By Alice Uribe

Copyright theage

Small business owner Jane O’Hehir has lived in Chatswood for 19 years. When she moves, she hopes her new suburb will have similar access to transport, cafes and shops that have made living there so convenient.

Along with her husband Andrew, O’Hehir, 59, raised three now-adult children in the five-bedroom lower north shore home. For the family, the closeness to schools, outdoor space and the Chatswood hub which has department stores, movie theatres, restaurants and medical services has improved their lives and allowed them to build community connections.

“We could get a coffee within a 10-minute walk from here … I regularly catch the new metro line,” O’Hehir said. “There’s a bus just 50 metres up the road that takes you straight up to Chatswood if you didn’t want to walk.”

Chatswood features on a list of Sydney’s high-amenity suburbs by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. The suburb is joined by others near the coast and the city which have some of the highest concentrations of amenities, but also filters for low proportions of social housing.