Community Impact

What does this TLPI mean for, and how does it impact, the community

– Further construction on a floodplain

– Further increase in house and apartment prices

– Local character more like the CBD

– Already overburdened public infrastructure will be further challenged

  • First Nations communities: the peninsula has already seen the dislocation of our First Nations communities. Increase in housing costs will further this process.
  • Schools: enrollments at West End State School have double over the last 10 years, and Brisbane State High School is now more than 3500 students. Neither have capacity to increase in size, and there is no available land for another school
  • Medical Facilities: patients are currently having to wait for appointments. Increased population will just increase the waiting period
  • Traffic congestion:  the local streets will be gridlocked with cars trapped in a network that has only three distributor roads
  • Public transport: with increases in traffic congestion the demand for public transport will increase considerably
  • Parking: ask anyone who drives onto the peninsula – parking is almost impossible. It will only get worse

– Environmental impact

  • Heating the peninsula: the higher the density , the higher the heat island impacts: extreme heat days will increase in the next ten years, and the very high-density areas will exacerbate the heat on the street, and the heat in homes.
  • Wind: very tall buildings create wind tunnelling: wind channels and swirls on the street in much higher velocities: the higher the density and taller the buildings, the stronger the wind gusts on the street. Very tall buildings in clusters create very uncomfortable street spaces.
  • Greenspace reduction: the higher density buildings reduce the area of green and permeable ground: this increases heat, reduces biodiversity and provides less open space. This is already evident in the recent South Brisbane growth, near Hope Street.
  • Shadowing: of a 90 story building

– Social Impact

  • Loss of human scale: very tall buildings create poor human scale.
  • Loss of sociability: very tall buildings create poor social connections and encourage physical dislocation in neighbourhoods.
  • Height and Density: People in the Kurilpa neighbourhood might not yet be able to grasp the massive scale of the increased height being proposed by BCC in the proposed Kurilpa Development Area.
    • To help residents, we have done an artist’s impression showing a ninety-storey tower built into the well-known neighbourhood destination of West Village .The central and tallest white apartment tower under construction is Altura at 22 storeys high: stack three more buildings of the same height on top, and you get the sense of the disturbing scale of the ninety-storey proposal. Go and stand next to Altura next time you go to Woolworths, and you will see that it is already a daunting building scale. Even though West Village is not in the proposed 90 storey area, it’s already a very visible high-density site, and the proposed new height limit means such a development could be dwarfed by the density of future infill in Kurilpa.
    • Also, the published Inner City Strategy documents do not state intended height increases or state the level of increased urban density across the five inner city areas intended for urban intensification. Heights have only been discussed in seperate press releases for the first area under investigation, being the Kurilpa Precinct identified by the TLPI.
      • What are the intended maximum heights in the five Inner City Precincts?
      • BCC in press releases have suggested an additional 10,000 people can be accommodated in the Kurilpa Precinct defined in the Inner City Strategy.
      • What additional population does the Inner City Strategy contemplate for the five areas in total?
      • The Inner City Strategy and the TLPI  lack clear and transparent information on important development matters .