Apartments are the new houses for a growing number of Australians. Housing affordability, aging, environmental issues, immigration and shrinking household formation patterns are driving this shift. Apartments are now the dominant form of new housing in many of our capital cities. In a little under 20 years over half of Sydney's population will live in apartments. In other cities the trend will be the same. The legal concept of strata title was invented just over 50 years ago as a means of conveniently financing separately-owned flats with common property and facilities, the strata concept has come a long way. Since then increasingly complex laws have been developed to accommodate increasingly complex buildings, many of which now incorporate a mix of uses. Despite these trends towards more complex housing forms and the many and varied laws that apply to them, our owners corporations and bodies corporate are compulsory not-for-profit organisations, run by volunteers from within the strata community concerned.
Strata expert and author Michael Teys has written this book to help strata communities and the owners corporations that run them think about the issues they face now and into the future. Growing Up is a thought-provoking book on an important subject as more and more Australians adopt higher-density living and learn to live in closer proximity with their neighbours.