If you were starting from scratch, where in New Zealand would you pick to live?
Maybe you’re happy right where you are, but it’s always fun to play “what if” – so Stuff has turned it up a notch, with a huge database to help you choose.
Our Sweet Spots tool contains information about nearly 2000 suburbs, towns and settlements.
We’ve collected demographic data from the 2018 Census; weather data from Niwa; house prices and neighbourhood data collated by homes.co.nz; and social and economic stats from independent data science company DotLovesData.
Since we first ran the project last year, we’ve worked hard to get our hands on new data to create an even more nuanced picture of the best places to live.
You might be a foodie – so we’ve now got data on the places with the highest density of restaurants, cafes and bars. Maybe being close to the local primary school, or essential services like supermarkets and healthcare, is important to you – so we’ve added that in too.
So how did we choose our Sweet Spots winners for 2022?
For every variable in our growing database, we assigned a score out of 10 for each suburb – more points if the suburb ranked better than the national median, fewer points if it ranked lower. The only exception we made was for house and rent prices: recognising that our major cities are increasingly out of step with the rest of the country, we used a regional ranking system for this one.
The final database contains 17 criteria we think matter to people. Not all of them will matter to everyone, though, so we only added up the points for eight categories we thought were undisputedly positive.
They’re similar to the criteria we used last year, when the central Christchurch suburb of Addington came out on top: we’re still keen on lots of sunshine, high levels of walking, cycling or public transport use, high employment, low or improving levels of crime, and a high level of volunteering.
This year, we’ve also scored suburbs on good access to essential services and proximity and choice of schools – the things which make a suburb more liveable – and reasonable rent, recognising that homeownership is increasingly out of reach for many.
We’ll be revealing our regional winners here on Saturday, June 11.
The 10 highest-scoring areas for each broad region in the country (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, the upper North Island, the lower North Island, the upper South Island and the lower South Island) became our initial finalists – but we weren’t done yet.
Just like last year, we wanted to make sure that our Sweet Spots were financially accessible and diverse. So we checked out which neighbourhoods would come out on top if we prioritised higher-than-average diversity or affordable house prices – and used that to inform our overall winners.
That means our regional winners aren’t necessarily the ritziest suburbs (although what someone in Auckland considers cheap might make eyes water elsewhere in the country).
The final step in our elimination process was to get local reporters to apply their knowledge to our shortlist. Data can’t capture the overall vibe of an area, and somewhere might tick all the right boxes in our dataset but still be missing that intangible X-factor, while another area with a slightly lower score might have a truly special feature that our data analysis missed.
From all that, we chose a winner for each region, and then picked our new national Sweetest Spot.
Now that we’ve picked our favourites, it’s your turn. The Sweet Spots interactive tool is based on this database, but with all 17 criteria to choose from.
You can fine-tune the algorithm to suit your priorities, and the scores will be weighted to match, to help suggest the sweetest spot for you.
The updated and new data might mean your answer is different to last year. If it’s the same, maybe it’s time to mull that big move.
© 2022 Stuff Limited