SAVE WILLIAMSTOWN
SAVE WILLIAMSTOWN
Reform locks up our suburbs
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/reform-locks-up-our-suburbs-20140614-3a4l4.html
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Plan Melbourne series: winners and losers
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/plan-melbourne-series-winners-and-losers-20140621-3al86.html
“A city bristling with three times as many high-rise towers as today. Twenty-storey apartment buildings along commercial strips in the suburbs. Continued sprawl on Melbourne's fringes, where there are few services and little transport. And a sea of single-dwelling housing in a low- rise middle suburbia, swaths of which have reached the end of their utility but will be uneconomic to redevelop.
Welcome to Melbourne's housing future under the Napthine government's new planning policy.
Released in draft form last October, Plan Melbourne, with its new residential zones - Neighbourhood (where development is highly restricted), General (where some low-rise development is possible) and Growth (where medium and higher density is permitted) - comes into effect in three weeks.
The Sunday Age has made a special investigation, comparing the ambitious scope of the policy, including its stated aim to enable the construction of at least another 1.5 million dwellings, with its imminent reality.
Over three weeks, we will examine how the reality of Melbourne under the new zones will be very different from the development regime of the past decade - and what it means for you. Plan Melbourne will mean fundamental changes to how neighbourhoods look, and to the value of many people's homes.
House prices in suburbs close to the city, and older suburbs in the south-east will continue to rise as the wealthy flock to their amenities - transport, schools, hospitals - and historic streetscapes, planning experts say.
But elsewhere, the growth in home values is predicted to flatten as subdivisions decline, and many owners are unable to unlock the value of their land.
Meanwhile, Melbourne's population is predicted to grow significantly. Where will they be accommodated? In high-rise towers in the city and in commercial areas in the suburbs, and on the urban fringe.
If that seems like a win for the not-in-my-backyarders and save-our-suburbs activists who feared neighbourhood amenity would be destroyed by medium-density development, their celebrations may be tempered by the reality that their housing value has also been reduced - a key asset in ......”
Saturday, 14 June 2014
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