COVID has ‘scrambled’ our cities as more workers willing to head to the fringes.
For demographer and statistician Simon Kuestenmacher, a city can be best thought of as an egg, with COVID-19 a big spatula that has ‘scrambled’ them.
“The typical pre-pandemic capital city in Australia essentially looked like a fried egg – all the fat, delicious juicy jobs are clustered in the CBD, in the city centre,” he told the crowd at the Property Congress in Hobart.
Commuting from the far edges of the city (the egg white) to the city centre (the yolk) can be a “soul destroying commute“ Kuestenmacher said, which meant people were willing to pay a premium to live as close “to the egg yolk as possible”.
However, with COVID-19 requiring large swathes of the workforce to work from home, and as businesses built up the infrastructure to do just that, the dynamic has changed.
“It was almost like we took a spatula to our fried egg, and we turned it into a scrambled egg city,” co-founder of the Demographics Group Kuestenmacher said.
“All of a sudden, more and more workers were free to act on a housing market like retirees. Meaning they were not shackled by the CBD anymore, they could choose their city of choice, their suburb of choice based on other factors, mostly liveability, affordability, personal preference and family relations,” he said.
During 2020-21, the population of regional Australia grew by 70,900 people in contrast to a decline of 26,000 for the capital cities, according to figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
Regional New South Wales saw an increase of 26,800 people and Victoria a 15,700 increase, contrasted with a 60,500 people drop in Melbourne and 5,200 fall in Sydney.
Tangentially, new CoreLogic data shows that over the last three months, regional house prices rose 5.1 per cent, while the combines capitals grew only 1.5 per cent.
Despite this, Kuestenmacher claims that working remotely does not imply “never going to the office,” and that if individuals only work in the CBD once or twice a week, they are more likely to accept living an “extreme commutable distance” away.
“This is why Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Geelong are the fastest growing areas in Australia,” he said.
When analysing the consequences of the COVID pandemic, Jessica Christiansen-Frank, Founding Director of Neighbourlytics, stated that the stories of regional and suburban centres were significantly different.
“Across the board we saw that the neighbourhoods that provided a whole of lifestyle experience, childcare, wellness, fitness, green space, those types of neighbourhoods that support the holistic local lives that people want to live, they performed much better,” she said.
“I dare say that a lot of what we are hearing about the hesitation to go back into the office is that many of our offices are in the type of communities that don’t have that whole of life support.”