Residents of a quiet Footscray street are worried that rapid development is threatening to overwhelm their neighbourhood.
A number of new developments are under construction or planned for Stafford Street, an area previously lined with predominantly stand-alone dwellings.
Resident Stephanie Driver said a number of new residential developments are putting too much pressure on the street, including a neighbouring site set to include five two-bedroom townhouses with only three off-street car spaces.
“Because we have the cafe on the corner we already have difficulties with parking,” she said. “We’re also concerned about the reduction of the street appeal.”
Kelly O’Mara said she and her partner had been attracted to the street by a “ramshackle but lovely” Victorian cottage they intend to bring back to life over the next few years.
“The rapid gentrification of Footscray has drawn people to this amazing cultural hub …we want to welcome more people to this area,” she said. “But we just feel that cramming the maximum number of cheaply built townhouses into a block with no provision for parking is really sad for our community.”
Resident Geoff Brown said Footscray was experiencing development at a rate that was too fast for the suburb to handle. He said new developments were going up at such a rate that traffic studies were meaningless because they didn’t take into effect the cumulative impact.
“They are all going up so quickly we don’t know what the combined effect is going to be,” he said.
“We are at risk of our quiet little street becoming a traffic and parking nightmare.”
Footscray’s population is forecast to more than triple from about 13,000 people in 2011 to almost 46,000 by 2041.
