The Windy Capital Tops Best Place For Families

Wellington has blown away other contenders for the TopSpot Kiwi families would choose when looking for a place to build a nest.

“International studies of best places show that families favour the access to parks, playgrounds and the coastline,” says Stephen Hart, author of the ASB (www.asb.co.nz) TopSpot reports.” “Since New Zealand has a lot of those features naturally, it made sense that for the purposes of this ‘Best Place for Families’ report, that we dug deeper to uncover other criteria to determine the place kiwi families would ideally choose to call home.”

“There are a number of things that influence the outcomes for best places for families to live. A primary consideration was that those places need to be good for both children and their parents. We found the 50 largest places families could be drawn to and measured them against the criteria to see how they performed. Wellington came out very well in all of the key family measures with Queenstown Lakes District coming in a close second.”

The report highlights the top ten best places for families to live as: Wellington City (760 points), Queenstown Lakes District (735), Selwyn District (690), North Shore City (655), Ashburton District (440), Auckland City (430), Waimakariri District (43), Porirua City (405), Christchurch City (390) and Rodney District (385).

Since families tend to like being around other families, districts and cities that lean heavily toward family with children under the age of 15 were looked at. They were also scored on low unemployment rates, housing affordability in relation to income levels and those places that identified as having the lowest deprivation levels. Additional points were scored for areas with strong neonatal health records and highest numbers of GPs per capita.

ASB (www.asb.co.nz) launched the TopSpot series of reports as part of their commitment to provide home buyers with useful information and tools to make owning a home and finding the ideal neighbourhood as easy as possible. The ‘Best Place for Families’ TopSpot is the fourth in the series and appears exclusively on the ASB website - www.iwantahome.co.nz. The focus is different each month and includes topics like Best Retirement Places and Greenest Places, to name a few.

For the full report of NZ’s ‘Best Place for Families’ go to www.iwantahome.co.nz
The information within the reports has been compiled from various sources, including Statistics New Zealand and QV.co.nz and was written by Stephen Hart of Barbican Publishing. ASB-PR120109-FR.

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Rosa Chhun

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