Sydney : For people in the US, the American Dream is a vision of broadly shared prosperity, freedom and opportunity. Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream focuses on rising incomes and national renewal.
Australians once had a simpler aspiration: owning a detached suburban home on a quarter-acre of land. That vision died a while ago.
Back in the 1980s, single-family detached homes comprised about three-quarters of building approvals, and even through the 1990s and 2000s the proportion was still around two-thirds.
Since then, it’s plummeted to less than half, with high-rises taking up an increasing share of Australia’s traditionally single-story skylines.
In many ways, that splurge of building has been a boon for a country where housing construction has rarely kept up with population growth.
