Submission Guide: Croydon TOD Precinct
After 6 months of planning, Burwood council has come back with a master plan for Croydon, as an alternative to the state government’s Transport Oriented Development program. Compared to the original proposal of mid-rise apartments almost everywhere within 400m of the station, their changes include:
No more housing south of the station
No more housing in HCAs north of the station
No more housing north of Presbyterian Ladies College
While the proposal does propose more housing in some places, these areas are located about as far from Croydon station as it’s possible to get and still be in Croydon. Much of the uplift is closer to Burwood than Croydon! Barely making use of the land Croydon station goes against the whole point of the TOD and is not good planning. This whole area is in demand and under-supplied. If the areas 700m from a station can handle an uplift in density, then surely the land directly facing the station can take it as well.
Huge swathes of unremarkable low-density suburbia has been excluded from any uplift on spurious heritage grounds. One of the heritage areas in the area was explicitly found to have:
No strong historical associations with any person or group
No social, cultural or spiritual significant to any community or group
No research potential
Not be rare, even at a local level
Despite this, it was still recommended to be carved out from increased density, because it was a ‘good example of a modest early 20th century housing estate’. Croydon is 20 minutes from Central in a city of more than 5 million people, where the average house costs more than $2 million. We can have affordable housing, or we can preserve unremarkable cottages in prime locations. We can’t do both.
Making a submission
You can make a submission until Monday 18th of November and ask council to do better through:
The form on the Croydon investigation area page,
Emailing council@burwood.nsw.gov.au with the subject heading “Submission on Croydon Housing Investigation Area”
While your submission will eventually passed on to the Planning minster, try directing the submission to the planner as feedback on what’s being proposed. While there is plenty to comment on in the Draft Master Plan itself, it goes a long way to speak from your personal experience and how you’ve been affected by housing affordablity.
Tips for submission
Highlight that it doesn’t make sense to force apartment dwellers to walk past multi-million dollar cottages to get to the train station.
If Croydon can handle development 700m from the station, it can handle development next to the station.
Push back on exclusion of everywhere south of the station and the heritage conservation areas.
This seems to be driven by a consultation from June where only 20 people objected to increased density in these areas!
Highlight that heritage listings come with trade-offs, and Croydon’s “heritage” is unremarkable and unjustifiable given its location and prices.
Note the most well off areas around the station have been left untouched in the master plan.
Push back on additional planning controls including:
Onerous design excellence requirements and design competitions (as per recommendations from a recent Productivity Commission report)
Excessive setbacks
