yeyejoijoi-deactivated20121231 asked: "especially in gentrifying suburbs;" Sorry, so in NZ/AU are suburbs a bastion of affordable housing where rents are becoming unaffordable due to an influx of higher purchasing power? Or are you using some other definition of gentrification? In some Canadian cities, the reverse is happening (ie suburbs were upper-middle class, but they are moving into the 'walkable' innercities and lower-class/immigrants are starting to dominate the suburbs, eg Toronto), so a comparison might be interesting!
essentially? yes, if I understand you correctly. you mean the suburbs as opposed to the inner cities, right? well, we tend to use “inner city” to mean strictly CBD or downtown or whatever, I think that’s possibly a more restricted use than most North Americans are used to.
but yeah, gentrification in Australia is a bit different than in North America and particularly the USA. there are not that many in-between-size cities/towns. there are maybe eight or nine large cities, mostly state capitals, where the majority of people live, a few more regional centres with populations mostly in the tens of thousands, and a smattering of very small towns and remote settlements. the population is very, very concentrated in the larger cities. the population of sydney and melbourne alone (about six to nine million total depending on how you measure it) is ~30-45% of the entire population of australia. I thought Canada was kind of similar? like, wikipedia says toronto is about half the population of sydney, but australian measurements of city population tend to skew large by including basically all contiguous built-up space rather than, say, the local government area of the City of Sydney.
anyway, I mean sprawl; there’s not a lot of high-density housing in most Australian cities. also there’s been rapid population growth in the large cities that hasn’t been adequately responded to. Population growth is not a problem in itself, but it was very, very poorly planned for, in Melbourne at least. plus there’s never really been much housing in the inner city in Melbourne (again, I’m not as well-informed on other cities). so what this all means is that gentrification moved out of the inner city into the inner suburbs decades ago. like, in most Australian cities there are still a whole bunch of leafy expensive suburbs that have never been affordable, but most people with no money who aren’t in public housing live in the outer suburbs.
I can’t speak to New Zealand because I’ve never been there. I probably know more about North American than Kiwi cities. You have to remember that Australians are New Zealand’s ugly Americans. I do know that Auckland contains a third of the Kiwi population so I’d imagine that they have a gentrification dynamic that’s similar in many ways.
