GLEBE’S SECOND WAVE
Why the Suburb Is Quietly Repositioning Itself for the 2030s
Glebe has already had its story told once. The arc is familiar: harbourside industrial and working-class suburb turned intellectual and alternative haven, turned gentrified terrace country with students threaded between. What’s happening now is less obvious, but just as important – a second wave that will carry the suburb into the 2030s whether it wants it or not.
The first current is physical. Terraces that were “renovated” in the 80s and 90s are being renovated again – this time with a different level of intention. Rear lanes are being turned into secondary access, garages, studios. Basements and attics are being captured as real living space. The classic Glebe floor plan – long, narrow, dark in the middle – is being split open for light in ways that technology and planning didn’t easily allow thirty years ago. Buyers at the upper end are not just buying a postcode; they’re buying into a kind of urban townhouse living that feels European in scale and Australian in light.
Around them, the apartment market is recalibrating. Median unit prices in Glebe sit around the high-$800k mark, with larger, better-positioned stock trading well above that – especially three-bed units that effectively function as house substitutes. Demand has softened at the margins over the last year, but the underlying drivers haven’t disappeared: proximity to three universities, a short run into the CBD, and a foreshore that is about to become significantly more valuable.
That’s the second current: Blackwattle Bay.
The state-significant renewal of Blackwattle Bay is not just a design exercise; it’s an economic one. Over ten hectares of land at the edge of Glebe are set to be transformed into a mixed-use precinct – residential, commercial, civic – with a 30-metre-wide waterfront promenade designed to complete the foreshore walk from Rozelle to Woolloomooloo. The new Sydney Fish Market complex sits at the heart of that, turning what used to be a car-parked dead zone into a destination.
For Glebe, that means the bayside edge shifts from “back of house” to “front window”. Streets that once overlooked working wharves and carparks will look out onto one of the city’s key public spaces. Access to light, water and amenity will tighten the radius of what counts as premium. The suburb’s long-suffering foreshore finally gets the treatment its location has always deserved.
The third current is demographic. Glebe is quietly graduating its own residents. Former students who once shared terraces now return as professionals. Older owners who bought into the suburb decades ago are ageing in place or cashing out to downsize locally into terraces or apartments that are easier to manage. Intergenerational wealth moves through the streets. Investors who once treated Glebe as a yield play now see it as a defensive, long-term hold.
Glebe doesn’t need a reinvention. It needs a refinement. A sharpened version of what it already is: dense but human, historic but not frozen, close to the city but not swallowed by it. The second wave isn’t about erasing the first; it’s about absorbing it and moving on.
For owners, this is the moment between breaths – the point before Blackwattle Bay is finished, before the full impact of foreshore change is priced in, before the next generation of renovated stock dominates the sales data. For buyers, it’s the part of the curve where you either understand what’s coming, or you arrive later and pay for the privilege.
— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal