Segregated Suburbs
Last year the NSW government announced an upgrade to the Bankstown line to accommodate more frequent, driverless metro trains and densification of most suburbs along the corridor. The area can be roughly divided into a western cluster of ethnic, working class suburbs and an eastern group of more gentrified ones, separated by the Cooks River which runs through the middle of Canterbury, as crudely depicted below:
In other words, they’ve set up a natural experiment in the responses of different demographics to a single, very significant, planning event.
Admittedly, it’s not a very well controlled experiment. The western suburbs further from the CBD are more or less being zoned entirely for apartment development, whereas the majority of each eastern suburb remains intact as single family (in many cases detached) housing. The distribution of objections to the plan (n=1,448) provide a strong clue as to why:
In spite of the government preempting this outcome by positioning extra housing growth in inverse proportion to the residents’ propensity to complain about it, they did so anyway. Far from providing reasonable feedback on the impact of development, the entire function of objections here has been to keep it away from rich white people.
The most charitable interpretation we can give this is that all residents would object to a given development proposal equally, but only those with high incomes and English proficiency are politically engaged enough to fight it. Another survey conducted by the Department of Planning (n=770) as part of the consultation process provides a more compelling explanation in terms of their values:
Every suburb in the eastern part of the corridor rated ‘Preserving local character’ as a high priority, while half those in the western part put ‘Affordability of housing’ in their top six. Neither concern crossed to the other side of the river. The worst thing those in the east could imagine is their suburb changing around them, whereas those in the west were afraid they wouldn’t be able to afford to live there at all.
The preservation of local character has been a particularly hot button issue in Hurlstone Park (9km from the CBD) of late. After successfully blocking plans for the erection of some two storey townhouses (apparently overdevelopment, in this context), sixty people turned up to a funeral for a federation house of no particular note when the owner decided to knock it down and subdivide into 200sqm lots instead. This has lead Canterbury council to apply heritage protections to a ludicrous 60% of the suburb (or just about everything built prior to 1970) on an interim basis for the next 12 months.
In the ten years from 2001 to 2011, the population of Hurlstone Park declined by 140 people, and the median age increased from 37 to 41. A similar pattern was observed in Haberfield, the Inner West’s other famous ‘build nothing’ suburb, which lost 133 people and had its median age increase from 39 to 42. Now consider how those 10 years played out across Sydney in areas that started out with a density of 20 persons per hectare or higher (i.e., areas where new development would be considered infill):
There’s a clear overall trend where the failure to densify drives young people out of the area. This is because young people have a strong preference for the kind of living apartments can provide, as we see from our sample area:
Which is all to say that while it may be personally quite cheap for the eastern residents to have the sort of preferences they do, preserving local character in an all encompassing architectural sense comes at the cost of unsustainable demographic decay.
Inner city suburbs predominated by large separate houses like Hurlstone Park and Haberfield were conspicuously absent from the examples provided by the NSW government for their new terrace housing strategy, which instead focused on the middle and outer ring. Let’s hope this was an oversight rather than intent, because the idea that grand federation houses and terraces can’t coexist so very 1920s.
