Fishermans Bend - the new gold rush
The stroke of a pen created a property gold rush, but who profited?
PT1M33S 620 349Go behind the success of Southbank's waterfront fine-dining and culture precinct, to its residential hinterlands beyond City Road, and you are in a dead zone – a windswept jungle of concrete apartment towers.
This area of Melbourne might be partly zoned "mixed use", but there is only one use here: residential skyscrapers.
It is a planning black hole where developers chose to build the highest, densest, most-profitable towers the government of the day would allow.
Fishermans Bend is doomed to repeat the planning mistakes of Southbank. Photo: Wayne Taylor
And it's a fiasco the state government risks repeating in neighbouring Fishermans Bend – Australia's largest urban renewal project in the industrial areas of Port Melbourne and South Melbourne.
When Southbank's renewal began in 1992, its tentative embrace of medium-rise housing soon morphed into a grand experiment in open-slather high rise. A 2014 report found Southbank's forest of skyscrapers would be unacceptable in cities as dense as New York, Hong Kong or Tokyo.
Largely planned by developers, Southbank now has an array of isolated towers that achieves terrific density but functions as a collection of vertical gated communities.
Today, the suburb is in large part a place for the upwardly mobile or those with no other option – in many towers, students pile into apartments never meant for more than one or two occupants. The Age showed last year this had become so extreme that a tent on a balcony was for rent.
Parkland? Forget it. There is virtually none to speak of. And some Southbank apartments now sit unoccupied because they are investments kept free of pesky renters. As one architect put it this week, "it's just a stack of real estate security boxes".
For two decades, Southbank has been a model of how not to plan a new suburb.
And yet, as two candidates for Port Phillip Council pointed out this week, Melbourne is poised to repeat these exact mistakes at Fishermans Bend.
In 2012, then planning minister Matthew Guy created Fishermans Bend, shocking all but a few property insiders by rezoning 250 hectares of land next to the city. A scathing review of that rezoning last year by a Labor-appointed panel found it was unprecedented in the developed world in the 21st century".
In the developer frenzy that has followed, 15 towers have been approved. The first, a 29-storey apartment tower, is now being built. Another 20 high-rise applications sit on the now Planning Minister Richard Wynne's desk.
Those already approved were given the nod before much thought was given to decontamination, transport, open space or affordable housing.
Last year, Mr Wynne brought a halt to the unfettered development, introducing temporary height limits for the area, and creating a new employment zone that he hopes will foster a knowledge economy.
But his own experts found that, within 12 weeks of him introducing those temporary height limits, a rush of 11 development applications went in.
It will be another 18 months before a permanent strategy guides the suburb's future, and for large parts of the area it is already game over – massive towers are approved.
In the time before permanent controls arrive, as architect and Port Phillip Council hopeful David Brand predicted this week, there will be applications for more 40-level towers – the maximum height that's allowed for an area dubbed "Montague" in South Melbourne.
Unless warnings from local community group the Fishermans Bend Network are heeded – of a temporary hold on tower applications that will overwhelm neighbourhoods – repeating the mistakes of Southbank appears all but certain.
The development community won't like that, meaning the state government probably won't either.
An upcoming book on Melbourne by RMIT academics including Professor Michael Buxton describes how Melbourne has jumped to the forefront of international high-rise development, and that this is placing a great strain on the city, because of short-term decision-making and a lack of planning.
What a sad trend for the world's most liveable city to be leading.
Clay Lucas is The Age's city editor
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