Inner-city roads and northern suburbs to shoulder Adelaide’s housing growth
Adelaide’s northern suburbs and inner-city corridors including Unley Road and The Parade will play a key role in delivering housing growth under the Malinauskas Government’s new 30-year plan for Greater Adelaide.
The State Planning Commission on Monday released its draft Greater Adelaide Regional Plan, which outlines where and how Adelaide should grow over the next 30 years and provides an overarching vision for land use, infrastructure, transport and public realm.
At the core of the plan is how to accommodate Greater Adelaide’s population growing from around 1.5 million today to 2.2 million in 2051, with the plan outlining areas for an additional 315,000 houses and 254,000 jobs.
In broad terms, the plan shifts Adelaide’s planning focus away from general infill – the demolition of old housing stock and replacement with new, higher density homes – and towards strategic infill development using significant housing projects on large land parcels like the Brompton gasworks or Thebarton Brewery site.
It also flags a shift towards masterplanned greenfield development, particularly in Adelaide’s northern suburbs and Murray Bridge, where large parcels of unused land will be transformed into new housing estates.
The draft plan represents the third iteration of the 30-Year Plan for Greater Adelaide, which the Rann Government inaugurated in 2010 and the Weatherill Government updated in 2017.
The Malinauskas Government has over the last 18 months flagged much of what was going to be in the draft plan, including its intention to scrap the Weatherill Government’s goal to limit Adelaide’s urban sprawl via a planning target of 85 per cent urban infill vs 15 per cent greenfield.
The 2024 plan expects the northern suburbs to shoulder much of the state’s housing and employment growth and push Adelaide’s urban boundaries.
The plan earmarks the Outer North region for 22 per cent of Greater Adelaide’s housing growth (70,000 new homes) and the Inner North for 14 per cent (43,000) over the next 30 years.
Planning Minister Nick Champion said developing further into the southern suburbs would risk encroaching on McLaren Vale, arguing that Adelaide’s growth is otherwise “trapped between the sea and the Hills Face Zone”, a planning protection that restricts development in the Adelaide Hills.
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“The north is really the only significant growth front that Adelaide has on the plains, so that’s where we have room to create new housing and new communities,” he told InDaily.
“And it’s got a whole lot of advantages: There’s already an existing train line, there’s already an existing expressway, and it’s flat, so it’s easily developed, and we’re already investing significant amounts of money in water and sewerage infrastructure.”
Labor backbenchers in the northern suburbs have been pushing for higher-density housing along the recently electrified Gawler train line, arguing earlier this year that the railway corridor is an “untapped asset”.
The draft plan identifies the Greenfields train station along the Gawler line as an opportunity for higher density and also proposes a new growth area in Kudla.
“The Kudla growth area provides an opportunity for a master planned extension to Munno Para and Blakeview that takes advantage of recent government investments in electrified rail,” the draft plan states.
The plan also canvasses the potential for a new “Northern Park Lands” separating Kudla from Gawler.
In total, 11,200 hectares of greenfield land are identified for rezoning in the plan, with seven new “growth areas” projected to accommodate approximately 96,000 additional houses over the next 30 years.
The new plan also brings a renewed focus on urban corridor development in Adelaide’s inner-ring suburbs, a key feature of former Planning Minister John Rau’s 2017 plan.
The Parade, Unley Road (towards Mitcham Centre), Torrens Road, Diagonal Road and Marion Road are all identified as sites with high-frequency public transport and “appropriate” amenity to support greater housing density.
It comes as six- to eight-storey apartment blocks emerge as a more common built form along Unley Road and The Parade, with more of these developments in the pipeline for the future.
Other corridors identified in the plan include Goodwood Road, King William Road, Greenhill Road, Magill Road, Glynburn Road, Payneham Road, Lower North East Road, North East Road, Main North Road, Prospect Road and Churchill Road.
Champion said the urban corridors identified in the 2024 plan build on the work of previous 30-year plans.
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“When those corridors were identified and rezoned, you don’t get an immediate upzoning everywhere along those corridors – it does take time because the private owners of land don’t always develop straight away,” he said.
“Many of these existing corridors are developing. Unley Council have decided to sensibly manage their growth in a sophisticated and sensible strategic way, and these corridors help them do that.
“We’re seeing some fairly significant developments along these transport corridors that provide good housing supply, that provide good retail and hospitality opportunities and good opportunities to gather.
“So you can see the sort of vibrancy in places like Unley and Prospect and on The Parade, you can see the sort of beginnings of that urban form becoming a sophisticated part of our housing supply.”
The plan suggests minimum height and density requirements should be established along corridors to encourage more intense developments.
It also suggests that public notification requirements should be removed for developments that do not exceed maximum building heights along these corridors.
Champion said there will “obviously always be debates around height” but corridor development is a “pretty important part of our housing supply picture”.
“Because if you don’t have density in the sky, you get density on the ground,” he said.
The draft plan outlines 14 strategic infill sites, including UniSA’s Magill campus, Thebarton Brewery and Keswick Barracks, where the state government will lead planning and investigation for new housing.
Notably absent from the map of strategic infill sites is the former Glenside Hospital precinct, which is currently the subject of a contentious rezoning bid by developer Cedar Woods.
The developer wants to build a 20-storey apartment tower on the site overlooking the park lands, with Champion to decide whether the developer’s planning code amendment is approved.
Asked why the Glenside precinct was left off the strategic infill map, Champion said: “I don’t generally comment on code amendments as they come up.
“The 30-year plan is a long-term document by the commission and it identifies those opportunities for significant housing opportunities and we do have to provide for supply because we’ve got a housing crisis on at the moment.
“There will still be code amendments in the system and those sorts of rezonings do everything from small parcels of land right up to big greenfield estates.
“That will just be a feature of the system at a short to medium-term horizon as opposed to the GARP which is longer term in that nature.”
Consultation on the plan opened today and closes on November 4.
