Renting Guide: How to Choose the Suburb You Want to Live In
Been busy house hunting for over a month now. Planning to share this experience as it's quite extensive, so I'm planning a series of posts.
This time, how do you pick the suburb you want to live in?
If you're new, chances are you'll first stay in the city. Before moving to Melbourne, our understanding of 'city' was quite literal, just the city. 'Suburb' also took on its literal meaning, basically the outskirts. It wasn't until after arriving that we realized, wow, it's quite different. The city is actually considered a suburb too, more akin to the CBD or downtown area, whereas suburbs are more like districts, just varying in distance. This year, with frequent safety incidents in the city, the advice we heard was to look more into the surrounding suburbs; living in the city isn’t a must.
We looked through various suburbs, with information mainly from government website statistics, suburb livability rankings, local recommendations on Reddit, recommendations from the Chinese community on Xiaohongshu, and advice from friends and colleagues with firsthand experience.
The government website has very detailed census data, including population makeup, immigrant origin countries, income, types of employment, and so on.
Online suburb livability rankings look at crime rates, transport, parks, healthcare, shopping, etc.
When choosing, we prioritized the following, ranked by importance:
- Safety, low crime rate (most important)
- Within 40 mins to the CBD by public transport
- Well-developed public transport, including trains (like the subway in China), Trams, and buses
- Off-street parking (to avoid a lot of hassles)
- Close to Asian supermarkets and restaurants
- Close to local supermarkets and markets
- Walk-friendly
- Driving experience (Melbourne's public transport system is radial, many places are just half an hour drive but over 1.5h+ by public transport)
- Open spaces and culture, coffee (important for mental wellbeing)
- Parks (as much as possible)
- A view from the window (if possible)
We’ve eventually marked the preferred areas with a red box on the map. Here are some purely subjective evaluations of some suburbs we've visited:
- North Melbourne lacks green spaces and has too many tall buildings.
- Glen Iris is very quiet and leisurely, with varied terrain, which might not be convenient without a car, walking could be tiring.
- Carlton used to be an Italian enclave, now it feels a lot like Wudaokou, with the University of Melbourne here, so lots of students and great food options.
- Fitzroy is vibrant, artistic, and offers a great walking experience, very popular among the young folks. Naturally, the rent isn’t cheap.
- Carnegie has somewhat old housing in its streets, it's relaxed, lacks parks, but food options are plenty, and it’s convenient for day-to-day living.
- Northcote mostly has professionals around 30 years old. Reddit says the most dangerous thing here is getting your foot run over by a pram. It has lots of parks and trails nearby.
In the end, we were lucky to rent in Northcote 🎉