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Key points
- Frankston has long been earmarked by the state government for higher density development.
- The outer suburb has become a lucrative drawcard for developers spruiking luxury, bayview developments in recent years.
- Local environment and community groups have launched a campaign over their fears of “a Great Wall of Frankston”.
- VCAT hearings will decide if two luxury 14- and 16-storey apartment buildings will be allowed to be built overlooking Kananook Creek and Frankston Beach.
- Frankston Council this week passed, by one vote, a new structure plan which locks in non-mandatory “preferred” height limits of 41 metres (or 12 storeys) for the waterfront area.
It’s been dubbed the Great Wall of Frankston furore.
A long-term plan to supercharge the potential of the underdog bayside suburb has culminated in a fight between residents, the council and developers over the proposal for towering luxury apartment buildings overlooking the foreshore.
The stretch of land between Kananook Creek and Nepean Highway is the centre of a major planning dispute in Frankston.Credit: Eddie Jim
The groups are at odds over Frankston’s future and how to balance a push for more housing and in-fill development while retaining the outer suburb’s waterfront appeal.
Locals are angry the looming plans for mid- and high-rise development along the stretch of Nepean Highway will forever block the rest of the city from the waterfront, and create an irreversible “cool-climate Surfers Paradise”.
“This is the biggest change to Frankston in decades,” said Rob Thurley, a community volunteer and lifetime resident. “And this whole process has been a real punch in the nose.”
Thurley has spent two decades cleaning and restoring Kananook Creek, which runs parallel to the Frankston foreshore and into Port Phillip Bay, and helped transform it from a rancid sewer run-off in the 1990s to the rehabilitated bush habitat of today.
An artist’s impression of the 14-storey luxury apartment building at 446-450 Nepean Highway. The development has been approved by Frankston Council and will go before VCAT.Credit: Urban DC
The creek is at the centre of a major planning conflict which will come to a head this month, as Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) hearings determine the fate of proposed 14- and 16-storey high-end apartment buildings, which would stand side by side and overlook Kananook Creek and Frankston Beach from Nepean Highway.
If approved, both buildings would exceed the height of two existing buildings on the waterfront side of the city centre; the 1973-approved 12-level Quest hotel (formerly Peninsula Centre) – once described by comedian Barry Humphries as “the worst building in Australia” – and the brutalist eight-storey South East Water building approved in 2013, which also attracted controversy.
Community activists, united under the broad “Stop the Great Wall of Frankston” campaign, say the tower proposals are a stark departure from historic council plans for Frankston which, back in 2005, set 26-metre height limits for building in the Kananook Creek precinct, and planned to push higher buildings east towards the train station.
But a slim majority of councillors, who this week voted five to four to approve a new blueprint for the city taking in non-mandatory “preferred” height limits of 41 metres (or 12 storeys), say progress must be made on the Nepean stretch blighted by empty shops, dated facades and little foot traffic.
“Things have changed over the last 20 years,” said Frankston Mayor Nathan Conroy. He said developers were not interested in creating lower-rise apartments, and that past council and VCAT decisions had set precedents for high buildings in the waterfront area.
“The viability of making an apartment building [in that area] that’s two or three storeys high … it’s not the case any more.”
Developer interest
For a bayside suburb with lush bushland, a clean and popular beach, a metro train connection and quick access to the Mornington Peninsula, Frankston has been long underestimated, according to RMIT Professor of Planning Michael Buxton.
“It’s been below the radar for a long time. It’s at that critical juncture of that dividing line between the city and country,” said Buxton, who supports the “Stop the Great Wall” campaign.
Kananook Creek in Frankston, which runs between Nepean Highway and Frankston Beach.Credit: Eddie JIm
“Its economic performance has not been great, and now its time has come – it’s been discovered by developers.”
Marked as one of Melbourne’s nine designated “metropolitan activity centres” in Plan Melbourne – the Victorian government’s official planning blueprint – Frankston has long been earmarked as a secondary city that requires a greater density of housing in its downtown area.
A turning point came when developer Urban DC secured approval for a nine-storey luxury apartment building on Ploughman Street, overlooking the town and beach, in April 2020. Construction is yet to finish but the apartments have sold out, with 80 per cent reportedly sold to Frankston residents.
Members of the “Stop the Great Wall of Frankston” community campaign outside the site of one of the proposed towers.Credit: Eddie Jim
Urban DC, which did not respond to repeated requests for comment to The Age, has previously told real estate media that Frankston is entering a “golden age”, and launched plans for a second site: one of the Nepean Highway developments now in contest.
“When we had too many people who had $2 [million] and wanted a penthouse, we realised we needed another project,” Urban DC executive director Danny Ciarma was quoted saying last year.
Soon after Urban DC submitted its application for a “Harbour” apartment tower on the site of a former Forty Winks retailer at 446-450 Nepean Highway, the Pace Development Group submitted its application for a 16-storey building on the former site of the Frankston cinema, at number 438-444.
The council approved the “Harbour” development by one vote in November after the developer offered to shave off one storey to appease concerns about overshadowing. But that approval will be challenged by the “Great Wall” campaigners in the VCAT hearing scheduled to start on Monday.
A second VCAT matter will be heard next month for the Pace application. The developer applied to the tribunal for a decision after council planning officers failed to make a recommendation within a prescribed 60-day time limit, although councillors passed a unanimous motion registering their symbolic rejection of the plan for being too high.
Pace Development Group did not respond to requests for comment.
There are also submitted plans for a 13-storey residential development on the 300-metre stretch between Kananook Creek Boulevard and Wells Street, and if that is approved it would leave only four small allotments undeveloped on the block.
The ‘Great Wall’
An artist’s impression of a 16-storey proposal for 438-444 Nepean Highway, Frankston, by Pace Development Group. Its future will also be determined by VCAT.
Since late last year, posters and petitions have been put up in Frankston cafes, local media and in front yards accompanied by photoshopped images of Nepean Highway littered with high-rise apartment towers on the coastline.
The community activists’ slogan has drawn the ire of some councillors who support the developments, but it has attracted the support of high-profile residents including the Reverend Tim Costello, who as St Kilda mayor in the 1990s fought that suburb’s push for foreshore high-rise developments.
“Great Wall” campaigners have gathered 5000 signatures for a petition that was handed by Frankston MP Paul Edbrooke to Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny last month. The group says attempts to meet the minister have failed.
The major concerns of residential groups are the visual bulk and shadowing over nearby homes, the creek and pedestrian areas, the commodification of the bay views for commercial purposes and worries the waterfront buildings will deter other developments in the city centre.
Thurley said some in his group were residents in the immediate vicinity of the sites but denied they were anti-development NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activists. He said the campaign supported apartment buildings along the strip that were no higher than the four storeys set out in Frankston’s first structure plan.
“We were all really rapt when they came up with the original plan and the vision back then,” he said. “The principles were that the dominant purpose of our waterfront is for the public, and it shouldn’t be dominated by private interests.
“Those heights are what you see in Manly, Noosa and many other parts that are long right along the bay.
“So the idea of a cool-climate Surfers Paradise is ridiculous.”
Those concerns were echoed by the four councillors – Steven Hughes, Liam Hughes, Sue Baker and Claire Harvey – who opposed both proposed developments in November and the new structure plan ratified at the council this week.
Conroy and councillors David Asker, Kris Bolam, Suzette Tayler and Brad Hill supported the strategic plan and the “Harbour” development, after considering arguments ranging from the housing crisis to the limits of the council’s powers to stop proposals considering Frankston’s status as a nominated “activity centre”.
A spokesman for Kilkenny did not answer why she had not met with the community group, but said any planning applications for Frankston were to be considered by the council and not the state government.
“Frankston City Council is yet to submit any amendment requests to the minister for planning,” the spokesman said.
“Any potential future amendments will be subject to community consultation and potentially an independent review.”
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