The Reflection of Income Segregation and Accessibility Cleavages in Sydney’s House Prices

Abstract

Cities often show residential income segregation, and the price of housing is generally related to employment accessibility, but how do these factors intersect? We analyse Greater Sydney, Australia, a metropolitan area of 5 million people. Sydney is found to have reasonably even employment accessibility by car, reflecting the increasingly polycentric nature of the modern city; however, it also shows considerable income segregation and variance in property prices between different parts of the city. Entropy is used to examine diversity and mixing of different income groups. Finally, hedonic price models using ordinary-least squares and geographically-weighted regression techniques show the differing effects of employment accessibility on house prices in different parts of the city. The results show that accessibility has small to negative effects on prices in the most valuable areas, suggesting that other effects such as recreational access and employment type/quality may be more important determinants of house prices in these areas.

Keywords

• accessibility
• geographically-weighted regression
• house price
• gravity models
• hedonic price models