Andrew Tice

SUBURBANIZING DISADVANTAGE IN AUSTRALIAN CITIES: SOCIOSPATIAL CHANGE IN AN ERA OF NEOLIBERALISM

ABSTRACT: This article analyses the shifting locations of social disadvantage in Australian cities based on data from the 1986 and 2006 censuses with Sydney as a case example. This 20-year period is highly significant because it represents the period over which the impacts of neoliberal economic policies introduced by the Federal Labor government in 1986, and maintained by successive Australian governments regardless of party, have fed through the Australian economy with a resulting increase in socioeconomic restructuring, including increased income polarization. This in turn has been reflected in a highly distinctive locational shift in concentrations of disadvantage in Australian cities as housing markets, largely left to their own devices (albeit supported by taxation and subsidy arrangements), have acted to realign the social structure of the city. The net result has been a marked suburbanization of the locations of disadvantage away from the “traditional” inner cities and into the middle, and in some cases outer, suburbs. In many respects, the locations identified are analogous to the first suburbs of U.S. cities that are now the focus of urban policy concerns. The article explores the impact of the “neoliberal turn” on the changing spatial structure of the Australian city and provides evidence of the changing nature of urban disadvantage in the postindustrial and increasingly fragmenting Australian city. In doing so, the article touches on the emergence of new geographies of underprivilege. “The Fibro Frontier”: A 1940’s self-build fibro cement house typical of lower income middle suburbs of Sydney, Australia (2013)”.

Children in Apartments: Implications for the Compact City

Apartments are often portrayed as the domain of young singles, couples and ‘empty nesters’. This article focuses on research undertaken in Sydney (Australia) where a disparity exists between identified planning assumptions regarding apartment residents and the actual apartment population. This article presents an innovative analysis of Australian Census data that identifies lower income households with children as a significant sub-sector of the resident apartment population, geographically concentrated in the lower value middle-ring suburbs of Sydney. An examination of one middle-ring urban renewal site (the Sydney Olympic Park site) provides evidence to suggest that new residential developments adjacent to areas dominated by an apartment market with a significant proportion of lower income families with children are themselves likely to see an influx of these households. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for planners and developers, as well as for service provision at a local council level.

Who Lives in Higher Density Housing? A Study of Spatially Discontinuous Housing Sub-markets in Sydney and Melbourne

Compact city urban policies are promoting higher density housing outcomes across many metropolitan areas. Consequently, the development of higher density housing in the form of apartments is becoming a major feature of the contemporary urban housing market. Understanding the demand driving this market has therefore become a critical issue for planners. However, traditional housing market analyses offer limited insight into what is essentially a three-dimensional housing market operating in a spatially fragmented manner. This paper uses the concept of spatially discontinuous housing markets to unpack the structure of the current demand for apartments in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s largest cities. It therefore offers a new analytical tool to improve understanding of high density housing markets as well as providing new insights into how such markets are structured at a time when planning policies and markets are delivering significantly greater quantities of this form of housing in many comparable urban areas.

Relocating Disadvantage in Five Australian Cities: Socio-spatial Polarisation under Neo-liberalism

Abstract During the mid-1980s, the Australian political discourse shifted decisively towards a neo-liberal political agenda that has remained the dominant policy paradigm ever since. Arguably, a key outcome of this has been an increase in social inequality. However, there has been little acknowledgement of this process in Australian urban policy debates. Yet these social outcomes have been accompanied by distinctive impacts on the socio-spatial structure of the Australian city. Using Census data over a 25 year period between 1986 and 2011, this paper analyses the trend towards a marked suburbanisation of the most disadvantaged households in the five major Australian cities. Its conclusions have relevance for current metropolitan planning strategies and their capacity to address what is emerging as Australia’s version of the now more widely recognised “urban inversion” of the last quarter of a century.

The First Home Owner Boost in Australia: A Case Study of Outcomes in the Sydney Housing Market

This article looks at the impact of the First Home Owner Grant (FHOG) ‘Boost’, a cash grant to first home buyers, which was introduced by the Australian Federal Government as part of the stimulus package in response to the global financial crisis (GFC) between October 2008 and September 2009. This policy initiative, based on a pre-existing FHOG, introduced in 2000 as a temporary support for the house building industry following the introduction of the Federal Goods and Services Tax, provided a major additional financial stimulus targeted at first home owners at a time when the GFC was threatening to destabilise the home purchase market. The policy was also promoted as a way of stimulating demand for new residential property to support jobs retention in the residential development industry. New South Wales, and in particular Sydney, provides a lens through which we explore the outcomes of the stimulus in terms of the geography of FHOG take-up and the types of property bought. It also assesses the impact of the Boost on first home owner purchase rates and the impact this had on post-stimulus housing demand.

Using an Online Spatial Analytics Workbench for Understanding Housing Affordability in Sydney

In 2007 the world’s population became more urban than rural, and, according to the United Nations, this trend is to continue for the foreseeable future. With the increasing trend of people moving to urban localities—predominantly cities—additional pressures on services, infrastructure and housing is affecting the overall quality of life of city dwellers. City planners, policy makers and researchers more generally need access to tools and diverse and distributed data sets to help tackle these challenges.

Moving though markets

Housing Market Analysis is a form of demographic research that seeks to unpick relationships between the supply of properties and the demand of households. Such analysis can be used for planning for future residential development. While econometric-orientated analysis dominates much of this research, a sub-discipline also exists that recognises that there are inherent geographies within these relationships, and that these geographies can therefore be mapped. This paper details the processes behind such a venture, beginning with the creation of a geographical framework detailing housing supply for Sydney, Australia. A demand dynamic is added to this framework using analysis of intra-regional migration. With the two elements combined, key relationships are identified, which form the basis of a brief discussion on the findings as they relate to activity within Sydneys housing markets.