[REJ] 79 Port Road, Thebarton | 37m x 2 & 31m| 10 & 2 x 8 Levels

[Llessur2002]

There's a Foodland around the corner about a 1km away.

And IGA at Bowden is only 850m walk (or one tram stop) away. There are certainly options for food shopping without a car. Not that the residents won't be able to use cars for shopping if they want...

[Algernon]

When cities look to invest and grow there's this tendency to view industrial land as an obvious first choice for redevelopment. But in reality cities can't be beautiful villages everywhere. They need industry. I don't think that strip along Port Rd is particularly desirable for residential development and should probably remain zoned as it is. I grew up in the area and never saw this massive shortfall of demand that urgently needed filling with 3 residential towers. Adelaide's growth is still slow enough that the governments need to ration growth among targeted areas to achieve some semblance of viability to those regeneration projects. If something like this pops up in random locations like Thebarton then that's a few hundred more dwellings of supply dragging down Bowden, the Port, the city centre revival et al.

It does have its benefits in the proximity to the tram line, but that's not to say it makes it a good spot to live. It's equally reflective that the tram line goes through areas which aren't particularly suitable. Not knocking the tram extension though, as its destination is logical and there has to be track in between point A and B, so if it runs by a few factories then that's just how it played out.

Skyshow would be nuts in one of those apartments though.

This really is a case of each to their own as, like I said above, if I were a first time buyer in my twenties - either single or in a couple - I would absolutely consider this development because of its location and I am sure I'm not alone here.

I think in Adelaide there's a tendency to view all new developments from the perspective of traditional family units who need to buy a house that will last them the next 10-15 years with outdoor space, room for a couple of cars etc but as house prices increase we're moving closer to the European (and interstate) model of first time buyers moving into a smaller apartment for a few years before moving the next step up the ladder into a house. Buyers in that bracket are often more interested in local amenity and connectivity than whether or not they're living next to an arterial road. This site checks an awful lot of boxes - close to the city, the pubs (including a micro brewery on the ground floor), the tram, the parklands (including the linear park to Henley Beach). I know a few people who lived in town houses around the Bowden area through their twenties - they worked in the city, very rarely used their cars and absolutely loved it. If the price is right for these apartments then I can see them being very popular indeed.

Plus, let's not forget that Thebarton already has a sizable residential community - it's not as if these will be the first residents in the area by any stretch of the imagination. In the medium-term when the Coca Cola site and Thebarton campus are redeveloped (one or both of which I am sure will include a supermarket as well as other amenities) then I can see this being a very attractive area for first time buyers and downsizers to live.

Also, I think we've really got to move on from the mentality that everyone needs to use a car to visit the supermarket. Across Europe (and most likely in Sydney and Melbourne) the trend has been to move from a large weekly shop towards convenience shopping two or three times a week. We will follow eventually, especially when/if trading hours are deregulated. I walk 500m to Coles a couple of times a week to pick up our shopping, it's literally just around the corner - 750m would be easy, 1km would probably be the limit on 30 degree plus days but fine at other times. If you lived here and wanted to do a big shop you could hop on the tram to the new Gawler Place stop - a 10 minute trip each way with trams running every 10-15 minutes and it's a 200m walk from the tram stop to the supermarket. Plus, the likelihood is that whoever lives here will work in the city and be able to visit the supermarket on their way home and then take a tram right to their front door. Sounds pretty peachy to me.

Please don't interpret my comments as somehow being some advocacy for car oriented living, because I'm absolutely not in that camp. I think I've only owned a car for 5 years in my life, and certainly have no need nor want for one living in Europe (nor Adelaide for that matter). From the points you raise the only point of contention for me is the matter of population growth not warranting universally high density in fill development throughout the entire Adelaide metropolitan area. This is largely a reality of the nature of suburban sprawl in Australia compared to Europe. It really hits you when you live in Europe and travel just about anywhere; Australian cities are geographically *huge*. This point can't be stressed enough. Often the question put to me by people here when asking about where I am from is "how many people live in Adelaide?" I answer 1.3 million people and they say "oh, just like Prague?" It sincerely is not. Adelaide sprawls some 110km from its northern to southern extremities and commuter cities like Mt Barker are quite distant as well. This is a geographical footprint that is largely equivalent of the geographical extent of Bohemia - an entire nation represented as a blue triangle on a national flag. So I guess when I try to relate to people the difference in size, I say that if you wanted to compare the geographical footprint of Adelaide or other Australian cities, you'd be comparing them to Prague, Kolin, Pardubice, Ceske Budejovice, Liberec, Plzen, Pisek, Tabor et al and thinking of them as one coherent system of commuter villages functioning as a single city with many people on 1hour+ daily commutes. The thought of that blows their mind every time. Likewise, they think it's incredible that we don't have underground metro systems in Australia, even when I show them pictures of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. This is from the perspective of people that either have one (Prague) or investigating building one (Brno) in cities of as little as 100,000 people but so densely populated that the economics of those ventures actually stack up!

If Adelaide were to improve its population density to the point that, at any given location within Adelaide, you would be in a truly walkable, hih density urban environment comparable to a European city, then it would require a population upwards of 10 million people. And again, this is merely a function of Adelaide sprawling so far that it would take so many people to fill all the space.

With Adelaide's population growth being a mere 0.5 percent for a very long time (and likely the forseeable future), we do have to ration population growth and target it in specific areas, because that additional 10,000 people spreads very thinly across Adelaide. Adelaide could double its population by bulldozing every house and replacing it with 2, and it would still resemble a city where everyone has a detached home, has a garden, and commutes by car.