How house prices and botched council amalgamations are driving racial segregation

SYDNEY is being locked in to a future of ethnic “ghettos” because of the state government’s botched amalgamation process and expensive housing.

SYDNEY is being locked into a future of ethnic “ghettos” because of the state government’s botched council amalgamations and expensive housing.

Western Sydney University Associate Professor Awais Piracha said booming levels of immigration and a lack of new dwellings across all parts of the city is further encouraging racial segregation.

Suburbs with the most new arrivals are almost exclusively in Western Sydney, where migrants from a single country can make up more than half the local population.

“What is the point of being in a place like Sydney if you are with the same sort of people you were before?,” the Professor of Urban Planning told The Sunday Telegraph.

Western Sydney University Urban Planning Associate Professor Awais Piracha says Sydney’s housing affordability will create future ethnic “ghettos”.

“It is not good for social cohesion. For a residential place to experience segregation is not good. We do not want ghettos.

“The (state government’s) Greater Sydney Commission talks about the three cities of Parramatta, Sydney City and the new city around the airport.

“There is another sort of city in my view: that is the Chinese city, the Middle Eastern city and Indian city. Should we have more mixing?”

Between 2006 and 2016 the number of South Asian (mostly Indian and Sri Lankan) migrants living in Sydney increased 143 per cent from 100,886 to 245,535 according to the ABS.

Sydney’s Middle Eastern-born population increased 31 per cent (up to 178,367), while the Chinese and Korean-born community increased 71 per cent (up to 337,642).

Sydney can be divided into the Chinese city, the Middle Eastern city and the Indian city, argues Professor Piracha. Picture: Craig Wilson

While North and Western Europeans immigrants cluster around Manly and Coogee, South Asian immigrants have concentrated around Harris Park and northeast Asian immigrants around Rhodes and Clyde.

Fairfield and Bossley Park remains the preferred area for Middle Eastern immigrants.

Dr Ernest Healy from The Australian Population Research Institute, said the problem of ethnic spatial concentration combined with economic disadvantage is getting worse.

“They grow up in an environment that is not typical of Australian society at all,” he said of migrants isolated by language, employment and wider social connection.

“Once this disadvantage becomes intergenerational governments and societies have a serious problem.

“I suspect it is getting worse and a big part of that is the housing market.”

Prof Piracha agrees, saying housing affordability is linked to future ethnic “ghettos”

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Migrants from North and Western European cluster around Manly and Coogee Beaches

Fairfield in Sydney’s southwest has absorbed about 9000 refugees in the past two years.

Fairfield Mayor Frank Carbone said the area has about 130 different cultures.

“Refugees will always go to their families but it would be in their interests that they are given opportunities and eventually spread to locations where there is health, education and jobs,” he said.

“Fairfield is a settlement city but the government needs to use this city as a conduit to help them resettle in other regional areas.”

Migrants gravitated to cheaper accommodation and those more affordable homes where concentrated in certain parts of Sydney because of the state government’s botched council amalgamation process.

Most north and eastern councils avoided amalgamation while many southwest Sydney councils became bigger and “Small councils mean small neighbourhood/community groups can easily pressurize/influence councils to stymie any proposals to increase density,” Prof Piracha said.

Parramatta, Bayside, Canterbury-Bankstown and Cumberland Council will take the bulk, according to the Department of Planning.

The state government has ruled out revisiting council mergers.