NEW ZEALAND’S SWEETEST SPOTS
If you were starting from scratch, where in ew ealand would you pick to live aybe you’re happy right where you are, but it’s always fun to play “what if”.
For Sweet Spots 2022, we compiled data on nearly 2000 suburbs, towns and settlements. We collected demographic data from the 201 ensus weather data from iwa house price and neighbourhood data collated by homes.co.nz and social and economic stats from independent data science company ot oves ata.
Since 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. ou might be a foodie – so we’ve now got data on the places with the highest density of restaurants, cafes and bars. aybe 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.
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. ot all of them will matter to everyone, though, so we only added up the points for eight categories we thought were undisputedly positive.
Those included 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 home ownership is increasingly out of reach for many.
The 10 highest-scoring areas for each broad region in the country uckland, Wellington, hristchurch, the upper orth Island, the lower orth Island, the upper South Island and the lower South Island) became our initial finalists – but we weren’t done yet.
ust 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 higherthan-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 uckland 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. ata can’t capture the overall vibe of an area, and somewhere might tick all of the right boxes in our dataset but still be missing that intangible
-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. ow that we’ve picked our favourite, it’s your turn. Go to interactives.stuff.co.nz/sweetspots/ to try our Sweet Spots interactive tool to find the perfect place for you, with all 17 criteria to choose from.