By Josh Gordon and Craig Butt
Aged care workers, teachers, nurses, paramedics and police are being forced to Melbourne’s fringes by high housing costs, prompting warnings about shortages of essential workers as the city continues to densify.
In a sign Melbourne is becoming increasingly stratified by occupation, a detailed analysis by The Age reveals essential service workers are increasingly living in outer-suburban areas.
Sunbury, for example, has the highest number of police and paramedics, and the second-highest number of primary school teachers and firefighters.
Frankston ranks in the top 10 for paramedics, firefighters, primary school teachers and police.
Craigieburn has the most aged care workers of any suburb. It is home to 722 aged care workers, equivalent to one out of every 38 workers who live there. That was followed by Pakenham, which has 696 people employed in aged care, or one out of every 36 workers.
Demographer Matthew Deacon, from Demographic Solutions, said housing affordability and a lack of appropriate housing for families had forced growing numbers of essential service workers to move further afield.
“The days of places like Fitzroy, and Collingwood, and Footscray being bastions of working-class people are long gone,” Deacon said.
The analysis, based on 2021 census data, shows Sunbury had a total of 191 police officers, with one out of every 103 of the suburb’s workers in the force. That was followed by Doreen, to the north, with 138 officers, and Langwarrin, in the south-east, with 130 officers.
In contrast, there are no police who live in Carlton North, Ivanhoe East or Princes Hill, three or fewer in East Melbourne and Middle Park, and four in Albert Park and Cremorne.
The map below shows how many police live in each suburb; if you click the tab, you can see an alternative view of the data showing how police officers rank when it comes to the most common jobs in each area. Overall, being a police officer is the 44th most common job in Victoria, so areas shaded yellow, orange or red have a lower percentage of police among their residents relative to the entire state.
It was a similar story for teachers. The top 10 suburbs for primary school teachers were an average of 40 kilometres from the city. Berwick had the most primary school teachers of any Melbourne suburb (448), followed by Sunbury (415). While primary school teachers are Victoria’s fifth most common job, they were the third most common occupation in these two suburbs.
But in a cluster of inner-city suburbs, there were fewer teachers and they ranked lower down the list in the most common jobs. In Melbourne’s CBD, primary school teacher is the 70th most common job. It is 90th in Parkville, 34th in Carlton and 32nd in Toorak.
Aged or disability care workers most commonly live in Craigieburn, Pakenham, Tarneit, Clyde North and Frankston, and the top 10 suburbs for aged carers were an average of 43 kilometres from the city.
And while aged or disability carer ranks as the third most common job in Victoria, it ranked lower than 10th in all suburbs within a five-kilometre radius of the CBD. In Middle Park, there are seven aged or disability carers, and the occupation ranks as the 76th most common in the area, while neighbouring Albert Park and St Kilda West count fewer than three aged care workers among their residents.
Research by Sydney University academics Catherine Gilbert, Zahra Nasreen and Nicole Gurran shows there are now no local government areas in Melbourne with a median house price that is affordable to an early career essential worker.
Even median prices for townhouses and apartments (strata-titled properties) are largely unaffordable.
The study of 21 essential service worker occupations, covering more than 350,000 people in Melbourne and Geelong, found more than 600 police who work in inner Melbourne commute from Geelong and Mornington Peninsula.
It shows Melbourne’s inner east lost an extraordinary 11 per cent of its essential service worker residents between 2016 and 2021, while inner Melbourne lost 9 per cent.
Lead author Catherine Gilbert said essential workers needed to be physically present for their work, often for shifts outside normal hours.
She said long commutes to areas of high service demand closer to the city place an additional layer of stress on essential workers.
“Housing affordability has been having a compounding effect on workplace stress and the effects of long-distance commuting,” Gilbert said. “It will come down to having more designated affordable housing near the city … that key workers can actually access.”
Modelling by Infrastructure Victoria also shows buying a house anywhere near the city, or even in Melbourne’s middle suburbs, is now out of the question for a household earning $88,021 a year – a typical wage for many essential service workers.
Infrastructure Victoria chief executive Jonathan Spear says a lack of available housing for people on low and moderate incomes had pushed people further away from jobs, schools and public transport, locking them in with more travel time in the car.
The Age’s analysis suggests essential service workers are increasingly being forced to travel large distances to work. The analysis shows the top 10 suburbs for police – home to a total of 1267 officers – were located an average of 49 kilometres from the city.
The top 10 suburbs for paramedics were an average of 39 kilometres from the CBD, while the top 10 suburbs for primary school teachers were an average of 40 kilometres from the city.
In Melbourne as a whole, 15.2 per cent of workers travel more than 30 kilometres to get to work. But in Sunbury, the figure is 44.9 per cent.
In Clyde North, about 55 kilometres south-east of the CBD, more than half of all police and aged care nurses, and 46 per cent of critical care nurses, travel more than 30 kilometres to get to work.
Recent City of Melbourne research also concluded that almost half of the workers essential to Melbourne’s city economy – such as cleaners, baristas, delivery drivers and childcare and aged care workers – live more than 20 kilometres from the city centre due to high housing costs and relatively low wages.
The state government has announced plans to add an average of 80,000 new homes a year over the next decade to help tackle housing affordability. Victoria has never managed to build 80,000 homes in a single year, although it came close before the pandemic.
Get fascinating insights and explanations on the world’s most perplexing topics. Sign up for our weekly Explainer newsletter.