Selecting Suburbia: Residential Relocation to Outer Sydney

In the larger Australian cities, most residential shifts to the outer suburbs, where most population growth takes place, have been regarded as entailing trade-offs between housing accessibility and the availability of local jobs and services. Declining housing affordability, high levels of unemployment and continued centralisation of jobs and services have repoliticised the situation. This paper reports on a sample of some 400 individuals who relocated from inner and middle-ring areas of metropolitan Sydney in the early 1990s. Whilst environmental amenity and housing quality do influence relocation decisions, and movers are socio-demographically diverse, the dominant concern remains housing affordability with movers typically young and shifting from rental to purchasing tenures. Most experienced marked increases in journey-to-work times and saw friends and relatives less after moving. The study reaffirms that whilst the Australian outer city may not be a place of last resort, large numbers still sacrifice a lot to achieve home-ownership there.