Southern population unpredictability

WHO would have believed it? According to Statistics NZ figures, Dunedin City has grown by 7000 people since 2013. No wonder the traffic has become so much worse and house prices have leapt.

This has happened, too, over a period when growth at the city’s cornerstone employer, the University of Otago, stalled.

As the population climbs past 130,000, increasing an estimated 1.5% over the past year, the rise is a welcome morale boost. Even as it brings new issues, notably in housing, the city has for decades feared the insidious threat of a downward spiral and accelerating loss of services.

During the 1970s, a big issue was the ‘‘drift’’ north. In 1979, there were actually predictions of a decline in population of 5% by 2000. There was discussion on how Dunedin could plan for reductions from about 100,000 people to about 70,000plus. And even in the 1960s there was discussion of Dunedin as a centre with an older population that would lose its relative position as a ‘‘main centre’’.

Industries continued to shut and/or shift through the 1980s. Only the rapid rise in student numbers kept Dunedin moving ahead, albeit slowly.

Predicting the future, however, is fraught with inaccuracy. It was not that many years ago that Statistics NZ thought Central Otago, as well as Clutha, Waitaki, Gore, Southland and Invercargill, would decline. The older demographics told the story.

How wrong that forecast was. Central, and especially Cromwell, has surged. Its population is estimated to have climbed 3.5% in the past year, one of the fastest rates in the country. And all those other districts also showed increases, even Gore at a 0.4% rise.

Queenstown Lakes, meanwhile, is up 5.5% to 39,100, the fastest rate in the country. This is a compounding increase that has many locals questioning the loss not just of services, but also of natural amenities, peace and beauty and community values. Traffic jams and acute housing shortages have become unwelcome topics of concern.

The increases in Queenstown Lakes and Dunedin are estimated at 2000 and 1900 people each. Put another way, at an average of three people per home, another 600 to 700 houses are needed in each district in that one year alone.

No wonder Dunedin house prices have surged at unprecedented rates.

The South has, in part, been dragged along by national buoyancy and spill from overcrowded Auckland, as well as the tourism boom. Dunedin and Invercargill are also now receiving refugees. The international trend towards central isation might be slowing, and the migration to sunnier spots is slowing.

That leaves Dunedin as a popular place because of its natural beauty, its strength and depth in education, its proximity to central Otago, its manageable size and its (still) relatively low house prices and minimal traffic congestion.

Reputation, perception and what is ‘‘trendy’’ count for so much. Dunedin has been discarding its supposed dull and grey overcoat for an image as a bright centre of many colours, as a premier and liveable lifestyle city.

Thanks, too, to highspeed internet and enterprises that circumvent the tyranny of distance, opportunities arise to work here in the South far from the crowds and tensions common elsewhere.

But even as recently as the late 1990s, Dunedin’s population actually slipped.

The future is notoriously hard to predict, and even the experts at Statistics NZ seldom get it quite right. In 2010, for example, it was predicting residential population growth in the next 25 years of 13% in Otago — 52% in inland districts, 6% in Dunedin and a decrease of 7% for the rest of Otago. Only eight years later, each of those figures appears to be wrong, based on what is happening now.

This is why projecting from the latest figures should be undertaken with caution. A lot can happen internationally, nationally and locally in a short time. For now, nevertheless, Dunedin — on the best information available — needs to plan for steady and healthy growth.