There is an oblong of land (as a child I preferred the word ‘oblong’ over rectangle) in Maribyrnong, bordered by Rosamond Road, Williamsons Road, Wests Road, and Raleigh Road (fun fact – the latter three roads are named after early land owners from colonial times). This land has mostly been industrial until recently, although it has partly transitioned since the late 1980s to retail showrooms along Rosamond Road.
Over the past decade or so, three high rise apartment complexes have sprung up in this oblong. Two are at opposing ends of Wests Road, and one in a side street somewhere off Rosamond Road.
Hence, whenever I stroll down Canning Street, I do not have to look as far as the CBD 11 km away to see a skyline – we have one 2 km away just over the river.
This is just the start of something big.
The northeast corner of this oblong is a very large site, which used to be occupied by a large warehouse. This has now been bulldozed and two large apartment towers (one being 30 stories tall) will be built there with an estimated completion date of 2032.
All along Raleigh Road from that corner, there are various other warehouses. One is a storage facility, and another is the Victorian HQ for some Buddhist sect whose name escapes me (all I know is that Suzanne Vega, my favourite singer, is an adherent to it).
As land gets more expensive in Maribyrnong, I strongly suspect that those warehouses would not be the most profitable use for those locations, at which point we will see more bulldozers and a few more apartment towers going up.
Nor do I see any of the side streets off Rosamond Road remaining as they are either.
Ultimately, I see a future where almost the entire oblong is taken over by apartment towers, aside from the various furniture showrooms located along Rosamond Road.
And then we have the explosives factory site immediately to the north. As I have written before, remediation of this site is going to be extremely expensive, in the hundreds of millions. The contamination has so far delayed all the proposals which have circulated for the entire length of my residency in Avondale Heights. But I suspect that remediation does not need to be done that thoroughly if high rise apartments are constructed on that site.
And thus I believe that we will see a very impressive array of high rise towers in West Maribyrnong within the next two decades, something to rival what has happened in Moonee Ponds and central Footscray in recent years.
Lost For Words! 