Before 1880 Sydney built very compactly, with most of its houses in rows referred to as terraces. Water supply and sewage disposal were poor. Standards were continuously changed under a variety of early city leadership and planning personnel. Official street widths varied from 200 feet wide to 120 feet wide and the cross streets 84 feet wide. Original houses were shoddy and impermanent because the land they were built on could only be leased short term. Later, as longer term leases were allowed, houses were made to follow more specific codes and alignments, and the city grew into its more familiar pattern.
Sydney was primarily divided by socioeconomic class until heavy immigration from Europe began in the late 1940s. Until then, the blue-collar workers lived in the crowded inner industrial suburbs, while the elite of society occupied the harborside and ocean front regions. Political loyalties followed the same clear divisions, with the affluent white collar suburbs voting conservative and the blue collar laborers voting with the leftist Labor party.
Significant changes in the type of residents who live in inner Sydney have been associated with the capital reinvestment process. (see next section: Transformation) Gentrification, which generally involves a decline in traditional working-class residents and a simultaneous increase in professional white-collar residents, has been occurring in inner Sydney since 1966.(6)
There has been a measured increase in professional, technical, administrative and clerical workers which corresponds with the structural changes in the city of Sydney. What used to be the working class suburbs of 1940 are becoming white-collar, affluent suburbs. The trend has seen the transformation, or gentrification, of once run down suburbs. The process began in Paddington before 1960 and has spread to Balmain and Glebe (see Map), and other areas throughout the inner city areas have seen similar pockets of upgrading. Sydney is now the opposite of the Burgess sectoral zone model. The white-collar and native born populations are moving outward into the formerly blue-collar and immigrant areas.
