The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

What’s the deal with those backyards?

Here is something awkward for urbanists over here: if you want to raise a kid in Auckland, you need a backyard.

No ifs and buts. Backyard.

And that is very unfortunate. We keep going on and on about how we need to live smaller. Build apartments. The solution to housing crises always seems to converge to 6-storey apartment blocks*1, and Auckland is no exception.

But then you have to find people who are willing to live without a backyard.

Maybe you’re now reading this from your inner city apartment *2, and thinking, yes I’ll like my apartment a lot, thank you very much. I know. I have been there.

Maybe you even live there with children. Again possible, but you must have noticed that despite having so many people nearby, there are curiously few children around.

Or maybe you did not notice this, because this doesn’t contrast with anywhere else in Auckland. You’re exceedingly unlikely to see kids outside, unless you drive to a mall or playground. And I mean drive. Let me come back to that later.

Perspective

And this is the moment to point out that this blog is set in Auckland. There’s a few unique warts to high density living here:

• Most apartments are small — in the city centre, many were designed as student residences (you can tell from the obnoxious naming of some of them), and the larger ones are often very, VERY expensive.

• Most sit in neighbourhoods and streets which, to be blunt, cannot support an apartment based lifestyle. And we have some expectation that they should only show up on busy arterials because apparently apartment blocks don’t fit on quiet streets:

• And townhouses are quite peculiar too. Until a few years ago we didn’t build terraced houses at all. What did happen is that every so often, at some random spot, you get this thing called ‘townhouses’, where a developer amalgamates a few lots, and fits as many houses as possible on it. When this happens, the limiting factor is space for car parks, so these (along with the driveways) take up almost all outdoor space. *4

All of this means that these high density options come with worse compromises than what seems to be the case elsewhere. Compromises which get more difficult to deal with after you start a family.

So, you get a backyard

Let’s remind ourselves of two key properties of backyards:

1. You don’t need to deal with the street environment to go there, or while being there.
2. It is close enough so you can casually go there if you want, even for just a few minutes.

So what?

• (1) means even small kids can go there without their parents being required to drop everything and go out on a trip.
• (2) means they can go there and be there, while their parents are doing any sort of chore, or just about anything else. To use a technical term, you don’t need to actively supervise them.

‘Street environment’, of course, is an euphemism for ‘car traffic’.

The combination of these two is a substantial improvement in quality of life. It gives both children and their parents the possibility to just be, at the same time, without one needing to just hang around and wait until the other is done being.

Now, there is always that guy asking, if you got kids, why don’t you want to spend time with them? I’ll talk about that later.

Oh, and one more thing:

3. It is outdoors.

Being inside is quite limiting — have you ever tried to play soccer, or tag, inside? Judging from toddlers, being lazy seems to be an acquired taste, and they will let you know if you keep them inside. There is also that issue that your eyes will grow to the wrong shape if you don’t spend time in daylight as a toddler. *5

Not that young kids are the only people who enjoy some outdoor space, but not having it available definitely stings a lot more after you have kids.

And we cannot finish this discussion without mentioning COVID-19 lockdowns. Holy shit, imagine being cooped up for a few months inside an apartment, instead of inside a backyard.

But not everybody has children

This is true, but only if you look at one snapshot in time. If you look over a few decades, most people will have young children at some point in their lives. And usually quite early in their career. If that moment forces them to move out to some suburban house, it will act like a filter, and only the small set of yuppies and childless couples will be in those apartments. (which you can clearly see on that age pyramid above).

And thus the plan of housing more people in apartments or other high density housing will not scale up to a meaningful part of the population.

So, as cliché as it is, we now have to ask the question:

Where will the children play?

So, first for context, about the 10 or so years living here:

In Aukland, I have never seen children play on the street.

Not a single time. Never. Heck, I hardly ever see adults hanging out on the street.

And even playgrounds, do you have a playground without a parking lot nearby? It is very common to find these completely empty even on sunny weekend days. So people drive somewhere, often to the larger parks like Onepoto Domain down at Onewa Road, or Eric Armishaw Park between Point Chevalier and Waterview. And have you seen those parking lots? It is an absolute zoo over there.

What this tells you is that children cannot go to a playground, unless their parents bring them. An observation confirmed by our household travel survey *6.

Look back at those key properties of a backyard. You see the problem? You have to organise a trip, typically a car trip, to let your kids play outside. The notion that yeah families ought to live like that, is insane.

But, won't somebody please think of the adults?

Where will the adults play?

And you know what, an urban designer by the name of Donald Appleyard thought of this fifty years ago. You may have seen these graphs with ‘social connections’, perhaps the coloured versions from this Streetfilms video, “Revisiting Donald Appleyard's Livable Streets”.

And this was more than fifty years ago. You see those dots labelled “Where people gather”? You know what we call that these days? Loitering. And you’re not supposed to do it. We’ve probably gotten a tier or two below that “heavy traffic” street by now.

There is a related graph, of the area that people consider ‘home’. Not the one everyone is sharing all the time, however I think this one is the money shot. This is why people can’t live with a backyard anymore.

So we can add a fourth point to our list of backyard key properties.

4. It is part of your ‘home territory’.

Look at those tiny boxes around those apartments. Have you ever seen a more clear visual of apartments being claustrophobic?

Choices

Why don’t people want to live in apartments? Why would they even go as far as opposing apartments that they’re never going to live in anyway?

This question is very similar to that of why people choose to drive cars. In theory there is a choice, but in practice this choice is very limited by what is available right now. Right now, the limiting factor for apartments is the lack of streets that enable the kind of lifestyle you’d have in an apartment. What Appleyard calls Livable Streets.

All of this said, there are spaces in Auckland which genuinely provide a viable alternative to a backyard. They are just so uncommon that for most people their existence doesn’t matter when looking for a home.

One of them is Wynyard Quarter. You can go there and observe this in real life. But if you want one of those apartments… if you have to ask you can’t afford it.

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