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BOOMERS POUND THE COAST
Source: Extract from: The Australian 10th October 2009- By Bernard Salt
HERE is a feature that will surely become more prevalent in sea change locations in the coming decade. It is the notion that there is sufficient space in this idyllic community for me but not for anyone to arrive after me.
This sets the stage for a culture clash. Baby boomers will retire en masse after 2011 when the first reaches 65. Many will seek out a sea-change lifestyle within striking distance of capital cities in places such as Byron Bay, in northern NSW, and Noosa, on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, and the Gold Coast.
A lack of new housing options means housing costs will rise and price out service workers. Noosa and Byron will become a bit like Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket Island off the Massachusetts coast: beautiful environments enjoyed by a favoured few.
Australians have not always had a love affair with the sea. The inland city of Ballarat was ranked the 10th largest city in Australia at Federation. (It now ranks 19th.) The Gold Coast did not exist in name or concept before the 1950s. Cairns had barely 4000 residents at the turn of the 20th century.
Sure, our capital cities were anchored by the coast but this reflected how we arrived rather than any preference for coastal living. Only the truly well-to-do could afford to retire by the seaside in places such as Victoria's Queenscliff. But all this changed soon after the end of World War II. By the 60s the Gold Coast had emerged as Australia's answer to Florida. The Sunshine Coast quickly followed suit. Today both rank within the 10 largest cities on the Australian continent.
The Gold Coast is a pulsing urban mass of 600,000 residents growing by the equivalent of a country town (say, 15,000 people) every 12 months. The Sunshine Coast contains 250,000 residents and is bigger than Hobart and will soon overtake Wollongong.
There is something uniquely Australian that is driving these and other new coastal cities such as Mandurah, south of Perth, and Hervey Bay, Queensland. The fastest growing part of the US is the County of Maricopa, which regularly adds 100,000 residents every year. The thing about Maricopa is that it is located in the Arizona desert. Lifestyle-seeking Americans flock to Florida but they also play golf in the desert near Phoenix.
We Australians are different: we don't do desert; we do coast. The Kiwis are different again. The fastest growing part of New Zealand is the mountain town of Queenstown, where they talk of the delights of "tramping the fells". The Brits are drawn to Spain's Costa Brava not, I suspect, because of the water but because of the presence of, well, other Brits. The Canadians have a preference for what we call tree change but what is known there as cabin country in British Columbia and cottage country in Ontario.
But the desire to live by the water today is universal. Consider, for example, the exorbitant cost of villas overlooking the Italian lakes. But lifestyle housing is usually fully priced in a variety of settings (such as lake, desert, beach and mountain) in places such as Italy and the US. What is unique about Australia today is that we are faithful to one lifestyle, the coast.
Yes, there's tree change but, let's face it, tree change is for sea-changers who can't afford pounding surf views. There's always that niggling suspicion that deep down tree-changers hanker for a harbour view. A "green scene" is not the same as a "blue view".
In either case the best tree-change towns are sited by a river or lake. Victoria's Daylesford - the tree-change movement's exemplar - is defined by its lake and by the Lakehouse restaurant. There will never be a fashionable tree-change town with a "hatted" restaurant in any of the flat, desolate villages of the Australian wheatbelt: wrong karma.
So we come to the coast. A little more than four million Australians live on the coast outside a capital city. This is about the same population as Sydney or Melbourne. But, unlike these cities, the sea-change coast is comprised of a series of settlements scattered along a 12,000km coastline.
Please feel free to contact me on email: Jenese Malone
See detailed article on house shortages in Australia here...
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