DEAR News Of The Area,

THE size and impact of the proposed Jetty Foreshores development has been much debated.

Concerned Coffs residents think it will be a large development while Property and Development NSW (PDNSW) keep telling us it will be small.

The PDNSW says that it will take up only a very small percentage of the land – but this calculation depends on what you take as the base area, maybe you include Muttonbird Island?

At a recent Council meeting (11/4/24) it was mentioned that the architecture and ‘form’ of the proposed residential housing might resemble the existing Pacific Marina on Harbour Drive.

This lends to a simple way to calculate the significant impact that is being proposed for our Jetty.

The Pacific Marina complex is three storeys high, contains 64 units and is 215m long.

The proposed residential housing is four floors high.

So if you imagined extending the existing Pacific Marina to four floors you would have 85 units fitting on a narrow, 215m long block.

The two lots PDNSW acquired, the lots on which residential structures would be built, have the railway corridor on the west side, are narrow, and total about 900m in length north to south.

Here’s the simple arithmetic: If 85 residential units take 215 m on a narrow block of land, then 250 residential units of a similar design would take up 630m of land along similar narrow blocks of land.

That is to say that 70 percent of the total length of the PDNSW lots would be taken up by four storey residential units.

Remember that space in these lots also has to be found for 200 more residences intended for short-stay accommodation.

70 percent does not sound like a very small percentage of the land being impacted by this development.

Or the building height has to go up, and the arithmetic changes.

I wonder…

Regards,
Greg MURDOCH,
Coffs Harbour.