This suburb is booming, and there's more development on the way. What comes next?
Life in Rouse Hill is good. There is a metro stop next to the town centre where driverless trains take residents to the CBD in less than 40 minutes, and the shopping centre features a lot of open space and community facilities.
But behind the omnipresent music and the carefully manicured lawns that define the town centre, and after two decades of unprecedented greenfield development, Rouse Hill continues to experience growing pains.
The shopping centre has virtually no rental vacancy, and the local council says it is struggling to keep up with the service demands of the tens of thousands of new residents.
Rouse Hill is home to more than 11,000 people. But it's set to take on thousands more over the next decade as the council grapples with how to implement the state government-mandated target of 23,300 new homes in the shire over the next five years.
What comes next for one of Sydney's first greenfield developments?
The news
On Wednesday, developer GPT Group announced it had begun construction on the second stage of Rouse Hill's major shopping precinct, Rouse Hill Town Centre.
With its leaders and local Liberal Mayor Michelle Byrne using golden shovels for a sod turning in front of tonnes of already moved dirt, the group said the extension of the shopping centre would allow for extra growth in the suburb, with its established main centre approaching capacity.
The precinct will grow the development by than 10,000 square metres and bring at least 50 new shops, cafes and leisure facilities to the area.
GPT had lodged its development application with plans to include 218 apartments, but Chris Barnett, the head of retail at the developer, said that 'at this time we are just focusing solely on the retail option'.
'It's a point in time in the cycle of residential development … what we have been able to do is future-proof what we're creating today to come back and build residential at the right time.'
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But more people will be coming to the centre regardless of whether GPT builds apartments on top: Hills Shire Council estimates 329,000 residents will join its local government area within 15 years, and is campaigning the state government to urgently provide more infrastructure to keep up with demand.
How we got here
Eastern suburbs residents, beware: Rouse Hill's town centre was once a nine-hole public golf course.
In 1998, the rural suburb was identified as a candidate for future growth as part of the Carr Labor state government's report, Sydney Into Its Third Century, which bucked the in-trend notion of building higher density housing along established train lines and instead identified new areas that were free of development constraints.
Rouse Hill would be the first suburb in the north-west to be developed. Landcom, the development arm of the state government, planned out the area before handing it over to developers GPT Group and Lendlease to build the town centre and homes around it. The first school opened in 2005, and the first part of the centre in 2007. In 2019, the north-west metro, with a stop outside the town centre, also began operations.
What you need to know
Things are slowly changing. Next to the shopping centre is empty land that will one day become Rouse Hill Hospital. After years of uncertainty, the federal Labor government committed in the election to funding a birthing suite after it was revealed that the hospital would be opened without one.
The suburb is part of the state government's North West Growth Area strategy, which has released acres of land across much of the region, with more to come. But even the metro and new bus services are struggling to meet the area's growth: Windsor Road and Old Windsor Road are clogged. The council claims the average travel speed is 20km/h in the morning peak.
The council is now campaigning for the state government to significantly increase its funding for infrastructure.
What they said
Michelle Byrne, Hills Shire Council Mayor: 'At the moment, we're home to over 200,000 people [in the Hills Shire]. By 2041, we'll be home to over 328,000 people. That's an increase in our population of over 71 per cent.'
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