Development application Casey

Not sure why people would want to live in a 45 unit complex in Casey. There are many other such developments close to shopping centres, transport links and work rather than being stuck out there.

Your’re fracked! Sorry to be blunt.

Yeah well there going up all around me, one being built across the road now, looks like I will have to close curtains more often.

(not sure where the quote button has gone) Sticking up random blocks of apartments in suburbs is not going to make Canberra into Paris. Hell, they’ve made wall-to-wall blocks of flats in Kinston, and it’s not Paris either.

Now, if they planned it out properly (cannot fathom what the P stands for in ACTPLA), they might be able to create a fake Paris by building lots of blocks of apartments together, but plonking them next to normal houses is not the way to go. They should not do it. I guess someone is going to get rich out of it.

It would still be worthwhile having a look at their plans and checking how many carparks they are allocating etc. You can quite legitimately send in a comment on there not being enough parks for the properties, if that will clog a small street with parking, or if paths and driveways will be directly opposite your house or on blind corners (and could be better sited elsewhere etc).

You can also check that they are within the stated limits – 3 storeys. Developers are prone to pushing their luck in Canberra and hoping noone notices.

Imagine if you will… if Canberran NIMBYs had been around when the great cities of the world were being built!

Imagine most European cities that currently have 4 and more storeys cheek by jowel over cobbled laneways… replaced by insipid separate dwellings that the average Canberran seems to value so highly…

Imagine travelling to New York and exploring the vibrant streets of the lower east side, Queens, the Bronx etc, full of idyllic little dog boxes with the owners carefully synchronising their Victas to last all weekend…

Imagine attending the Notting Hill Festival in London and seeing not a character-filled road with people enjoying their joie-de-vivre from balconies overlooking the revelry, but a bunch of suburbanites yelling out that they can’t hear the bloody cricket on the plasma…

Imagine you had a choice of an apartment on the Champs-Elysees, or a soul-destroying little dogbox in a meaning less street in a meaningless suburb full of rows and rows of ticky tacky houses in Los Angeles… or for that matter in Gungahlin.

There’s more to life than a doggy little dogbox on a doggy little Gungahlin suburb with a carefully tended 35 sq metres of lawn you can’t do any meaningful thing on, in a street of insipid rugby league-following public bloody servants whose idea of an exciting night is to take the back road to the Gungahlin Lakes Club for a tasteless serve of club food, whose life is so empty that when a building that does not conform to their outdated desire for monotonous suburbia is proposed they threaten to move out because life is going to be so terrible…

The OP would appear to be a glass half empty type, an opportune whinger rather than an optimist.

Thanks for clarifying Deadly. So to answer my original post question, since I should have read the ACT block plan properly, there is not really any point complaining – I’ll just suck-it-up 🙂

I’ll just use this place as a rental in 2012 when they finish building the monstrosity. Hell, judging from the developers promotion of the “October 2010 rent assessment”, a 2 bdrm box in Casey rents at $400-430 a week!! Imagine the rental returns in 2012……

If you have a look at page 21 of that document you will see it specifically divides those b8/b9 areas into Multi Unit (light red) and Medium Density (dark red). The block in question is dark red, while the ones around it are light red.

It seems these correspond to the RZ3 (light red) and RZ4 (dark red) planning zones. Which are:
RZ3 – 2 storeys + basement + attic up to 8.5m tall
RZ4 – 3 storeys + basement + attic up to 12m tall

So unfortunately thats why this block can have a big set of apartments where those other blocks only have town houses.

What are you complaining about? They are beautiful dog boxes.

Perhaps its just my (mis)-interpretation:according to the scribbles on this
http://www.actpla.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/19795/TA2010-31.pdf
(marked as page 23 of the document)
The land is marked (B9 – medium density)
But two other blocks marked the same (b9) (near the block in question) are just standard town houses, with those “satellite” units above the garage. So I may have incorrectly assumed it only meant two story – on earlier pages the block in question is marked dark maroon.