. Moreover, the state of South Australia has established planning policies to new housing construction in a country facing increasingly unaffordable housing prices. Those state policies overrule local regulations and have led to taller buildings along transport corridors.
In this fraught context where property development has become a political football, even the modest proposal to allow more flexibility for the construction of age-friendly dwellings required extensive hand-holding with the city council. “I don’t think our internal planning or public support ever wavered, but we had to create a blank slate and show beyond what people have known for 30 years,” Lowe said. “We started from imagining what could be possible and then worked backwards.”
Enlisting an architect to show actual designs of what age-friendly infill and cohousing could look like helped the public envision how these tweaks could change Unley to accommodate their own family’s needs as they or their relatives age. “We described friends living together collaboratively or a 50-year-old widow moving in to care for parent,” said Madigan. “As soon as you start scenario planning, people understand it. If you talk setbacks and codes, that language doesn’t resonate.”
Ultimately, Madigan’s firm developed a suite of designs for extra-large, large, medium, and small lot sizes that would not radically change the look and feel of the average Unley block. “Traditionally there has been a very conservative approach to the suburbs and it’s been quite justified because a lot of bad infill has been served up and we lose the older housing stock that gives them character,” Madigan said. “There is a general sense that if we put in more housing, we are going to increase hard surfaces and lose tree canopy.”
With the team’s success convincing the city council to allow these new housing designs, blocks which were once ineligible for any increase in density could now see the density of housing units triple. But the zoning code change is only the first step, as private developers must begin taking advantage of the new land use rules. “This initiative is therefore quite revolutionary as it has borrowed the principles of cohousing from other countries and attempted to create an Australian version, with the risk that this Australian version has no proven value to developers or potential residents yet,” Madigan said.
Even without proof of concept, such foresight is nevertheless key according to Trevor Shilton, Director of Active Living at the National Heart Foundation of Australia. “Australia’s ageing population has been identified as one of the largest megatrends affecting the country in coming decades,” he said. “As a result of the co-housing design project, the City of Unley is continuing to advocate that building code variations provide for active ageing and mobility access standards.”
Cootes, who serves on the City of Unley’s Active Ageing Committee, believes the demand is there despite entrenched financial interests. “There will always be people who want their land value going up all the time and don’t want to lower the tone of the neighborhood,” she said. “But sometimes I volunteer at a food co-op and a few of the others are single women. When they see my house, they tell me ‘This would be great. I could share my house to offset the cost and still have my private space.’”
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