its planning future has been locked in.
🔑Presumably somebody has the key, because the infrastructure it unlocks does not arrive until 2055.
The Victorian Government has just announced the Fishermans Bend Development Contributions Plan (DCP).
🎯The release promises 117 infrastructure projects, staged across three decades, to support 16,300 proposed dwellings.
This is Victorian #headlinedevelopment in its purest form: a delivery framework for a precinct that has spent fourteen years failing to launch. 🚀
In September last year I called it an abandoned pipeline. Apparently that was optimistic.
📊 Charter Keck Cramer data shows 2,164 apartments completed, 1,290 underway, and thirty-six projects totalling 12,781 homes abandoned in the precinct.
Most existing built form across Montague and Wirraway sits on permits granted before the government’s own Structure Plan Amendment.
That amendment delivered reduced heights, mandated density caps and higher contributions, with not one dollar of state funding for heavy enabling infrastructure.
Fourteen years in, the government is still “finalising” the Montague Precinct Implementation Plan.
The solution, apparently, is a DCP: shifting the cost of roads, parks and drainage onto future developers.
A development levy only works when projects are commercially viable.
🏢When high-density apartment #feasibility is underwater, adding tens of thousands in DCP fees per dwelling does not build infrastructure. It keeps land vacant and undeveloped.
Presales remain stalled because buyers cannot absorb the cost and there is still no tram or enabling infrastructure.
I’m sure the tram is coming, along with the station, presumably funded in the final tranche.
💰The government can commit $60bn+ to the #suburbanrailloop to unlock an extra 25,000 homes decades away. Yet it has not been able to find $1bn to unlock 40,000 homes on the edge of the CBD.
Promising 117 projects by 2055 is not a delivery plan. It is a thirty-year deferral.
🤔This is what happens when actually administering feasible development is replaced by #planningreform press releaseses.
It’s simple: You cannot levy infrastructure out of projects that do not stack up.
Just like you cannot build apartments with a thirty-year announcement and a press release.