It's the street everyone avoids. The place you're warned against, or make jokes about. The rough suburb.

Postcode prejudice is rife across Australia — it might be Sunshine in Melbourne, the western suburbs of Sydney or Logan, south of Brisbane — and it leads to us making judgments about people based on where they live.

Those judgments are often rooted in classism, says Rebecca Wickes, a criminology expert and the director of the Monash Migration and Inclusion Centre.

"I think class is a fundamental fault line that runs through stigma," she tells ABC RN's Life Matters.

Class, made recognisable through concentrations of public housing, "is a fundamental fault line that runs through stigma." ( Getty: kokkai )

That stigma has a real impact on people, who might feel a deep sense of personal shame, or even hide their address on a resume.

"There's a perception that if you put the postcode of a poor neighbourhood on your job application that might affect your chances of getting the job," says Ilan Wiesel, senior lecturer in urban geography at Melbourne University.

For richer, for poorer

Dr Wickes says postcode stigma particularly affects disadvantaged people and minority groups — a consequence of "structural decisions and policies that encourage particular groups of people to live in particular kinds of places".

But there's a flip side, too.

Dr Wiesel says residents of very affluent suburbs — like Melbourne's Toorak, Sydney's Mosman or Perth's Cottesloe — can face stigma too.

Residents of Sydney's harbourside suburbs might have it good, but they too face stigma. ( Getty: vale_t )

"Stigma is about stereotypes and preconceptions, and we have preconceptions about wealthy neighbourhoods as much as we have about poor neighbourhoods," Dr Wiesel says.

And he says those preconceptions seem to change, depending on a person's sex.

Dr Wiesel says many older men say living in affluent suburbs is "a sign of their own success, their business success, their professional success".

Not so for women he has interviewed from the same areas.

"They'll say, 'I'm from the eastern suburbs' or 'I'm from the northern suburbs', avoiding actually saying Toorak or Mosman," he says.

"They felt they were being judged as privileged; that it wasn't a sign of their own success but rather their father's success or their husband's success; that they have inherited that privilege.

"And there was negative stigma associated with it, that they are self-entitled."

While Dr Wiesel says any stigma can have a real impact on people's lives, it's important to acknowledge that negative stigma in affluent areas coincides with "a lot of privileges that you earn by living in those neighbourhoods in terms of access to facilities [and] the networks that you have around you".

Whereas in poorer neighbourhoods, he says, that negative stigma compounds "many other forms of disadvantage".

'I was told to avoid the west side of the river'

When Nic Healey arrived in Dubbo earlier this year he was warned by numerous people about where not to rent a house.

Nic Healy, who presents radio for ABC Western Plains, "totally ignored" warnings about living in West Dubbo. ( Supplied: Nic Healy )

"I was told to avoid the west side of the river, West Dubbo," says Nic, who presents breakfast radio for ABC Western Plains.

"People said it was a bit rough — the phrase I heard a couple of times was 'Wild West Dubbo'."

But the best rental he could find was in West Dubbo, so he "totally ignored" the warnings, first renting and more recently buying into the area.

"You could not get a more friendly area and I'm a bit stunned that it still has a bit of a rep," he says.

Which is not to say he believes suburb warnings are never warranted.

Nic says he was "an inner-westie in Sydney for ages", living in Surry Hills in the 1990s "when people were telling me ... it's nothing but junkies and slums".

"It's where I saw my first dead body, so they weren't entirely wrong," he adds.

He was also "mugged a couple of times" in Redfern, back when that was "regarded as a very rough area of Sydney".

"So sometimes these warnings do have an actual meaning to them," he says.

But, Nic argues that "every town, wherever you are, is going to have some areas that are doing less well than other areas".

The important question, he says, is whether that makes an area a place to avoid, or whether "that should be the area where we're concentrating resources and empathy".

He believes how you answer that question will "depend on how you see the world around you and how want to change that world around you".

Changing the narrative – or running with the stigma

So can a community reinvent its image, or band together and change the narrative?

Dr Wickes believes to achieve that would require "a lot of funding" and "a lot of goodwill from people who have access to the means to be able to make change".

But it is possible.

About a decade ago, the Mayor of Logan, south of Brisbane, set out to change the area's reputation.

Dr Wickes says he "made an absolute policy change to have a more socially inclusive area" and to be more economically inclusive — an idea marketed to all residents.

"That was really backed up with a set of policies and practices that were geared towards creating socially and economically inclusive spaces for the residents of Logan," Dr Wickes says.

And it's had an impact.

"I think that you could find some evidence to say that over time Logan's stigma has decreased and it is seen as an area where there are affordable homes, where there is access to employment, and that that diversity is actually a good thing, not a bad thing in that area," she says.

There's also the option of taking your suburb's stigma and running with it.

That's what residents of the Wollongong suburb of Albion Park did after it was included on a list of the 10 "most bogan suburbs" in Australia.

Claim the Ugg boot, claim the stigma. ( Getty: southerlycourse )

Instead of rejecting the label, residents appropriated it, and proposed to their local council that a giant Ugg boot statue be erected in the centre of town in celebration of their bogan-ness.

"I think it's a good example of how you can actually take the stigma and turn it over its head really," Dr Wiesel says.