A TALE OF TWO CITIES: TAURANGA OVERTAKES DUNEDIN AS NZ’S FIFTH BIGGEST CITY
Living in Tauranga is like living in paradise. I moved here five years ago, and haven’t looked back, says Tony Wall.
A quick word association game. Tauranga: summer, sun, sand, surf, bikinis, board shorts, booming, bridges, beauty, heat, holidays, outdoors, oldies.
Dunedin: colonial, cold, concrete, castles, ice, isolated, indoors, students, sloshed, Scottish, rugby, rain, riots. Where would you rather live? The only surprise about Tauranga overtaking Dunedin as New Zealand’s fifth largest city is that it took so long. To me, Dunedin is a city mired in its colonial history with only its university keeping it from being a small provincial backwater.
Tauranga, on the other hand, is booming – its population roaring ahead. Aucklanders can’t get here fast enough. It’s only a matter of time before it overtakes Hamilton and eventually Wellington – even Christchurch.
Quite simply, Dunedin is the past, Tauranga is the future.
I moved here from Auckland with my family five years ago and haven’t looked back.
It has Auckland’s natural beauty without the gridlock. Pretty much every suburb has water views.
The gem in the crown is Mt Maunganui – one of the most strikingly beautiful areas in the world. Any visitor who climbs to the summit and takes in the view across to Matakana Island or east towards Whakatane is pretty much straight on the phone to the real estate agent.
The lifestyle is amazing. I live on the other side of town from the beach, but can be in the waves after work within 10 minutes.
Our street borders an estuary and if I told an Aucklander what we paid for our house they’d spit out their latte.
People joke that Tauranga is an enormous retirement village but hey, that’s the silver economy and it’s worth billions – not to mention an endless supply of babysitters.
Of course as the population grows bigcity hassles will arrive. But right now, I’m living in paradise.
128,200 Population
15.9 Average temperature
2250 Sunshine hours
1250mm Annual rainfall
$672,000 Average house price (average value December 2016 Quotable Values)
$4.50 Cost of a flat white
Dunedin’s no retirement town ... it’s a vibrant city with a wealth of history and culture, says Hamish McNeilly.
Dunedin is no Tauranga; it has heritage, culture and a pulse.
It is a city where tens of thousands of young New Zealanders spend the best years of their lives, studying, partying and watching couches mysteriously combust under the intensity of the Dunedin sun.
Tauranga is a retirement home – a satellite suburb of Auckland. It’s a town that grew too fast.
And Dunedin is a city that knows a thing or two about the vagaries of booms. The city’s stunning buildings came when it was at the forefront of an international goldrush – when the population trebled in three years. By 1870, it was New Zealand’s largest and wealthiest city.
Fast forward almost 150 years and it is now the sixth largest, but the city’s inhabitants couldn’t be happier.
And that’s a fact: Dunedin ranked as the best city to live in according to a recent biennial Quality of Life Survey.
I moved here with my pregnant wife in 2008, and we bought a 112-year-old villa overlooking Otago Harbour for $289,000. We now have two boys, no mortgage, and a fully insulated and double-glazed home.
I used to work occasionally in Tauranga; but it’s important to learn from your mistakes. Unlike Tauranga’s endless sprawl of
Truman Show-style homes, mobility scooters and gridlocked traffic, everything in Dunedin is a handy five minutes away.
Everyone has heard of the ‘‘Dunedin Sound’’, but no hipster ever name checks the ‘‘Tauranga wheeze’’. And we also have beautiful beaches, better surf and wildlife, and less sagging skin and fewer drunks.
Tauranga is no tropical paradise, nor is Dunedin some bitter Scottish outpost.
If it is a tropical getaway a Dunedinite is after, well, they just get on a plane with the money saved from lower – or no – mortgages.
Tauranga may be four degrees warmer on average, but that’s not much use if it rains all the time. And Mt Maunganui? In Dunedin we would call that a hill.
127,000 Population
11.8 Average temperature
1824 Sunshine hours
705mm Annual rainfall
$354,000 Average house price (average value December 2016 Quotable Values)
$4 Cost of a flat white