It was love at first sight when Sydney and I met properly a dozen years ago. I fell hard with the sort of giddy infatuation that makes it easy to overlook the odd flaw or two, and to blithely ignore those flaws even as they crumbled into mighty chasms over the subsequent years.

But now I’m ending things and moving out. And let me be clear: it’s not me, Sydney. It’s you.

There are a lot of little things that have been bugging me for a while. The wholesale destruction of the night time entertainment scene, especially for live music, on exaggerated public safety grounds that just so happened to free up prime real estate at firesale prices to be picked over by the government’s developer mates, was one sign of how little this city cares for the people that live in it.

But that wasn’t the tipping point – well, not completely.

There’s also the way that the city has been blithely looking to make a quick buck by selling off priceless pieces of its heritage – whether it’s the Sirius Apartments or the Powerhouse Museum – with no plan other than “how swiftly can we convert this public asset into private profit?” It used to horrify me, but that shock has long since curdled from anger to sorrow to deep, unrelenting disgust.

So has the deliberate scuttling of public transport corridors in favour of WestConnex, with the state government essentially imposing a new tax on the western suburbs for the privilege of being able to get to work. That perhaps more than anything shows precisely how little this place cares about the environment, its people or its own future.

Even the things that I love about the place aren’t enough any more.

Getting to the beach or the Opera House or the Art Gallery or Taronga has become longer and more difficult with roadworks and the future white elephant light rail. And trying to get about on the overcrowded trains with a toddler usually involves carrying prams up stairs at the station – a massive wheelchair accessibility problem which just about every other Australian city dealt with decades ago – making it comprehensively more hassle than it’s worth. What sort of city penalises its inhabitants for wanting to actively enjoy living there?

The biggest factor, though, was the most predictable. Housing prices – specifically, the spiralling rent increases since buying had long ago ceased to be an option for our two professional income household.

The final straw was realising that renting a large enough property within our budget for our growing family would sentence my wife, who works in the CBD, to a commute that would begin before our son was up in the morning and end after he’d gone to sleep.

Any city that would require a parent to not see their own child during the working week as a prerequisite for living there is demanding the slow suicide of families. That stuff ends marriages and poisons children. Sydney, you’re pretty and everything, but you’re not remotely worth that.

So we’re out of here. We’re heading to Adelaide, where we can get some mental, financial and physical space that is never going to happen in a city run by developers, where public transport is deliberately being set up to fail, where things like “walking in your neighbourhood” or “getting to work” or “not living in a cockroach-infested s–thole” are treated as privileges you have to earn.

When I left A-town it was a national punchline; now it seems like an oasis of arts and culture with a lifestyle that Sydney reserves for its most criminal millionaires. Just being able to play with my son in a park that isn’t already earmarked for a private townhouse development will be a thrilling change.

We’re impossibly lucky. We have options. And one is to get the hell away from a city that actively punishes people for living in it.