The decline of ‘advantageous disadvantage’ in gateway suburbs in Australia: The challenge of private housing market settlement for newly arrived migrants

Abstract

Chinese

The spatial concentration of recently arrived immigrants in gateway cities and suburbs is usually seen as undesirable by urban academics and policy makers. This paper presents a counter-argument that the concentration of disadvantaged new immigrants in the form of humanitarian refugees and their families can, and does, result in positive outcomes for those groups. In part, our argument is based on making a distinction between people-based disadvantage and place-based disadvantage. The paper examines the changing nature of place-based ‘advantage’ for immigrants in Australian gateway cities through a focus on two metropolitan locations, Auburn (Sydney) and Springvale (Melbourne), known as popular destination suburbs for recent immigrants. While these two cases validate the benefits of such gateway suburbs, they also demonstrate that the capacity of recent migrants to emulate concentrated settlement patterns is now significantly undermined by changes in the labour market and affordability problems in the housing market. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possible future of gateway suburbs and the implications of this shift for the wellbeing of particular groups of disadvantaged residents.

Keywords

cities disadvantage gateway suburbs housing migration

Introduction

Millions of people migrate from one country to the next every year. In 2013, there were 232 million migrants globally and between 1990 and 2013, the number of international migrants grew by 50% (UN International Migration Report, 2013: 1). This migration has had a major impact on the nature of cities and their housing markets, particularly in the ‘gateway’ cities that attract a large proportion of each country’s immigrant in-flow. Internationally, research has examined the influence of recently arrived immigrants on the spatial concentration of disadvantage on particular housing submarkets (Anacker, 2013; Painter and Yu, 2008; Teixeira, 2014). In the USA, UK and other Western countries that receive large numbers of immigrants annually, these debates have largely focused on concentrations of particular ethnic groups with characteristics that are perceived to be problematic, such as low labour market attachment and high welfare needs, often in inner-city neighbourhoods (e.g. Hamnett and Randolph, 1988; Jargowski, 1997; Ley and Smith, 2000; Murie and Musterd, 2004; Murray, 1984). More recent research, however, has demonstrated that concentrations of disadvantaged immigrants tend to be found in the suburbs rather than the inner city, and they tend not to be associated with concentrations of single ethnic groups (Burke and Hulse, 2015; Price and Benton-Short, 2007; Price et al., 2005; Walks, 2001).

This paper focuses on these issues in relation to housing submarkets in Australia’s two largest gateway cities of Sydney and Melbourne. It argues that concentrations of recent immigrants with characteristics associated with disadvantage have, in this context, led to beneficial outcomes for those immigrants and those who have followed them. This paper focuses on the housing experiences of recent immigrants to two locations – the suburbs of Auburn in Sydney and Springvale in Melbourne. Each has traditionally operated as a point of arrival for new immigrants, especially immigrants from non-English speaking countries arriving on family or humanitarian visas. Partly as a result of this, they have also been identified as areas containing a significant proportion of disadvantaged residents, as measured by the Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (henceforth SEIFA index), which ranks areas in Australia according to relative socio-economic advantage and disadvantage. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these changes for the future of ‘advantageous disadvantage’ in Australian gateway cities, including in support of immigrant settlement specifically.

The role of gateway cities and suburbs as immigrant destinations

While world cities have long been recognised as key hubs in the global flow of information, capital and people, gateway cities are those where immigration is of equal importance in the transformation of the urban social, political and cultural landscape (Benton-Short et al., 2005). A gateway city is defined as ‘a major metropolitan area where large numbers of immigrants have settled’ (Price and Benton-Short, 2007: 103); and gateway suburbs as urban spaces within those cities where new immigrants converge. In global city research, it is the so-called Alpha cities of the world that have commanded most scholarly attention, but recent decades have seen the emergence of previously unrecognised cities as top immigrant destinations by virtue of the sheer number and complexity of their transnational populations (Benton-Short et al., 2005). Among them are the immigrant destination cities in the key settler societies of Australia, Canada and the USA: Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne, Miami and Vancouver (Benton-Short et al., 2005). In Canada, for example, the three cities of Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto attract 74% of all Canadian immigrants who arrived in the last three years (according to 2006 figures) (Hou and Bourne, 2006), while in Australia, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth capture 80% of the country’s immigrants (Ley and Murphy, 2001). Importantly, this influx of recent immigrants has been accompanied by the out-migration of, mainly lower-educated, domestic populations from these cities (Hou and Bourne, 2006; Ley, 2007). Changes in city housing markets, labour market restructuring and practices of cultural avoidance may be behind these trends, although Ley (2007) suggests that, in Sydney at least, housing market pressures are a dominant factor. He contends that low-income populations have been pushed out of high priced housing market areas and empty nesters have sold up to capitalise on rising equity in their homes while immigrant populations have simultaneously moved in ‘because they … [are] willing, by enduring acute affordability problems and through high levels of crowding, to tolerate housing conditions that … [are] unacceptable to the native born’ (Ley, 2007: 250).

Gateway cities are thus notable for the ethnic and racial diversity of their immigrant populations, but also for the spatial distribution of those populations across city areas. For example, in writing about Washington, DC – one of the newest and most unlikely American immigrant cities –Price et al. (2005: 63) describe the city as a ‘prototype of a new postindustrial immigrant gateway that is not well-characterized by existing conceptualisations of immigrant settlement’. These earlier conceptualisations posited that new migrants were often poorer than their domestic-born counterparts and would typically converge in low-income central city areas with other members of their ethnic group to take advantage of low-cost housing and existing ethnic networks and support. Over time, as they accumulated more resources, it was thought that they would move to better – suburban – neighbourhoods with a non-immigrant majority as part of a process of assimilation into the host society (Hou and Bourne, 2006).

Gateway cities differ in two respects. First, the neighbourhoods where new immigrants concentrate are not mono-cultural, but racially and ethnically diverse, such that one group rarely dominates. While Musterd and Deurloo (2002) explain this diversity in European countries with reference to their stronger welfare states, which reduce income disparities between social groups, the same kinds of patterns are also emerging in more liberal societies, including the USA, Canada and Australia (Ley and Murphy, 2001; Musterd, 2005; Price et al., 2005; Walks, 2001). Second, new immigrants are no longer settling in inner-city areas which they subsequently use as a springboard for upward mobility to the suburbs, but instead are heading directly to those suburbs located in the older middle ring areas and city outskirts (Katz et al., 2010; Singer, 2012; Walks, 2001). A more finely grained analysis, moreover, reveals that these spatial arrangements can be complicated by ethnic and racial background as well as by class (Price et al., 2005; Teixeira, 2014).

Also notable is the way low-income immigrant settlement overlays onto the spatial topography of disadvantage in cities, such that there is a growing correlation between the suburbanisation of immigrant settlement and the suburbanisation of disadvantage (Andersson and Bråmå, 2004; Anderson and van Kempen, 2003; Randolph and Holloway, 2005; Randolph and Tice, 2014). In Europe, one of the key drivers of this convergence has been the availability of social housing to disadvantaged immigrant groups, predominantly on large-scale housing estates in peripheral neighbourhoods on the edge of cities (Musterd and Deurloo, 2002; Wacquant, 1993). In countries such as Australia, with more deregulated housing markets, it is poor-quality and relatively low-cost housing stock in the private rental market that attracts immigrants to suburban neighbourhoods. The effect in both cases has been growing concerns about the concentration of disadvantage in multicultural neighbourhoods and the marginalisation of residents through the poverty, social problems and lack of opportunity that characterise these places (Phillimore and Goodson, 2006; Smith and Ley, 2008).

By way of contrast, in this paper we demonstrate how the clustering of disadvantaged social groups in low-income immigrant gateway suburbs might actually prove to be advantageous to those groups because of the presence in those suburbs of low-cost housing, family and social group networks and state and community-based organisations that cater for low-income and immigrant populations. In teasing this out, we draw a conceptual distinction between the spatial clustering of people who have characteristics associated with disadvantage and the nature of the places in which they have settled. Drawing on a long tradition of spatial disadvantage literature (Baum et al., 2006; Bolton, 1992; Gregory and Hunter, 1995), Burke and Hulse (2015: 3) provide a useful definitional distinction between these ways of conceptualising disadvantage: concentrations of disadvantaged people, and place disadvantage. Where poverty concentration refers to a concentration of people who share low income, place disadvantage describes how the characteristics of places themselves, such as labour market access, geography, local housing markets and other such features can disadvantage households in a variety of ways. Throughout this paper we draw on this distinction to examine the relationship between people-based disadvantage and place-based disadvantage, arguing that the two do not always converge and that disadvantaged people can actually live in relatively advantageous areas.

Background to the Australian context: The gateway suburbs of Auburn and Springvale

Australia has a long history as a migrant destination country. In the year 2012–2013, net overseas migration to Australia – including permanent and temporary entry across a diverse range of visa types – was 244,400 persons and the greatest number of them settled in the most populous states of New South Wales (67,800) and Victoria (60,600) (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2013). Many new migrants settle in urban areas, especially the large gateway cities of Sydney and Melbourne, where 62% of foreign born migrants from non-English speaking countries and one-third of migrants from English speaking counties live (Edgar, 2014: 364, from 2011 census data). Migrants to Australia are a very diverse group. The largest group of arrivals in 2012–2013 were people arriving on temporary visas (48%) including student visas and temporary skilled workers visas. A further 17% were Australian citizens returning to live in Australia after a period overseas, and 13% were from neighbouring New Zealand. The balance entered on permanent visas (17%) including family and humanitarian visa holders (in addition to 5% on ‘other’ visa types) (ABS, 2013). Settlement data on migrants to Australia show that the largest group in the period 2010–2015 were skilled migrants (61%), followed by family migrants (33%) and then humanitarian migrants (6%) (Australian Government Department of Social Services, 2015).

Migration policy shifts that emphasise skilled migration over family reunion or humanitarian entry to Australia have changed the nature of migrant settlement and migrant communities in recent years, although the overall population of temporary and permanent migrants remains diverse. Temporary migration is an important route to permanent residency; the proportion of successful applications for permanent residency that were made from within Australia increased from 40% to 59% in the decade to 2013–2014 (Betts, 2015: 11). The multi-stage ‘landing’ can take numerous years to resolve and inhibits stable housing upon arrival. Overall rates of temporary long-term immigration to Australia are now very high by national historical standards, with 1.6 million temporary visa holders residing in Australia in 2014 (Betts, 2015: 12), and a majority of these beginning their settlement journeys in Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, in which our case studies are located.

Migrants do not disperse evenly across Australian cities once they arrive, and immigrants from different countries often move to different locations within the city. Previous studies have noted that ‘many migrants have settled near existing communities with ethnic services, social support networks and lower-cost housing’ (Edgar, 2014: 364). Indeed, throughout 20th century Australia, a defining feature of successful immigrant settlement – in terms of enabling wellbeing and opportunity for immigrants as well as for an enriching their contribution to Australian society – has been the geographic clustering and cohesion of immigrant communities upon arrival. This phenomenon is even more pronounced among immigrants whose first language is other than English (Hugo, 2011). Indeed, despite the way concentrations of disadvantage are perceived as problematic in policy and research terms, concentrating some groups of people who we might call ‘disadvantaged’ can result in high functionality through facilitating the establishment of services, interpersonal support and high social capital.

In the past, key gateway suburbs such as Auburn and Springvale have offered opportunities for successful settlement in Australia to new immigrants. This was particularly true in the years immediately following the Second World War to the late 1970s, in which there was considerable government support for immigrant settlement to assist the flourishing manufacturing industries (Burke and Hulse, 2015). It is part of what Hunter (2003) has described as the ‘institutional history’ associated with contemporary Australian urban disadvantage. For immigrants, these institutional settings included the provision of supported settlement in various forms of hostels, of highly variable degrees of adequacy, which provided a point of settlement in the years following arrival, supported by one of the core principles embedded in Australian policy guidelines that shaped multiculturalism: ‘[the] needs of migrants should, in general, be met by programs and services available to the whole community but special services and programs are necessary at present’ (Galbally, 1978). Hence, the interplay of affordable housing and supported immigrant settlement within suburban manufacturing middle-rings in Australia’s cities resulted in a post-manufacturing decline legacy in which clustered immigrant communities are frequently located in places with relatively high degrees of amenity and social and economic infrastructure.

However, there are now signs that these suburbs are struggling to provide the same type of arrival experience. In part, the changing circumstances and experiences of new immigrants in Australia can be explained by changes in the economy, particularly the decline of manufacturing and rise of service sector jobs, which require a different skill set including fluency in spoken English (Baum et al., 2005). This has made gaining employment upon arrival more difficult for many new immigrants who do not speak English well. Policy changes, including reduced access to state-sponsored English training (Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIMAC), 2008), have also increased settlement barriers for some migrants. At the same time, eligibility requirements for government support payments have tightened (Klapdor, 2014). Even among those eligible, the difficulty of covering basic living costs with these payments, especially in the major cities has made the settlement experience more difficult for many new arrivals (Burke et al., 2011; Martin, 2012; Murphy et al., 2011).

Another major change occurring in Australian cities that has had a significant impact on the settlement of new immigrants is the changing nature of the housing market. In the major Australia cities, increasing house prices and rents since the 1950s have resulted in problems of housing affordability as house prices and rents have increased at a faster pace than wages (Flood and Baker, 2010; Yates, 2000). At the same time, dedicated immigrant settlement support has been largely withdrawn. Housing assistance is now highly targeted and typically provided via demand-side subsidies to individual households to (partially) offset high costs of private rental now that home purchase has become increasingly unaffordable for low to moderate income earners (Stone et al., 2016).

Our findings suggest that the shift in Australia from a social policy environment in which immigrant settlement was supported by direct government-funded housing assistance (e.g. immigrant hostels) and a stable and open labour market (e.g. manufacturing employment opportunities) to a private market-based housing system in which at least 90% of households live in ‘market’ housing which is either owner-occupied or privately rented (ABS, 2011), coupled with a deregulated labour market, has undermined the capacity of newly arrived immigrants to benefit from living near places with high amenity (i.e. as a result of housing price-related displacement and an insecure private rental sector) or to do so well (i.e. living in crowded on unsatisfactory conditions or living in unaffordable housing). The way these dual processes converge to reduce the advantageous disadvantage – i.e. advantageous places for disadvantaged people – derived from gateway suburbs such as Auburn and Springvale is outlined in the remainder of this paper.

Researching disadvantaged suburbs

This paper draws on work undertaken as part of a large multi-year project on the concentration of socio-economic disadvantage in Australian cities funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The aim of the project was to explore the changing dynamics of disadvantage across the urban landscape; the role that housing markets and systems played in these processes; and the kinds of responses enacted by policymakers and communities. In selecting suitable sites of study, a typology of disadvantage in Australian cities was developed based on a detailed analysis of socio-economic statistics and housing market performance in the three most populous cities in Australia: Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane (Hulse et al., 2014). A long list of 177 disadvantaged suburbs across the three cities was developed drawing on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage (IRSD), which is based on 16 variables, including incomes, unemployment, disability and language skills. A multivariate statistical analysis was then undertaken at the suburb level to identify distinct ‘clusters’ of variables based on a selection of 14 demographic and socio-economic variables from 2011 Census data under three broad groupings: (1) social and residential mobility; (2) lifecycle stage and family type; and (3) change over time in socio-economic status. More detail on the methods used to develop this typology, including the resulting suburb types, can be found in Hulse et al. (2014). The study identified four distinct types of disadvantaged suburb across the three cities, as summarised in Table 1.

Table 1.

Typology of disadvantaged suburbs: distinctive socio-economic features.

Category	Distinguishing features	Disadvantaged suburbs in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane
Category	Distinguishing features	% of suburbs	% of population
Type 1	High on young people and single-parent households	8	3
Type 2	High on overseas movers, high on two-parent families	41	55
Type 3	High on residential mobility (but low on overseas movers), high on older people and lone-person households	15	8
Type 4	High on overseas movers, on reduced unemployment and on reduced incidence of persons in low-status employment	35	33
All		100	100

Source: Hulse et al. (2014: 4).

For each of the four distinct types of suburb, specific characteristics were identified that were notably above or below the combined values of all disadvantaged suburbs. The most significant are listed in Table 1. For example, across all Type 2 suburbs in the three cities, 27.9% of all households were couple families with children, compared with 23.5% of households across all disadvantaged suburbs (Hulse et al., 2014: 29). Type 2 suburbs also revealed a noticeably higher proportion of households who have moved from an overseas address in the previous 5 years (7.1% compared with 6.2% for all disadvantaged suburbs). Other noticeable differences of Type 2 suburbs is a higher proportion of households who have moved address in the past 5 years (25.6%) when compared with all disadvantaged suburbs (19.7%); a lower proportion of lone-person households (18.1% compared with 22.2%); and a higher percentage change in low-income households (8.2% compared with 5.7%) indicating a more rapid increase in households in the bottom 40% of the Australia-wide household income distribution.

Once disadvantaged suburbs were identified in the three cities, consideration was given to the housing markets in these areas. As outlined in Hulse et al. (2014), the cross-tenure nature of disadvantage was particularly noteworthy. Disadvantaged suburbs had a greater percentage of rental dwellings than their greater metropolitan areas as a whole in 2011, and saw more rapid growth in private rental housing during the period 2001–2011 than the national average. Despite this, owner occupation was the majority tenure in disadvantaged suburbs across the three cities, although the proportion of people living in owner-occupied dwellings was lower than for the metropolitan populations as a whole. The proportion of people in disadvantaged suburbs living in social housing, while greater than that of the total population, was still lower than those living in other tenure types, reflecting what scholars have referred to as the residualisation of the Australian social housing system (Morris, 2015).

Following the development of the typology, fieldwork was undertaken to collect more detailed information about suburbs classified as disadvantaged. This included a survey of four selected disadvantaged suburbs in Sydney (not discussed in this paper), and case study fieldwork conducted in a total of six suburbs: two in each of the three cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane chosen to reflect the four suburb types (Cheshire et al., 2014). This paper focuses on the findings of two of these case study areas: the suburb of Auburn in Sydney and the suburb of Springvale in Melbourne. Both suburbs were identified as ‘Type 2’ suburbs (specifically, high on overseas movers, reflecting their role as urban gateways for immigrants) and were the only Type 2 suburbs in which detailed case study research was carried out. As demonstrated in Table 1, Type 2 suburbs are the most numerous of all of the disadvantaged suburb types, and also accommodate the largest proportion of the population living in disadvantaged suburbs. The metropolitan-wide analysis of disadvantaged suburbs across the three cities also noted that Type 2 suburbs have a distinctive housing market ‘characterised by high and growing levels of private rental and higher density housing, suggesting rapid change in which investor landlord activity has been a key housing market driver’ (Hulse et al., 2014: 4).

The case study research in each area consisted of a desk-top review of relevant data, documents and media reports; in-depth interviews with local stakeholders and community representatives; interviews with state-level policy makers; and focus groups with residents. In each case study location, the researchers first interviewed a local council (municipal government) officer who had in-depth knowledge of the local area and key stakeholders as a way of eliciting advice on who should be interviewed and of gaining assistance with the recruitment of residents for the focus groups. In Springvale, 11 interviews were undertaken with key community representatives and service providers in addition to a focus group with 13 local residents, while in Auburn, seven interviews were undertaken in addition to a focus group with 10 residents. The interviews provided a local perspective on the nature of area-based disadvantage and its causes, manifestations and effects, as well as insight into the main interventions that had been adopted in each area to address disadvantage.

Immigrants in Auburn and Springvale

Auburn and Springvale are both suburbs with a rich history as gateway suburbs for recent immigrants, including humanitarian refugees. In the words of one interviewee in Auburn:

… a lot of people come straight from the airport to Auburn. (NGO Community worker/support provider)²

In Auburn, only 32% of the population was born in Australia in 2011 compared with 60% across the greater Sydney metropolitan area. In Springvale the figure is 30% compared with the greater Melbourne metropolitan area of 63% (ABS, 2011). In both suburbs, a language other than English (Arabic in Auburn and Vietnamese in Springvale) was the most commonly spoken language at home (ABS, 2011). Both suburbs also had a high proportion of recent immigrants relative to their respective metropolitan averages (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Place of usual residence five years ago.

	Auburn suburb	Greater metropolitan Sydney	Springvale suburb	Greater metropolitan Melbourne
Place of usual residence 5 years ago – overseas	17%	7%	17%	8%

Source: ABS, 2011 Community Profiles.

In both suburbs, immigrants come from a wide range of countries to settle. The most common countries of birth differ between the two suburbs. In Springvale, a very high proportion (21%) of the overseas-born population was born in a single country – Vietnam, while immigrants living in Auburn come from a broader range of locations (see Table 3).

Table 3.

Top five countries of birth.

Auburn suburb		Greater metropolitan Sydney		Springvale suburb		Greater metropolitan Melbourne
Australia	32%	Australia	60%	Australia	30%	Australia	63%
China^a	13%	England	4%	Vietnam	21%	England	3%
Turkey	6%	China^a	3%	India	11%	India	3%
India	5%	India	2%	Cambodia	5%	China^a	2%
Lebanon	4%	New Zealand	2%	China^a	5%	Italy	2%

Notes: ^aExcludes Taiwan and the Special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.

Source: ABS, 2011 Community Profiles.

Both Auburn and Springvale also have a high proportion of humanitarian and family migrants when compared with the Australian average. Table 4 provides data on the number of migrants to the broader Local Government Areas (LGAs) within which the suburb of Auburn (Auburn LGA) and the suburb of Springvale (Greater Dandenong LGA) sit compared with Australian averages. It is notable that while only 6% of all immigrants to Australia during the period 2010–2015 were humanitarian migrants, the comparable figures for the Auburn and Greater Dandenong LGAs were 14% and 20%, respectively. The higher family migration intakes in these local government areas is likely due to the migration of family members of earlier humanitarian immigrants.

Table 4.

Number and percentage of immigrants by migration stream, selected LGAs and Australia total for the settlement date range 1 April 2010–31 March 2015.

Area	Migration stream				Grand total
Area	Family	Humanitarian	Other/unknown	Skilled	Grand total
Auburn LGA	5556 (42%)	1922 (14%)	7 (0%)	5809 (44%)	13,294
Greater Dandenong LGA	7719 (39%)	3899 (20%)	8 (0%)	8063 (41%)	19,689
Australia	380,233 (33%)	73,833 (6%)	167 (0%)	707,081 (61%)	1,161,314

Source: Australian Government Department of Social Services, 2015 Settlement Reports.

In both Auburn and Springvale, the case study research revealed concern for the wellbeing of immigrants, particularly those with low English literacy. A particular challenge was the difficulty for immigrants to access work, even when they are educated and hold qualifications. This is exacerbated by the decline of the manufacturing industry and rise of service sector jobs in Australia, which require higher English proficiency, as well as a lack of recognition of the overseas qualifications of highly skilled immigrants in Australia. Interviewees noted that in some cases these circumstances resulted in immigrants working in the informal economy in cash-in-hand jobs with unregulated wages and conditions. Interviewees also reported that immigrants often find it difficult to navigate Australian systems, deal with cultural barriers and find out about the opportunities and support available. These challenges can be compounded for refugees who may have spent years in refugee camps, or have come from environments that have not made them work-ready:

Many new arrivals experience multiple disadvantage including poverty, housing stress, previous experiences of trauma, interrupted education experiences, health problems, disability and unemployment which require additional resources to target their complexities of need. (Auburn City Council, 2013: 21)

Disadvantaged people

Auburn and Springvale were both identified in the larger study as suburbs with a high proportion of disadvantaged people based on selected data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Table 5 provides a summary of selected demographic characteristics for the two suburbs. Table 6 summarises this data to show the percentage difference between each suburb and its respective metropolitan figures.

Table 5.

Selected demographic characteristics, the suburbs of Auburn and Springvale and their respective greater metropolitan areas, 2011.

Demographic characteristic	Auburn suburb	Greater metropolitan Sydney	Springvale suburb	Greater metropolitan Melbourne
Unemployed^a	11%	6%	11%	6%
In low-skilled/low-status jobs^b	46%	28%	57%	30%
Households with weekly income less than Aus$600	22%	17%	26%	18%
Living in private rental^c	33%	25%	31%	23%
Low-income households^d paying more than 30% income in rent	33%	21%	20%	20%

Notes: ^aof the total labour force; ^bof employed persons aged 15 and over; ^cpercentage of occupied private dwellings; ^dhouseholds with weekly income < Aus$600.

Source: ABS, 2011 Community Profiles.

Table 6.

Selected demographic characteristics, percentage difference from respective greater metropolitan area, 2011.

Demographic characteristic	Auburn	Springvale
Unemployed^a	89%	91%
In low-skilled/low-status jobs^b	65%	88%
Households with weekly income less than Aus$600	29%	45%
Living in private rental^c	33%	36%
Low-income households^d paying more than 30% income in rent	55%	−1%

Notes: ^aof the total labour force; ^bof employed persons aged 15 and over; ^cpercentage of occupied private dwellings; ^dhouseholds with weekly income < Aus$600.

Source: ABS, 2011 Community Profiles.

As demonstrated in Table 5, with the exception of the proportion of people living in housing stress in Springvale (discussed further below), both suburbs have a higher proportion of people who are disadvantaged on a range of measures when compared with their metropolitan averages. However, while it is clear that both suburbs are areas in which disadvantaged people live, neither suburb could be identified as a disadvantaged place.

Not disadvantaged places

A key finding that emerges in our analysis is that there is a fundamental difference between disadvantaged people and place disadvantage. This distinction in many ways reflects the peculiarly Australian form of urban disadvantage referred to above, in which people with low incomes or other forms of disadvantage may, for a range of reasons, including historically affordable home ownership, live in locations of relatively high amenity (see also Burke and Hulse, 2015; Pawson et al., 2015). Recognising this distinction, commentators have criticised the focus on disadvantaged places rather than people in recent urban policy and practice (see, for example, Andersson and Musterd, 2005; Bradford, 2013; Darcy, 2010).

Both Auburn and Springvale have very good public transport facilities, and a vast array of shops and services catering to the local community. They have also historically been major hubs providing resources and support to new and established immigrant communities. Indeed, in each location, the very presence of first-wave immigrant groups in years of intensive manufacturing, and migration to support it, promoted the growth of immigrant-specific support services that were subsidised by government as well as those that grew more organically via community relationships and support needs.

The role these suburbs have played as immigrant gateway suburbs has brought both challenges and opportunities for the people living there. In Auburn, focus group participants viewed the area as ‘dynamic’ and positively influenced by its multicultural and diverse population: having ‘a real energy to it’. Residents spoke positively of the cultural diversity of the area. They cited examples of strong ties between neighbours, with reciprocal borrowing and gifting. They noted that young people in the Auburn area, in particular, had a tendency to socialise with people from many different countries and that this provided them with a strong foundation for adapting to change and accepting others. In the words of one NGO community worker/service provider, ‘no one think’s it’s odd or weird or forbidden to hang out with people from different cultural backgrounds’. Conversely, though, some interviewees noted that the Auburn community was made up of many different subcommunities and reflected that in some cases there was fragmentation both between and within specific subcommunities. Interviewees and focus group participants also noted that many residents faced social barriers because of poor English skills. Relatively high residential mobility in some parts of the area was also an important factor limiting the scope to develop neighbourly relationships, both in properties set aside for recently arrived refugees, and in private apartment buildings with rapid resident turnover. Despite this, the dominant discourse was one of a positive multicultural community supported by public events and a multitude of both cultural-specific and cross-cultural services.

Similarly, research participants in Springvale spoke about their pride in the multiculturalism of the area, and a discourse arose of Springvale as a place of welcome and opportunity with a deep and diverse civil society, including welfare and advocacy organisations and many faith groups. Much of the pride evident in the community was founded on years of consolidated grass-roots responses to community needs, most notably those of newly arrived immigrants in the area. Also stemming from this was a reportedly high level of community cohesion and acceptance of diversity among residents.

Housing in Auburn and Springvale

In addition to being high amenity locations, especially for immigrants, both Auburn and Springvale have historically provided relatively affordable housing options compared with their respective metropolitan averages. In the past, this included a range of both private and public housing options, including migrant hostels and boarding houses (see also Edgar, 2014). Today, the vast majority of housing in both suburbs is private, being inhabited by owner occupiers or private rental tenants. As demonstrated in Table 7, both Auburn and Springvale have a higher proportion of people living in private rental housing than their respective metropolitan averages, and a smaller proportion of people living in social rental. Notably over half of all dwellings in both suburbs are owner occupied.

Table 7.

Tenure break-down in case study areas and their respective metropolitan areas (ABS, 2011).

Tenure^a	Auburn suburb	Greater metropolitan Sydney	Springvale suburb	Greater metropolitan Melbourne
Fully owned	22.8%	28.9%	32.1%	31.0%
Owned with mortgage	28.1%	33.7%	23.2%	35.6%
Private rental	32.8%	24.6%	30.9%	22.8%
Social rental	4.6%	4.9%	1.5%	2.9%
Other tenure type	2.9%	2.0%	5.0%	1.9%

Note: ^a% of occupied private dwellings.

Source: ABS, 2011 Community Profiles.

Springvale

In Springvale, home ownership among immigrants was facilitated in the past by the existence of local employment in manufacturing industries as well as strong community support in the area, particularly among the large Vietnamese community. As a result, those people who were able to enter the property market earlier have been able to remain in the area, even if they subsequently lost their jobs in manufacturing or became too old to continue working and are now living on low incomes. The relatively high proportion of the population in Springvale who own their homes outright (slightly higher than the metropolitan average) goes some way to explaining why the proportion of low-income households paying more than 30% of their income in rent is no greater than that of the greater metropolitan area (see Table 6). However, concern was raised by interviewees that those earlier immigrants who had not purchased property in the area in the past had become residualised in place as they were no longer able to afford to purchase property and private rental costs had increased significantly. In addition, many of the more recent immigrants have also been unable to purchase property in the area.

All the Springvale stakeholders interviewed reported rising housing costs as the key issue facing the suburb. Their concerns included the need for adult children of current residents, some of whom migrated years earlier, to establish homes further away in the outer suburbs of the city or beyond because they could not afford to buy or rent locally, and the impact of rising rents on the elderly and other vulnerable groups. The lack of social housing and crisis accommodation was keenly felt:

Still got a lot of homelessness. Need even short term until they can find suitable accommodation in other places. Transitional housing: need 500–1000 of them, still not enough. (Springvale, NGO community worker/support provider)

The older housing stock provides for cheaper rental options although the standard of the housing is often very poor:

Rental stock is in bad dis-repair. Refugees/recent arrivals go into these houses. Real estate agents are slow to act on people living in sub-standard conditions and reluctant to do anything about it. (Springvale, community NGO community worker/support provider)

In many cases, the result of this situation has been that people on low incomes wishing to remain in the area because of the community services and support available, but who are forced to rely on the private rental market, have resorted to living in overcrowded conditions in poorly maintained private rental housing. Some interviewees noted that this was a particularly common practice among elderly male Vietnamese residents. These claims about the marginal housing sector in Springvale appears to have some depth. Real estate agent-run registered rooming houses are common, as are smaller (unregistered) rooming houses. A particular type of boarding arrangement, in which several elderly Indochinese men share a single room within a house occupied by an unrelated family, was cited by one agency:

Both sides very happy. Landlord getting cash, residents pay less cash. (Springvale, community NGO community worker/support provider)

Welfare services report that tenants often have very little in the way of household effects, such that there is considerable demand for basic household items such as bedding. Some mentioned the negative impact of poverty and housing insecurity on clients’ mental and physical health. It was assumed by agencies that many poor renters were moving to lower cost areas.

Auburn

In Auburn, housing stress is of even greater concern than in Springvale, with more than half of all low-income households spending more than 30% of their income on rent (see Table 6). In the words of one interviewee ‘everyone wants [to live in] Auburn and it’s not possible’ (NGO community worker/service provider).

Auburn Council’s Community Strategic Plan for 2011–2021 identifies ‘housing affordability, suitability, and quality of development’ as a key challenge for the area and notes that ‘housing prices and rents are expected to keep rising due to our strategic location on the railway line between the Sydney and Parramatta CBDs’ (Auburn City Council, 2011: 34). The Council also recognises that:

… [t]he composition of our population is constantly changing. Anticipating the types and mix of housing we will need in the future is part of this challenge. (Auburn City Council, 2011: 34)

The high demand of recent immigrants to settle in Auburn has also put upward pressure on private rents. According to one interviewee (Industry/commerce), average rents in the Auburn area have increased by around 30% in the past five years. This is a significant increase considering that many recently arrived immigrants are reliant upon social security payments. While Auburn’s housing is more affordable than in many other parts of Sydney, it remains unaffordable for many of the people living in the area and those who would like to live there. Housing affordability and access is a particular concern for single humanitarian entrants who do not have an Australian rental history or a good income. The lack of English proficiency of many humanitarian immigrants also means that they are unable to find work and are reliant on social security payments (NGO community worker/service provider).

The most affordable housing option for single people is to move into shared accommodation. However, it can be difficult to get a shared property through a real estate agent since agents will often refuse applications for two single men to share a property, for example. When people in this situation do manage to access private rental accommodation, often it is overcrowded, with many people sharing the dwelling (NGO community worker/service provider). Interviewees noted that it is not uncommon for 6–8 single men to be sharing a two-bedroom unit, while some interviewees spoke of two-bedroom units with as many as 10–12 people sharing (local government officer, industry/commerce). While overcrowding is usually under-reported in official statistics, it is notable that 11% of all households in the suburb of Auburn reported having six or more people living in them at the 2011 Census, compared with an average across Greater Sydney of 4% (ABS, 2011). One interviewee also noted that more university students have been moving into the area in recent years, putting further pressure on the private rental market and exacerbating the problem of overcrowding (NFP housing provider).

There are some boarding houses in Auburn, but many people do not want to live in them. In particular, many single people who have come through the asylum seeker pathway and have spent time in detention do not like the idea of sharing (NGO community worker/support provider). There were also accounts of people leasing out garages as dwellings for Aus$150–180 per week (industry/commerce). For those not wishing to live in a share-household, there are few options aside from these unsuitable sorts of arrangements. One focus group participant also noted that some properties in the area have been converted into dual occupancy as a result of the demand for housing in the area.

Single humanitarian entrants are not the only groups struggling to find affordable and appropriate accommodation in the area, however. Large families also face difficulties and it is not uncommon to have families with two adults and five children sharing a two-bedroom property (NGO community worker/service provider). Having unapproved residents living in properties can cause significant stress for individuals and families as a result of threats to tenure security, overcrowding and affordability concerns (NGO community worker/service provider).

Discussion and conclusion

In the cities of the world where large numbers of immigrants settle, gateway suburbs such as those of Auburn and Springvale perform key functions as arrival points for low-income immigrant groups where low-cost housing, ethnic support networks and – previously – employment in the low-skilled manufacturing sector have historically provided the necessary resources that new immigrants need for successful settlement. While recent literature on gateway cities in the USA and Canada draws attention to the emergence of new, and ostensibly unlikely global gateway cities (Price et al., 2005), and the changing dynamics of immigrant settlement that challenge earlier conceptualisations of immigrants congregating in ethnically homogenous inner city areas until social mobility induces them to assimilate in ‘better’ suburban neighbourhoods (Hou and Bourne, 2006), this paper has considered the emerging contradictions arising in well-established gateway suburbs as a result of broader changes in housing and labour dynamics and migration policies, and internal pressures arising from increased housing demand in gateway areas.

The first of these contradictions relates to the spatial concentration of low-income immigrants in areas that, by all indicators, are often understood as being disadvantaged, and the concerns of urban scholars and policymakers about the risks of social and economic exclusion that beset immigrants as they settle in these areas. As our analysis of disadvantaged suburbs demonstrates, gateway suburbs such as Auburn and Springvale which have high proportions of overseas movers are the most numerous of all disadvantaged suburbs in Australia and accommodate the largest proportion of the population who live in those disadvantaged suburbs. Yet, our distinction between the concentration of poverty on the one hand and locational disadvantage on the other provides greater clarity to the way disadvantage is understood and experienced in many such gateway suburbs.

While both Springvale and Auburn house a high proportion of disadvantaged residents – including higher proportions of humanitarian and family migrants compared with the Australian national average – they are not disadvantaged areas. Both are desirable locations in which to live and appear to be increasing in desirability, not only among those people who live there now – including immigrant and non-immigrant populations – but also among people looking to move to these areas. Key advantages are the high amenity in each location; reasonable commuting distances to the CBD when compared with other areas in Sydney and Melbourne; historically affordable housing, including home ownership; availability of public transport; and the desirability of population diversity and its associated diversity of shops, food outlets and services. The case study areas explored in this paper demonstrate that places where disadvantaged people live are not necessarily disadvantaged places. Indeed, while it might be seen as undesirable by policy-makers to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of places with concentrations of disadvantaged people, these places can play a very important function when such concentrations of disadvantaged people are associated with high levels of service and community support which has grown up through grass-roots and community initiatives, as well as through government services and support.

This points to the second contradiction now facing gateway suburbs, which Auburn and Springvale illustrate clearly: while the desirable characteristics of gateway suburbs can have a very positive impact on the areas’ residents, over time they can also contribute to a reduction in housing affordability as housing demand increases. Previous patterns of immigrant settlement that defined Australian gateway suburbs in the post-Second World War years to the late 1970s were underpinned by a social policy environment that supported immigration via the provision of housing support, language training and employment opportunities. More recently, however, as we have shown, broader changes in urban housing markets, economic and labour market restructuring and migration policies are beginning to undermine the benefits for immigrants of setting in these areas. Where the intensification of the housing market across urban areas, the demise of employment opportunities in low-skilled industries, and the erosion of government support for newly arrived immigrants places those immigrants at risk of greater disadvantage than previously, the tightening of the local housing market through a bottom-up push on prices compounds that disadvantage through emerging locational pressures. In both Auburn and Springvale, housing costs are increasing rapidly and relative housing affordability for the people who live in the area is decreasing. While private-market housing has successfully housed new immigrants in the past, this is no longer the case as local and national pressures on house prices create a growing problem of housing affordability. The result is that these places, which have all of the amenities essential to support the needs of recent as well as more established immigrants, are becoming unaffordable. With the exception of those fortunate enough to buy housing in the area in the past, many immigrants no longer can afford to live in these areas except in overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactory living conditions. The choice facing new ‘disadvantaged’ immigrants who would like to live in these suburbs, then, is one between living in overcrowded and/or substandard conditions or moving to a more affordable area with fewer facilities and support services.

If similar processes are occurring in other gateway suburbs in Australia – and the prevalence of Type 2 gateway suburbs among Australia’s most disadvantaged areas suggests that they may – this has important implications for the ability of Australia to continue its role as an immigrant destination country that enables wellbeing and opportunity for new arrivals, especially humanitarian and family immigrants, and supports their enriching contribution to Australian society. In the context of recent shifts in immigration policies away from humanitarian and family immigrants towards skilled and student immigrants (Hugo, 2011), perhaps this is not a priority of the current government – but it should be. The big question now is whether gateway suburbs in Australian cities can continue to carry out their important functions, and whether new gateway suburbs will form in the future given the massive changes that have occurred in both the labour and housing markets.

The likelihood of gateway suburbs being maintained or created in the future will also be influenced by the nature of future government policies aimed at addressing spatial concentrations of disadvantage, given the way disadvantage concentrates in these areas. While the bulk of the academic literature and policy approaches to the question of addressing disadvantage talk about the importance of not concentrating disadvantaged people together (Arthurson, 2012), our research makes the case for encouraging, supporting and maintaining concentrations of disadvantaged people in local neighbourhoods under circumstances where this facilitates a concentration of support services provided not only by governments, but also by community organisations, businesses and other private organisations. Current academic thinking on addressing disadvantage is becoming critical of spatially targeted approaches to supporting disadvantaged populations because individuals and households who do not reside in those targeted areas are likely to miss out on support, and because they fail to tackle the fundamental causes of poverty that persist among disadvantaged groups regardless of where they live (Andersson and Musterd, 2005; Maclennan, 2013; Manley et al., 2013; North and Syrett, 2008). But a strong case can still be made for area-based approaches, in concert with broader welfare schemes, when they seek to target the specific disadvantaging features of a given place and/or when the target population are concentrated in designated areas (Cheshire, 2012; Lupton, 2003), as occurs in gateway suburbs.

If the aim is to support immigrant settlement and to facilitate that settlement in places that are known to be desirable to immigrants for the reasons outlined above, policies explicitly targeted at gateway areas to help immigrant groups access affordable and safe housing in tight housing markets would go some way to easing the pressure. Drawing on the work of Beer and Foley (2003), such measures might include: the provision of information and support to immigrants in charting their way through housing markets; bonds or bond guarantees to assist immigrants in accessing private rental housing; encouraging established immigrant communities to invest in housing cooperatives or private rental stock that could be let to recent arrivals; programmes designed to reduce discrimination against immigrants in the housing market; and enforcing regulations that require all housing to be safe and secure. Without such interventions, the risk of disadvantaged immigrant populations ending up in highly disadvantaged places, as is already occurring (see Ward, 2015, for a UK example and Smith and Ley, 2008, for Canada) will increase.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the other researchers who contributed to this project and in particular the project leader, Professor Hal Pawson. We are also incredibly grateful to those people who participated in our research and took the time to speak with us about their jobs and their lives. Finally, we are very grateful for the constructive comments provided on an earlier version of this paper by three anonymous referees.

Funding

The research presented in this paper was conducted as part of a larger research project funded by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (Reference: 70704).

Notes

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