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

Abstract

This paper explores the relationships between accessibility, income segregation, and house prices in the Greater Sydney Area. Sydney is found to have reasonably even employment accessibility, 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 the diversity and mixing of different income groups. Finally, hedonic price models using ordinary least square and geographically-weighted regression techniques to 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 important to investigate further in this context.