Now here’s a dilemma for dedicated house dwellers: apartment blocks are increasing, not decreasing the values of your homes, but they’re also making us fatter and less healthy. Truly, the law of unintended consequences has never had a better week.

Let’s start with the wallets. New research covered by Elizabeth Redman in the Sydney Morning Herald found that house prices have risen faster in a handful of Sydney neighbourhoods where a wave of high-rise apartment towers were built, compared with other suburbs with less apartment development.

So much for the myth that apartment blocks would destroy real estate values in their vicinity. In the suburbs that got over 1000 new apartments, detached house prices climbed even higher than in suburbs that barely got any.

As the e61 Institute’s Dr Nick Garvin diplomatically put it, the findings make it harder to argue all of this price growth was driven by shortages of high-density housing. Translation: building more apartments didn’t make the area less desirable — it made it the place everyone suddenly wanted to live, housies included.

Now for the waistlines. Under the same masthead, health reporter Rachel Rasker delivered the other plot twist: those same shiny, walkable, transit-oriented suburbs of the future turn out to be doubling as junk food hotspots.

Her reporting found that almost one in three existing food outlets across these areas were deemed “unhealthy,” while more than half were “less healthy” — meaning a staggering 85 per cent of the 1,151 food options evaluated were not healthy.

Apparently nobody told the urban planners that “increased density” also refers to the BMIs of local residents.

Dietitian Dr Sisi Jia summed up the problem neatly: “When you’re walking down the street and there are 10 fast food chains, and that’s what you’re seeing day to day, those are the strong drivers shaping your choices.”

So here’s the modern Sydney apartment-living experience in one sentence: move into your shiny new tower, watch your suburb’s house prices boom around you, and emerge from the metro station each evening surrounded by nothing but fried chicken and bubble tea.

Wealthy, unhealthy and not very wise – that’s the future of Sydney’s suburbs.

Stories culled from the Leftfield Communications daily property news feed.