Sydney, Australia`s largest city with a population of about 5 million, has been known worldwide for its pleasant climate and beautiful scenery.
Yet a set of figures released by the Sydney Morning Herald has drawn attention to the little-known side of the city.
The article, "the world loves Sydney, but Australians don`t think so," says that over the past 45 years, more people have moved out of Sydney to live in other parts of Australia than they have moved to Sydney. Sydney has moved in an average of 85 people a day, but has lost 129 people. Since 1971, Sydney`s local population has lost nearly 720000 people.
Sydney has always been one of the first destinations for overseas immigrants, and the influx of immigrants and the loss of local residents have greatly changed the demographic structure of Sydney. In 1976, less than 25 percent of Sydney residents were born overseas. Forty years later, Nearly 40% of Sydney`s overseas-born residents have been born abroad.
Over the past 20 years, more Australians have moved to Melbourne. Many expect Melbourne to overtake Sydney as Australia`s largest city in the near future.
According to the latest census data obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald, some 2.1 million people have moved out of Sydney since 1971 and moved to other parts of Australia. Nearly half of them moved to the rest of New South Wales, where Sydney is located. McClindell, who works in sociology in Sydney, says that people move to Sydney to work or receive education, and then move away at different stages of their lives and move back and forth. In this trend of population migration back and forth, the lost population is larger than the migration population. This shows that there is a clear problem in this city of Sydney.
From the regional point of view, the most serious population loss is Sydney West City. McClindell said the west city did not provide enough attractive lifestyles for residents to stay, although the cost of living there was lower than in the north and east parts of Sydney.
In terms of age composition, the majority of residents who choose to move out of Sydney are between the ages of 25 and 44 and between 0 and 14, which means that the emigration population is usually family-wide rather than retired people who want to move to other parts of the country for a peaceful life.
A 2015 survey showed local residents were mostly pessimistic about Sydney`s future. The survey, which involved more than 1000 people, found that 64 percent thought Sydney was worse than five years ago, while 66 percent said it would be worse in five years.
There is an analysis that the surge in prices in Sydney is one of the main reasons for the loss of local population. The latest annual international housing affordability survey shows that Australia ranks third among the most difficult-to-afford countries around the world, while the median Sydney property prices at the top of the country are more than two times higher than other provincial capital cities other than Melbourne and Canberra, On average, buying a house in sydney is almost 13 times as much as people`s annual income.
In addition, respondents believe that the high cost of living, increasingly congested traffic, increasing difficulty in finding jobs and increasing pressure on the part of people living in Sydney are among the challenges that Sydney faces all the time but can never get rid of.
But Wilson, lead researcher in demographics at Charles Darwin University, says Sydney`s disproportionate emigration and emigration is not necessarily a bad thing. London, one of the characteristics of a cosmopolitan city, has the same problem, and the negative impact will be offset by Sydney`s high birth rate and young population composition.
