Forest Lake Blues
When we were house hunting a few years back, it was the height of the property boom in Queensland. Prices had been stable for about six months and we had saved up a deposit but then we noticed the market seemed to be moving again so we rushed to buy before it all went up by another 100k. I was not too keen on Forest Lake but it was the only affordable suburb for us that suited the commute to both of our workplaces and I found a house that had a big overgrown yard (the way I like it) so we ended up out here.
I knew there was a bit of stigma around Forest Lake, I had thought it would be a bunch of tiny alottments with identical houses packed together like the opening scenes of Edward Scissorhands. Driving out here, we found the place to be green and, well, “foresty”.
But nothing prepared me for the reaction we would get from so many friends and strangers when we say we live in Forest Lake. It’s not the kind of suburb that people have no opinion on. I often get “way out there?” or “why did you buy there?” (with that downward emphasis on the “there”) and other times people express that the fences are too high or that it’s full of MacMansions. Forest Lake has it’s share of grandiose housing but the majority of houses here are single story and three bedrooms. I agree that every house has a six foot fence around it but then I hear people complain about their neighbours or never talk to their neighbours in other suburbs so why is it considered such a big deal here? Also Forest Lake is not as far out of town as some suburbs on the North side or The Gap. So it takes twenty minutes (forty in peak hour) to get home from the city – a relatively long drive for Brisbane but considered a good time for other cities.
The most annoying slur is that Forest Lake is a dormitory suburb: “everyone leaves for work during the day”. WTF? Can you tell me a suburb where most of the people are sitting at home all day? We know for a fact that there are a lot of retirees and stay-at-home mums in Forest Lake, just go to the shopping centre during the day, it’s full of people. Likewise there are always people going for a stroll on the paths between houses and taking their kids to the park.
Forest Lake does have a high crime rate due to it’s proximity to Inala. Is this the thing that everyone’s trying to talk around but not wanting to directly say?
Maybe it is the values of Forest Lake. People here are obsessed with getting ahead and having the good life. What? None of this makes sense – why is Forest Lake singled out as the suburb that represents these values?
I think the stigma lies in all of the things I mentioned but also in something I’ve been reading about on some friends’ blog The Memes of Production which is the idea of authenticity.
I think authenticity is what most people are trying to get at when they have a go at me about Forest Lake. Forest Lake was created by Delfin ex-nihilo as the theologians would say: from nothing. The lake was carved out of a little creek, the land divided up according to Delfin’s plan. The streets, the lights, the gardens on the round-abouts, the landcaping, the shopping centre, the schools, the sports centre, all were orchestrated by Delfin. This has meant that people view the suburb as artificial and owned by Delfin. When you go to live there, you lose your identity and live the life that Delfin planned for you to live there. I think this is what’s at the heart of the Forest Lake stigma.
Delfin has almost finished developing it’s next big “artificial” suburb out at Springfield Lakes. It seems like they’ve managed to avoid the stigma that Forest Lake has, I’m not sure what they did differently but I suspect it’s they way they’ve marketed without using their name as much.
Matt, I’m not sure that it is an authentic or ‘organic’ vs inauthentic or ‘designed’ thing. I’m old enough to remember when Inala gained its bad reputation (which I don’t think it has any more, at least not in the same way), and it was to do with a suburb planned and populated at a particular point in time with young families. But young families don’t stay young, and the suburb was not (at that stage) planned with youth and young adults in mind. Hence problems with bored youth in the 1970s. Our own suburb went through a similar phase about 10-15 years ago. The young families grew up and there were a lot of young people trying to entertain themselves while effectively ‘trapped’ in the suburb by lack of facilities, lack of money, and lack of public transport. We’ve got a lot of young families again, and I expect in 10 years or so we’ll go through another such cycle (although public transport is improving).
This is the only negative thing that I have heard about Forest Lake. It is a well-planned, very liveable suburb from what I can tell, and one that we spent a lot of time looking at when it was new. Springfield is just too young at this stage to cop the same kind of flack. It is probably only the really well-serviced inner suburbs that don’t go through this at some point, partly because young families can rarely afford to move in there for starters. Plus, there is a long-running disdain for suburbia in Australian intellectual tradition.
I think, as you noted in passing and as Lisa has mentioned above, that it is partly an issue with a certain disdain for suburbia, but compounded by the fact that it is a generally Australian disdain for suburbia being expressed about a specifically Brisbane suburb, and that raises a whole different set of issues.
Because Brisbane is, in many ways, one big suburb. The CBD is small and, really, no one lives there. (Like so many cities in Australia and in New Zealand—we often take our inaccurate sense of the dual life of the inner city and CBDs from the larger, older cities of other parts of the world, like London or New York, and we normalise that as “city life,” though our own experience is vastly different.)
I would say my own suburb is, if not inner city, not far off. In Sydney, this would be an inner-city suburb, so close it is to the CBD. And yet, it’s so suburban—which is what I love: the greenery, the space, the distance between the houses. But often the idea of what makes a suburb—and how a city should balance between inner-city spaces and suburbia—is drawn from Sydney and Melbourne, and simply doesn’t fit well onto the different pattern that is Brisbane.
I suspect this was a more coherent argument in my head than on paper, but for what it’s worth, I suspect that’s one of the issues with Forest Lake-directed disdain.
(Because seriously? Forty minutes home in peak hour is fantastic for Sydney. I had a forty-five minute drive (each way) to work twice a week, half an hour (each way) to another job three times a week, and nearly an hour and a half (each way) to university four times a week—and that’s not even in peak hour, when it took much, much longer.)
I suppose it is a number of things mixed together. I get the Australian disdain for suburbia and the cycle of “trapped” families. There is definitely an imaginary border around the inner city suburbs beyond which you become a boring suburban parent. Inside this border you are an urban hipster. We have been thinking about this lately because Sol is going to an inner city suburb kindy near my work so we’ve been mixing with parents who were lucky enough to buy before the boom or rich enough to live close to the city.
Part of my point, though, Matt, is that that inner-city suburb/outer suburbs mentality seems to me to have been transplanted more or less wholesale from other cities, when it doesn’t accurately reflect Brisbane’s structure. Oh, I suppose there are what I—snobby New South Welshwoman—would think of as “real” inner-city suburbs, like the Valley, but Brisbane really doesn’t have the same structure as the southern cities.
I mean, here Auchenflower, or Milton, or Paddington (beautiful, leafy, hilly, green suburbs) occupy about the same distance from the city as, say, Newtown does in Sydney, or even Darlinghurst—but they’re so different in feeling.
I think what I’m trying to argue is that Brisbane’s peculiarities (which are a big part of what attracts me about the city) demand that we think differently about suburbia and its relationship to the central city than we would if we were living in a southern city.
(It might also be a function of Brisbane’s comparatively small size. These families trapped in suburbs with poor public transport, all growing up at the same rate and turning into bored teenagers—we get those in Sydney, too. But they tend to be much, much further out from the city, because Sydney grew rapidly for some forty years before Brisbane really got started, and there’s no room for brand-new suburbs too close to the CBD. When the new suburbs are an hour’s drive or more away out of peak hour, then the separation between urban and suburban is much more decisive.)
I think the dormitory concept focuses on the idea that an area is mostly residential, with no variation in how space is used, i.e. a quintessentially suburban zone. As you say, there are few truly suburban suburbs in which this doesn’t happen, but that’s kind of the point of the critique. Of course, singling out particular suburbs as beyond the pale is a probably an admission that the much-vaunted cosmopolitanism of more “credible” inner-city enclaves is itself just a desperate veneer of authenticity, because in fact everybody’s utterly alienated… :)
Hehe Ben, well that cheered me up! But a couple of inner city dwelling friends have commented off blog that they know deep down they are going to end up in a “dreary suburb” if they have kids if only to keep them away from the homeless and desperate that lurk about closer to the city centre.
Suddenly I feel very fortunate to be living in a regional centre. It takes me five minutes to drive to work (that’s if I hit the peak 15 minute traffic around 8:30). Other times of the day I can be home in two. And to drive from my side of town to the beach takes 20 mintues to half an hour at the very most. Still that’s not to say there aren’t still similar attitudes towards various areas/suburbs of town. Particularly a divide between the seachangers who move up from southern cities and states and choose to live at the various beachside suburbs compared to the “old bundabergians” who live “in town”.