Parramatta Road plans leaving community, developers in limbo: Urban Taskforce
GUEST OBSERVER
The NSW Government has produced a number of plans for development along Parramatta Road over three years yet the community and developers are still uncertain about when statutory plans will be ready.
Recent media reports that communities are uncertain about potential development seem to blame developers for looking at the sites the government has identified for development.
Our developer members have followed the governments lead in looking at development on the very sites the government has nominated for urban renewal.
The latest plan for the New Parramatta Road defines quite specific heights on individual sites (i.e. average 14 storeys – max 25). The Plan includes a Draft Parramatta Road Urban Design Guidelines that ‘provide a consistent urban design framework against which land use and development assessment decisions can be made.’ The guidelines include very specific diagrams of building envelopes with set-backs and heights including the areas of taller buildings above 4 storeys.
Rather than developers being the aggressor in the potential urban renewal of Parramatta Road the problem is that the governments planning strategies are so detailed that they are creating a change in the value of land and understandably owners are looking to capitalise on this.
The development industry is being given very precise indications by government as to which sites across metropolitan Sydney are available for redevelopment but it then seems to take years before final zoning is gazetted.
In the case of Parramatta Road the process has already taken three years and the latest planning document indicates that development applications will be from 2018 onwards.
See below plan of a potential development site on Parramatta Road indicating the degree of detail the government’s plan includes:
Chris Johnson is chief executive officer of property development industry group Urban Taskforce and can be contacted here.