PEOPLE DON’T KNOW FOREST LODGE YEt

YOU JUST DONT GET IT

Forest Lodge is one of those suburbs you don’t understand until you walk it without a destination.
No open home.
No café plan.
No appointment on the other side.
Just walking — letting the streets decide the route for you.

It’s small. Smaller than people realise.
A slip of land pressed between Annandale’s confidence, Glebe’s charm, and Camperdown’s institutional gravity.
Most suburbs announce themselves.
Forest Lodge just… appears.

I remember the first time I really noticed it.
Not drove through — noticed.
There’s a difference.

I was cutting through Ross Street on a late afternoon in winter.
Someone was burning incense in an open window.
A uni student was sitting on their front step reading something too thick for enjoyment.
A woman in activewear walked a dog that looked older than both of us.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing “Inner West iconic.”
Just a suburb that felt like a long exhale.

That’s Forest Lodge.
It’s the space between breaths.

People who live here talk about the suburb with an odd kind of loyalty — the type usually reserved for places that raised them, not places they moved into as adults. When you read through community pages or hyper-local threads, you don’t see the typical arguments you get in bigger suburbs. Instead, it’s things like:

“Does anyone know who knitted the scarves around the trees?”
“Lost cat near Lodge Street, please keep an eye out.”
“Thank you to the guy who returned my wallet.”

There’s a softness here you don’t find in the louder postcodes.

And the housing stock mirrors that energy.
Not dramatic. Not curated. Not desperate to impress.

You get terraces that look like they’ve been gently lived in rather than aggressively renovated.
You get small apartment blocks that have survived decades without acquiring strange extensions or architectural crimes.
You get new developments that somehow — miraculously — don’t feel out of place.

Forest Lodge is an ecosystem that shouldn’t work but does.

Part of it is geography.
USYD on one side, RPA on another.
Two engines of perpetual demand.
Students, academics, medical staff, professionals — a rotating cast of people who need proximity more than they need perfection.

And yet, the suburb never feels transient.
That’s the thing that surprised me most when I dug into resident sentiment.

People stay.

They start in a one-bed apartment, upgrade into a terrace, then raise a family in a house they swore they’d only occupy for two years. The suburb holds onto you by accident — quietly, the way a street becomes a routine before you realise you’ve lived your entire life along it.

There are factual reasons for its resilience, too.
You can’t write a blog without acknowledging the numbers, even if you hide them between the lines.

Over the past decade:
• Terrace prices have climbed from the mid–$1.1M range into the $2.2M–$2.6M corridor.
• Oversized two-bed units that once traded for $700K now push $1.1M+.
• Vacancy rates remain consistently low due to academic and medical demand.
• Listings are scarce — painfully scarce. Forest Lodge is one of the lowest-volume suburbs in the Inner West.

Scarcity creates desirability.
Desirability creates resilience.
Resilience becomes identity.

But numbers aren’t the reason people love this suburb.
They’re just the proof.

The real reason is harder to describe, but you feel it when the light hits the terraces on Lodge Street in the late afternoon. Or when you walk past the community garden. Or when someone says hello before thinking twice about whether they should.

Forest Lodge doesn’t try to be special.
It simply avoids being anything else.

It has no village to advertise, no wide shopping district, no landmark that trends on Instagram.
It’s one of the few suburbs in Sydney where the absence of spectacle becomes the spectacle.

And that’s why buyers who arrive here often don’t leave.
Not because it’s flashy.
Not because it’s famous.
But because it feels like the place between the places — the quiet spine that holds the Inner West together without ever needing credit for it.

Forest Lodge is the secret suburb.
The one people whisper about after they’ve moved in, hoping no one else notices.

But they do.
They always do.
And when they finally come looking, they understand why the people who live here guard it so closely.

— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal