Every so often, someone releases a list of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live. Here’s an ABC News article on one from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, listing the most unaffordable cities in the English-speaking world in relation to wages. My town is Sydney, ranking in second place.
I’ve been reflecting on what makes up a city – this city – when it’s so hard to live in it.
The Sydney property market (rental in particular) is notoriously vicious. There’s a musical about it this season, Open for Inspection, to illustrate. An unbelievable number of people will show up at every inspection, groups surging in the door for that fifteen minutes. This city has a reputation for being impersonal: it’s considered unusual to make eye contact and smile at strangers, and you’re considered to probably be out to steal from them if you do. (I mean, I’ve had shop assistants and cashiers look at me with shock and almost tearful gratefulness when I respond to a ‘hello, how’re you?’ with a ‘fine, thanks, and yourself?’) This kind of isolating menace is never more apparent than when it’s inspection time, from the powerplay around who gets in the door first, to who achieves the friendliest relationship with the real estate agent, to the little games around personal space. It’s a hard city in which to find somewhere affordable and liveable in which to place yourself, and it’s a big, unfriendly city. It is not expected that we be kind to one another.
Sydney is a city very much divided along class and ethnic lines. I am not sure how to explain to you how class works in Australia, because it seems to slip through a lot of the understandings used to explain class elsewhere, and also because I am from a middle class part of town. In some ways, Sydney’s like a group of bickering villages, really, with their ideas about the other, caricatures of uneducated, working class slobs and clueless private school snobs (as for the latter: accurate with disturbing frequency!). It’s such a large city that the more privileged groups get to stay in their enclaves without ever much mixing if they don’t want to or can’t. I mean large both in terms of population – there are about 4.5 million Sydneysiders – and spatially, with Sydney being very spread out and national parks and other sorts of greenery all round about.
As for ethnicity, there’s a sense that if you are one of those, you belong there. Muslims in Lakemba, Italians in Leichhardt, new immigrants who can’t speak English in Ashfield, and so forth. It’s a big city and there are all kinds of people from all kinds of groups all over. It says a lot about this city that there are such strong ideas, regardless, about who belongs where, and who is straying out of their space. And I just think about how that’s tied to the endless racism running through this country, and through this city, as per the 2005 Cronulla race riots (please be warned that, at the top of the Sydney Morning Herald article linked, there is an image of a person surrounded by a mob and being hit).
It’s a strange city in which to live, and a difficult one. Because, even while you’re struggling to pay the high rent, there’s still the question of how those class and ethnic groupings play into other living expenses. Which suburbs get the good groceries, and which are given the crummy ones? Where the cost of living is so high, how is space being used to dictate of whom gets taken more advantage?
For me, personally, the hardest time for living in this country is 26 January. Australia Day is the anniversary of the First Fleet’s arrival: the beginnings of the colony of New South Wales. Australia Day is known also as Invasion Day. It’s a day on which it’s popular to dress up in clothes with Australian flags on them, and to use Australian flags as capes. I am scared to go outside on 26 January because I know that racist feeling is running high (‘we grew here, you flew here’) and that people like me are not welcome. I see someone wearing Australian flags and I tense up until I can get away from them, because maybe they’re just patriotic, but that flag has come to symbolise a violent, racist hatred in many an Australian head. I remember the Cronulla riots, and I remember the acts of violence that occur all the time in this city, and I am scared.
I’ve lived in Sydney all my life, and I wonder about how different things must be elsewhere. How do you yourself experience the community in which you are living? Perhaps you live in Sydney, too, and experience it differently to how I do. I find myself a bit tense outside of this city: I love Melbourne to the south, and I have ties to Newcastle to the north, and I have enjoyed my time in many small towns, but I feel strangely secure here in this strange, alienating place, because it is what I’m used to.
It’s so much more complicated than I’ve laid it out here; these are my reflections, coming from a thoroughly middle class sort of person. I’d recommend Flat 7 by lovely blogger ana australiana to anyone who wants to learn more about cities, class, renewal and related issues.