As part of a public realm revitalisation strategy for the Gosford Waterfront our client required baseline pedestrian, active travel, vehicular and parking usage data to inform optimum infrastructure investment decisions.

The ACT Planning Authority required a comprehensive assessment of the planning and economic feasibility of increasing the supply of ‘missing middle’ style housing typologies in low density residential zones in the ACT.

The Urban Intelligence team working with Purdon was engaged by the ACT Property Council to research policy options that could be proposed to increase dwelling supply in the ACT to meet population demand forecast for 2060. This was done in the context of National Cabinet announcements and the October 2024 ACT election. The work was commissioned to assess the ability of current land settings to meet population demand, with a view to answering questions around the impact on industry, returns to government and the impact on the community.

The lease variation charge acts as an infill tax. It will discourage the thousands of decisions that will be required to achieve missing middle development. The intent of LVC is to capture theoretical windfall gains. We believe it should focus on development profit. I won't try and explain everything in the graph below which deconstructs the logic of LVC for a development. But we believe the bit that should be charged is the yellow bit (if it exists for a development), but the green gap is what the government is attempting to charge. (from the ACT Government's 'Planning and Economic Feasibility: Integrating the Missing Middle in RZ1 and RZ2' which can be found at http://bit.ly/47Bcxlq)

The ACT Government was testing location concepts for a revitalised tertiary education facility to replace an asset that had reached the end of its economic life. This included assessing alternative uses for the different sites and matching the proposal to early design concepts.