Sydenham Price Surge

There's A Reason Those Houses Got Demolished

The weird thing to read today is that houses in Sydenham are rising in price.

Several kilometres down Unwins Bridge Road from St Peters is this small suburb that was made smaller in the 1990s when the federal government bought up and demolished a swathe of houses under the flight path.

In their place is a park, Sydenham Green, one of several in the suburb. Like St Peters, Sydenham is on the train line, several bus routes and is close to the shopping strips of Marrickville and Newtown.

And while much of it also suffers from aircraft noise, Rowley says this only seems to be putting off prospective buyers who have never lived in the inner city.

In his experience, that's about one in five people at an open house.

I work next to the park where the houses were demolished with the advent of the Third Runway. The planes come in overhead to land and I can see the innards of the undercarriages as the wheels hang off the bottoms of the planes. It stops conversations dead. The rumble is an ungodly 110dB SPL just outside the building when a 747 comes in. You get used to it, but you wouldn't want to live there. Desiring to live there is a questionable factor if but for the price, so it is the devil's choice. Even if the median prices were 644k, it's nuts. There's a reason those other houses got demolished.

You only need to stand in the park for half an hour to understand.