The unlikely Sydney suburb in line for new 30-storey towers

A plan to build 1200 apartments in Five Dock in towers up to 30 storeys high is among dozens of large proposals filed with state planners, bypassing local councils, under the government’s new bonus scheme for infill affordable housing.

The Herald counted more than 13,000 dwellings contained in 40 development applications lodged with the Planning Department seeking to use height and floor space bonuses of up to 30 per cent introduced by Premier Chris Minns late last year.

There is a proposal to build 1191 apartments in towers up to 30 storeys along Parramatta Road in Five Dock.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Many are in their early stages, with little detail available, and several are modifications to earlier proposals already approved at a smaller scale. The projects are dotted across Sydney, including in Rhodes, Crows Nest/North Sydney and Chatswood, and in Wollongong and northern NSW.

On Parramatta Road in Five Dock, Deicorp wants to build 1191 units in six towers up to 30 storeys, making it one of the largest single proposals filed to date. The developer reportedly purchased the “super site” for $260 million last year.

Deicorp is seeking to apply the full 30 per cent bonus brought in by Labor, meaning 15 per cent of the units would need to be leased out as affordable housing; that is, at below-market rates for at least 15 years.

The suburb nine kilometres west of Sydney CBD is getting a metro station, due to open in 2032, and Canada Bay Council has been tasked with completing 5000 new homes by mid-2029.

‘We have to be careful … we don’t want to be transformed into a Chatswood or a Burwood.’

Canada Bay mayor Michael Megna

The proposed towers are in the so-called Kings Bay precinct of Parramatta Road, an area packed with car yards, petrol stations and sheds that was earmarked for renewal in 2016 under the state government-led Parramatta Road Corridor Urban Transformation Strategy.

Canada Bay’s Liberal mayor Michael Megna said the Deicorp proposal would go through the state government, and was broadly in line with what council expected on that part of Parramatta Road. But he did not want high-density creeping into low-rise streets further back from the highway.

“We have to be careful that the dominoes don’t start falling, or being built,” Megna said. “You just can’t have that because once there’s one, they’ll want more. Before you know it, it’ll be a metropolis in suburbia. We don’t want to be transformed into a Chatswood or a Burwood.”

The winning design, by Turner Studio, for a 1191-apartment development proposal in Five Dock, which would see buildings of 30 storeys come to the suburb.Credit: DPHI planning portal

Elsewhere, some of the larger projects lodged in the state planning system under the incentive scheme include 906 apartments in Wollongong, 220 of which are slated to be affordable, 930 dwellings in Tweed Heads and 479 units in two 36-storey towers in Penrith.

Holdmark Property Group is also using the bonus in new plans submitted for its massive redevelopment of the former Melrose Park industrial area, just west of Meadowbank. Nearly 2500 apartments are planned for the “south” part of the precinct.

Planning Department secretary Kiersten Fishburn told a recent Urban Development Institute of Australia industry lunch the scheme had yielded a “really terrific response” and outperformed expectations.

“We had been anticipating we would get about 25 applications in a year. We have significantly more than that. We’ve got close to 50 in various stages of assessment,” she said.

However, as of late July, only two proposals were close to final assessment, and both were lodged under an old incentive scheme rather than Minns’ new rules. The first project to seek the Minns bonus is a revision to an existing approval in Dee Why, seeking to increase the height of the development and lift the number of apartments from 219 to 280.

It is currently awaiting the developer, Landmark, to respond to submissions against the proposal. That included an objection from Northern Beaches Council, which said it was “concerned that the additional height and bulk is inconsistent with the urban form delivered through the Dee Why Town Centre Master Plan”.

Another objector, Julie Gledhill of Newport, said the development would overshadow the adjacent Stoney Range Reserve, a home to local wildlife. “It’s the oldest ploy in the developers’ book, get approval, then push for more,” she wrote.

Minns recently spoke of the need to speed up the planning system, pledging to weed out bureaucracy, red tape and “unreasonableness”.

The government has also promised to publish a league table showing how long the Planning Department takes to assess state significant projects such as the aforementioned affordable housing projects.

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