Mid-rise residential buildings as high as 10 storeys are coming to the suburbs, thanks to an excellent new state policy aimed at making the best use of railway stations.
But of the nine Newcastle-area stations that the new zoning will apply to, two must eventually be moved and one may be abolished. So it's obvious that state planners thought for no more than five minutes before choosing the places for densification and didn't bother to consider the long term.
They never do.
Then there's the insulting bit: the policy won't apply to several of our stations that are higher priorities for greater density. Why? Because they're not on the rail line to Sydney. The chosen stations all are, you see.
So this is a Sydney-centric policy, treating Newcastle as a far-flung dormitory cluster of the state capital. We've seen that before in this Labor government's planning policies.
But let's look first at the positive side of the changes, which are the responsibility of Planning and Public Spaces Minister Paul Scully and his department.
We absolutely must make intense use of land around stations. Railways are valuable, loss-making public assets with enormous capacity to transport people and therefore relieve pressure on roads. We'll need that capacity in the decades ahead.
In fact, a criticism of the policy is that it applies only within about 400 metres of stations, whereas people will walk a bit farther than that to a public transport stop.
Another argument in favour of the policy is that the greater the number of people who live in flats, the less the competition for detached houses. So, if you hope that you or someone close to you can buy a nice bungalow, you should welcome the policy.
It is in fact one of two big planning changes that the state has implemented to increase density and improve housing supply.
The first, introduced in December, was a size bonus of 20-30 per cent if projects included 10-15 per cent affordable housing - homes reserved for inexpensive rental to people of modest income.
Bear in mind that developers will sometimes push and shove to get an extra 5 per cent floor area or height, only to hear a council say "No." And here's the state allowing a whopping 30 per cent.
Now it's also lifting basic (pre-bonus) floor-area and height limits around certain stations in and around Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong. In return, developers must allocate just 2 per cent of their buildings to affordable housing, though that fraction will rise.
Starting from the Sydney end, which is obviously how state planners view them, the Newcastle-area stations are Morisset, Booragul, Teralba, Cockle Creek, Cardiff, Kotara, Adamstown, Hamilton and Newcastle Interchange.
Formerly, the basic limit on floor-area might have allowed a typical lot of, say, 550 square metres to accommodate one detached house or maybe three townhouses. Now the up-zoning will allow about 15 flats on the same lot, assuming the land is part of a multi-lot development. Height limits will allow not the former two or three storeys but six or seven.
But that's before bonuses. Developers easily get an extra 10 per cent for 'excellence in design' (even if the excellence is hard to spot). And then there's the bonus of up to 30 per cent for including more affordable housing.
That takes multi-lot developments to nine or 10 storeys and about 22 flats per 550 square metres of land. Now that's the sort of densification that makes the most use of a station.
But it becomes pointless if the station eventually isn't there.
Kotara Station obviously needs to shift one kilometre east to serve the big residential and employment zone that's planned for the site of Kotara Homemaker Centre. The only reason it isn't moving now is because the state is never keen on spending money in Newcastle.
Cockle Creek station is badly placed for access to the Boolaroo redevelopment zone where the big new buildings should obviously go. The station needs to move about 400 meters northeast, so let's hope the new zoning there, which isn't finalised, doesn't extend southwest.
And it's perfectly obvious to anyone who looks more than a few years into the future, as planners are supposed to, that Booragul station will at some point be a candidate for closure. It's on a loop that skirts the hill between Teralba and Fassifern and which adds two kilometres to the length of the line. Trains have to slow down for the curves, too.
One day the state will surely look at rebuilding the line so trains go straight over the hill (as they once did) or through it - and that would leave the planned Booragul high-density zone without the station it was built for.
Or are we to assume that creating high-density dependency on Booragul station will ensure that the loop can never be removed?
And they call that planning.
If there's a proposal instead to remove part of the loop by expensively diverting the line between Fassifern and Booragul, running it directly across difficult terrain, no one has said so.
You may well ask why we would be worried about densification at Booragul but not around Waratah station, just 3.6 kilometres from the West End. But that question seems not to have occurred to anyone in the Sydney offices of the Department of Planning and Environment.
Nor does the department seem to realise that land near Warabrook station, six kilometres from the city centre, should also accommodate many more people, who would enjoy lovely views of the pond there as well as rail access.
Then there are several stations around booming Maitland that could and should be serving far more people than they are now.
But none of those are on the line to Sydney, you see. So it seems they don't count.
