One consequence of rising rent and house prices in Sydney is the further gentrification of inner suburbs, with wealthier people displacing poorer households in certain desirable areas.
These shifts in neighbourhood composition in Australia’s largest city can have negative effects on the people displaced – people losing access to their community networks and familiar surroundings, as well as more practical concerns like access to transport and health infrastructure.
While gentrification is obvious after the fact, predicting where it may occur can be tricky. Being able to predict which areas may change would allow local governments and town planners to be proactive, rather than reactive, in response to gentrification.
This is why researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) developed a model which aims to predict gentrification using changes in the socioeconomic status of an area as a proxy.
In the following map you can see which areas the researchers predicted would become more gentrified, or increase in socioeconomic status rank, and the areas in which they predicted it would decrease:
Click here to load the map in a new window on mobile.
Here you can see the same data aggregated to larger areas to get an idea of the broader changes occurring:
William Thackway, a researcher at UNSW’s City Futures centre, was the lead author on the study that aimed to develop a method to predict future gentrification.
Thackway said their model takes a wide range of data from sources like the census, business registers and property databases to train a machine-learning model to predict changes in the socioeconomic index for an area.
“The key result there was that whereas previous studies have identified gentrification in the last 10 years in Sydney occurring in a 5km to 10km ring around the city, particularly concentrated in the inner west and south-east Sydney, we predicted that ring to expand outwards to a 10km to 20km ring around the city,” he said.
“So that’s moving further westwards to suburbs like Auburn, Bankstown and Homebush, moving further south, south-east to places like Maroubra and Botany, and also further south to Sutherland.
“So essentially on a broad scale that gentrification is moving outwards from the city and enveloping suburbs that are bordering on previously gentrifying suburbs, what you could broadly call spillover effects.”
Thackway said they were only able to model the predicted change from 2016 to 2021, as socioeconomic indices from the latest 2021 census are not yet available.
“But what would be particularly interesting … once we get the [socioeconomic indices data] for 2021, we would be able to evaluate the performance of our model, on its predictions to 2021,” Thackway said.
“And of course, if we wanted to we could also rerun the model and forecast for 2026, which would be potentially interesting exercise after we’ve sort of evaluated the models performance on the 2021 predictions.”
As part of the analysis, the researchers were able to see which statistics were good indicators of gentrification or socioeconomic decline in each area, sometimes with unexpected results, such as relationship indicators having as much importance as house prices, education or employment.
“It was surprising to see that an increase in married couples in an area led to a higher prediction that the area will gentrify, while areas with more divorcees and one-parent families were less likely to gentrify according to our model,” Thackway said.
