The good life is never far away

IN more or less any city, the wealthiest live within a 20-minute drive of the CBD.

Illustration: Michael Perkins

I HAVE always been fascinated by rich suburbs (and, indeed, by poor suburbs, but that's another story). And I have discovered something quite extraordinary about the rich.

In more or less any city you care to nominate, the suburb or precinct recognised as the home of the wealthiest citizenry is within a 20-minute drive of the CBD.

And the reason is simple. Really, really rich people don't commute, so they choose the best real estate within easy reach of work. Also, living within 20 minutes of the centre of town also delivers access to a city's leading cultural institutions.

Consider the evidence. Melbourne's well-to-do live in Toorak, 6km from the city's business heart in Collins Street. Any member of the Toorak nation can decamp to the centre of Melbourne within 30 minutes at pretty much any time of the day. Only the very rich have this level of control over time in day-to-day life. The same goes for Sydney. The harbour city's elite live in Point Piper, also 6km from the city centre.

But the consistency of rich people's behaviour doesn't end there. Brisbane's elite live in St Lucia, which is, you might have guessed, 7km (by road) from the centre of town.

And I haven't even started on holiday houses. Sydney's elite spend their weekends in Palm Beach, which is 90 minutes from the centre of town. Melbourne's Portsea is also a 90-minute drive, as indeed is the trip from St Lucia "up the coast" to Noosa's Little Cove.

Mind, those Perthlings spoil my theory. Ritzy Dalkeith is 9km from St George's Terrace. And the holiday enclave of Eagle Bay (dubbed Ego Bay by locals) requires a four-hour drive from the city centre. But then West Australians have a different tolerance to distance. The edge of commuting tolerance on the east coast is an hour and a half on a Friday night; in the west this is doubled.

My theory about really, really rich people goes further. New York's elite live on the Upper East Side, which is 12km from Wall Street. However, this distance on the Manhattan grid can be covered in 20 minutes at most times of the day. And certainly this is the case by subway if the rich are feeling bohemian and want to mix it with the locals.

Weekenders are preferred in a series of coastal villages known as The Hamptons, which begin 100km east of Manhattan, on Long Island. Again, this distance could be covered within 90 minutes on a Friday night. Mind, if you are rich enough to have a weekender in The Hamptons, you probably leave work when it suits.

How about London. Mayfair and Belgravia are positioned exactly 6km west of the Bank of England in the City. Again, it's a 20-minute commute by car, cab or the Underground. English weekenders are typically located in any of the Home Counties that abut London; the closer of these can generally be reached before 8pm on a Friday night.

Paris's swankiest suburb is widely considered to be the Neuilly-sur-Seine in the 16th Arrondisement, which lies west of the Arc de Triomphe. The Parisian creme de la creme live a mere 7km from the business heart, the Bourse. And the drive to work ain't half bad, either: they motor down the Champs Elysees.

I suppose this is what you get when you are top of the tree in a market-based economy. You get to pick and choose the most convenient residential locations within what you consider to be a tolerable commute time to a capital-city job market. And that tolerance is almost universally recognised to be 7km or 20 minutes.

Bernard Salt is a KPMG Partner; [e-mail]
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