Raquel Lingam

We've lived here for 2 years, moving to Gold Coast in a couple months for Hubby's work. Young couple with a toddler and 2 dogs.

It's a great suburb for value for money, especially after starting out on the north side of Brisbane, we are renting a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom home with a large yard for $350 per week.

There are heaps of schools and childcare places to choose from, Redbank Plaza is great, and Orion and Riverlink are not too far away. You can commute to Brisbane City or Ipswich quite easily, about 30 minute drive to Brisbane and 20 minutes to Ipswich.

Public transport is okay, but not great. There is one bus that goes through riverview, and it rarely runs on time, either early or late. There is also the train station, but we are about a 30min uphill walk from Riverview station, and it is not very accessible for pranks or wheel chairs as there is no lift to get over the tracks, if you need to cross you have to spend about 10 minutes walking down the road and then under the tracks. Getting to Springfield is quite time consuming, by train you have to switch at Darra, and by bus you can either switch at Redbank Plaza or Goodna station, the journey including waiting times is usually about 1 hour 30 minutes either way.

We love that there is more bush and trees than most of the new estates, but the parks are often taken over by misbehaving teens, and the bush trails are abused by people on dirt bikes, which the police seem to not really care about.

There is a neighborhood watch, but that seems to be just more of a social thing for the few residents that participate rather than actually preventing crime. The newsletter often reports stolen items, break ins and vandalism and they aren't allowed to print everything that happens.

Most of the time the Neighbourhood is quiet and peaceful, unfortunately there are a few houses that like to party, with very loud music playing till late in the night and drunk people yelling out and sometimes fighting with each other. There are also quite a few hoons in the area, some of which speed around, other just have extremely noisy cars.

Also the newer houses are very cheaply built, the ones on stilts shake and wobble, whether it's windy or you're just walking down the hallway.

The climate is not great, it gets very cold at night and very hot in the day. Winter nights and summer days are awful. But there usually are good breezes which are nice on the more temperate days. Also it seems to either rain constantly or not at all, and the soil quality is terrible, I do not recommend living here if you like to have a nice lawn and garden.

All in all I do not regret living here, but I wouldn't plan on staying here for long.

I would recommend this suburb for family's with kids, and probably retirees, but just make sure you check out the neighbors around the house your looking at.

If you are moving here or already moved here I would suggest getting connected with the neighborhood watch, and the community center on Old Ipswich Road. There are a lot of little events and weekly get togethers that you may enjoy.