This was published 11 months ago
Frankston’s future as luxe bayside suburb a distant dream in derelict town centre
Underloved Frankston is having a moment in the sun, with a byelection due in March and big plans brewing for the city centre. But not everyone is happy.
By Adam Carey
A group of friends cross the Kananook Creek footbridge towards Frankston Pier.Credit: Justin McManus
It’s a Tuesday afternoon in January, the mercury has nudged past 30 degrees and Frankston beach is pumping.
Teenagers leap off the end of the pier into blue water; kids splash around their parents’ knees; people prop under an umbrella’s shade or lay towels on the hot sand and sun themselves to the soundtrack of droning jet skis cutting through the water.
Forty kilometres across Port Phillip Bay, Melbourne’s CBD skyline shimmers in the summer haze, mirage-like.
This is fringe suburbia, the last stop on an hour-long train ride from Flinders Street, but the view from the arched footbridge over the mouth of Kananook Creek is like a scene from a resort town.
Frankston is having a moment in the sun.
A federal byelection will happen on March 2, triggered by the death of popular local Labor MP Peta Murphy from breast cancer in December.
The City of Frankston’s pro-development mayor, Nathan Conroy, has been preselected as Liberal candidate, and will run against Labor contender Jodie Belyea, founder of a local support group for disadvantaged women.
Conroy has championed two proposed high-end apartment towers on Nepean Highway that would overlook Frankston Beach; the 16-storey Pace development and the 14-storey Harbour building, each of which would exceed the height of any current local building.
Developers have begun to wake to Frankston’s potential to shrug off its stubborn battler tag. The luxe, nine-storey Horizon building – a new landmark – is due to open next month, four years after buyers bought off the plan.
“People are looking at that going, ‘Oh my God, it’s amazing’. You’ve got the pub over the road, you’ve got the beach. Why wouldn’t you move in there?” state MP Paul Edbrooke says.
Long Island, a narrow stretch of land between Kananook Creek and Frankston Beach, is at the centre of a campaign against two proposed apartment towers. Credit: Justin McManus
But the two proposed waterfront towers have split the community. Edbrooke, for one, is not buying the developers’ pitch of “a lifestyle like no other”.
“It’s good to see Frankston moving ahead but when we start looking at individual plans that overshadow existing structures in Frankston, tower above existing buildings and don’t take into account that the best asset in Frankston is the beach, that’s our jewel in the crown. I think we’ve got a bit of a problem,” he says.
Opposition to the towers is most visible on “Long Island”, a narrow strip of land between the foreshore and Kananook Creek, which residents of the two towers would look down upon. Many front fences of the area’s low-rise houses bear “Stop the Great Wall of Frankston” posters.
Russell Kerr, a former teacher at Frankston High, has lived on Long Island for more than 10 years. He fears both the council and state government have been sweet-talked into backing two inappropriate towers that will enrich the developer, house a few already wealthy people, but do nothing to address the area’s wider housing shortage.
Long Island resident Russell Kerr argues Frankston’s foreshore is the wrong site for tall towers. Credit: Justin McManus
“There’s a big push to get these buildings up, obviously the state government want to look like they’re doing something superficially on the housing front,” he says.
“This is disturbing because it’s not addressing the needs of young people and the people that need affordable housing in Frankston.”
A rival group to the towers’ opponents emerged in October, arguing the towers will give Frankston’s languishing CBD a desperately needed economic boost.
“We need some hope,” Advance Frankston group member Trudy Poole says. “Once Harbour and Pace are approved, Frankston will just go whoosh.”
Poole has lived in the area for 38 years and says too many parts of the CBD are derelict, their streets blighted by shuttered shopfronts and vacant buildings.
She blames a lack of direction from the council over many years, arguing the long-term failure to commit to a structure plan for the CBD has scared developers away.
A shuttered business on Nepean Highway in Frankston.Credit: Justin McManus
Poole and her Advance Frankston colleague Garry Ebbott meet The Age outside the 12-storey Quest building on Nepean Highway. Next door is a vacant shopfront that has recently been occupied by squatters.
Over the road, heavily tagged hoarding walls barricade the demolished former cinema site where Pace’s 16-storey proposal – announced two years ago but not approved by council – awaits a hearing at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
Poole, who founded a breakfast club for Frankston’s homeless population five years ago, holds out hope that these two high-end waterfront buildings will encourage other developers to build more affordable housing in the CBD, even though the Pace and Harbour apartments are targeted at wealthy buyers.
“Once we get a little bit of classy development in here then you’ll get people. You’ve got to have a mixture, not just one socioeconomic group,” she says. Poole and her friend Ebbott have both separately bought a unit in the Horizon building.
“We want to age in place. Our kids all live around the area,” she says.
Advance Frankston members Trudy Poole and Garry Ebbott outside the new Horizon building, which they will both move into next month. Credit: Justin McManus
Both the Horizon building and the proposed Harbour building are projects of developer Urban DC.
Founding director Danny Ciarma bristles at the charge that his projects ignore the need for more affordable housing in Frankston, arguing that “the daisy chain of the property market” increases affordability whenever new housing is built.
“It doesn’t matter where you put stock into the supply chain; it creates an opening,” he says. “So this business, this bullshit that these luxury apartments do not do anything for affordable housing, it does.
“Horizon puts 71 more apartments into the market … that frees up 71 houses of all diverse groups.”
From pretty to pretty vacant
One kilometre inland from the beach, at the eastern end of the CBD, dreams of luxe Frankston living seem distant indeed.
The suburb’s glinting white train station has been rebuilt following an architectural competition. Young Street has had a facelift, with palm trees planted in its median, but the revamp hasn’t brightened the street scene opposite the station.
Young Street, opposite Frankston Station, has been revamped.Credit: Justin McManus
Shops – those that are not vacant – are a mix of pawnbrokers, fast food outlets and discount stores. People linger, but few are buying.
A man sits on the footpath, cigarette butt in one hand, talking to himself. A woman stands outside the 7/11 entrance, begging. Another has nodded off on a bench, her chin slumped against her chest.
A man asks me, beneath his breath, if I’m chasing heroin. Shirtless young men stand on street corners, periodically walking down the area’s laneways towards Bayside Shopping Centre, where five uniformed security guards stand watch.
The network of laneways between the station and the shopping centre has been spruced up by council, with street art murals and a bluestone walk celebrating Frankston’s hall of fame inductees.
Here, among the charity stores and pawnbrokers offering unsecured loans, green shoots of new commerce have begun to sprout, including a craft boutique, a bubble tea store and a smartly furnished cafe.
Laughing Lark cafe owner Lisa Pay was lured to the area by the promise that a number of other businesses would open nearby at the same time, but says that fell over. Her cafe still faces a row of vacant shops.
“The whole of Frankston is vacant,” she says.
Pay would like to see those empty shops pulled down and replaced by apartments.
“It would bring life to all the businesses that are here, and hopefully new businesses would open. It’s such a gorgeous area, I feel like we’re wasting it,” she says.
Inside a Young Street discount store, Gopalakrishnan Neelakandan stands behind the counter, guarding the goods from shoplifters. He emigrated from Chennai to Melbourne last year with his wife, who is a nurse at Frankston Hospital.
They are looking for a home in Frankston, but the search is difficult, he says. For now, they have settled in Cranbourne East, about 30 kilometres away.
The push for urban renewal in Frankston
Statistically, Frankston is slightly older and poorer and significantly less multicultural than most other municipalities in Melbourne.
“Frankston is a little bit like Geelong, but 15 years behind,” Edbrooke says.
Melbourne’s story in the 21st century has been one of rapid population growth and increasing cultural diversity. Between 2001 and 2021, the city’s population swelled by 1.6 million people to 4.91 million, and the proportion of overseas-born residents grew from 28 per cent to 40 per cent, census data shows.
But the City of Frankston has had little part to play in this tale. Its population grew by just 30,000, while the proportion of overseas-born residents rose modestly, from 21 per cent to 26 per cent.
Yet Frankston has a housing shortage, despite its sluggish growth rate.
Analysis for the council found that just 4 per cent of rental properties in the local government area are classified as affordable for low-income earners.
The streets are still dominated by large, detached houses, with few options for small households, such as villa units, townhouses and apartments.
“If no changes are made to the balance of dwelling sizes over the next 15 years, it is likely that the dwelling needs of the future community will not be met,” the council warns in its draft housing strategy, which is due to be finalised late this year.
The strategy hopes to address the shortage primarily by building up in the CBD, which currently has a low number of apartments.
At its next meeting, Frankston council will move forward on its plan to more than double the bayside suburb’s population in the next 15 years, with an aim to build at least 9000 new homes and transform the mostly low-rise city centre into a bayside Box Hill.
The new “structure plan” for central Frankston reimagines the underdeveloped heart of the suburb, between the station and the beach, as one of Melbourne’s major urban centres, brought to life with new apartment buildings and townhouses, as well as thriving retail and office spaces.
Preferred building heights in the precinct would vary from three to 16 storeys, depending on location, the council plans show.
On this vision, the council and the state government are in unison. The Allan government in September designated Frankston as one of 10 priority hubs for housing intensification, where it aims to build a total 60,000 homes in the next decade.
This month, the Victorian Planning Authority announced it has begun to scope out the Frankston Activity Centre for more housing.
The authority and the Department of Transport and Planning are reviewing building heights and design rules for the area “to allow for more high-quality and affordable homes to be built in the neighbourhood”, the authority said.
“We’re introducing clear new rules so that more high-quality homes can be built in Frankston, close to all the services, jobs and transport it has to offer.”
The state government is moving to assume planning controls for Frankston by the end of 2024, and the council voted narrowly to approve its own structure plan for central Frankston in June.
Conroy – who took leave from his mayoral position this week to campaign in the byelection, and declined The Age’s interview request – was among five councillors who voted for the planning scheme amendment, including its preferred 12-storey height limits between Nepean Highway and Kananook Creek.
Conroy has called the planning amendment the “biggest thing to happen to Frankston in 20 years”, arguing it will give developers clear direction on land use and building design and “provide better connection to our prized assets of Kananook Creek and the waterfront”.
Three councillors voted against the amendment and one abstained.
Golding’s view.Credit: Illustration: Matt Golding
Councillor Claire Harvey, the solitary abstainer in the vote, said she was concerned that the Pace and Harbour developments could undermine efforts to renew the rest of the city centre.
“It could disincentivise building where it’s more suitable, which is closer to the station and on the other side of Nepean Highway,” she said.
“People don’t want to lose their views … once higher buildings go up in that precinct, it becomes less appealing for every other developer to build in our actual city centre.”
One kilometre south along the beach from Long Island, past the dunes and the colourful beach boxes, Langwarrin couple Daniel and Lisa Korsak are stretched out on beach towels, relaxing in the blazing sun.
They bought into the area 10 years ago because the housing was affordable.
The pair have followed the debate about Frankston’s “great wall”, and believe the waterfront high-rises would give their city the shot in the arm it needs.
Langwarrin residents Daniel and Lisa Korsak, pictured on Frankston beach, believe the towers would bring life to the CBD.Credit: Justin McManus
“We’re not nimbys, we’re yimbys,” Daniel says. “All the services are here: you’ve got the university, TAFE, the train station and shopping centre, but a lot of the businesses here, they tend to struggle.
“Having more residents living within the CBD will support a better economy ... You live in an urban area, you can’t expect things to stay the same.”
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