MASSIVE changes to the face of Leederville are on the horizon with a proposal to transform two sprawling carparks into major mixed-use developments between 10 and 18 storeys tall.
Amid Leederville’s small bars and niche retailers, some 14,600sqm of the town centre is taken up by 464 ground-level parking bays split across carparks at Frame Court and The Avenue.
The council considers this a pretty severe underutilisation of so much inner-city land, and is proposing to transfer parts of the carpark land to a private developer to build upwards and include parking bays in their building.
Once it’s done there’ll be a slight surplus of parking, with 484 daytime bays and more available after hours when the office workers go home. But there’ll be some parking pain in the meantime for about three years of development with a deficit of 262 bays in a suburb which some business owners already complain is short on parking.
The plan has been more than a decade in the making and after searching for a developer among eight interested parties, Vincent has settled on Hesperia as the best one for the job. Hesperia’s previously delivered the nearby ABN Group office building in Leederville.
Hesperia has proposed their buildings will include a mix of residential, retail, medical, community spaces, plus multi-storey carparks. Vincent will sell some of the land as part of the deal and retain ownership of the public open spaces and the carparks, and receives the revenue stream from parking tickets.
Councillors voted unanimously at the July 25 meeting to put the idea out for public comment.
Mayor Emma Cole said “It’s very exciting, it’s very high quality.
“We could maintain at-grade street level car bays, but by going multistorey we release that high value land to really be developed in a number of different ways.”
She said it’d bring a “significant amount of public realm [and] new facilities space to the benefit of the local community. We’ll be increasing the population; we know that with population we can guarantee the success of the town centre.”
Ms Cole said “it’s very high value, very precious public land,” and so they were “opening this up for comment from both the community but also for others to have a look and say whether they think this is the right deal, or whether they would like to propose something different.
“So no decision has been made to sell the land, no decision has been made to proceed until we can go through this process. But it’s the first opportunity our community has had to actually view this and see this and make comment on it.”
It’s open for comment in person or online at imagine.vincent.wa.gov.au until September 11.
by DAVID BELL
Perth Voice Interactive 
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