When you take a look at the street network of Footscray, everything looks much like many other inner Melbourne suburbs – a network of narrow streets lined by terrace houses. But if you take a close look next door to the Footscray Park campus of Victoria University, you’ll see something quite different.
It’s a sea of car parking.
The car park has spread south from the university campus on Ballarat Road.
And then taken over the adjoining neighbourhood.
The original street network still remains, complete with footpaths and streetlights.
And cul-de-sacs.
But bollards and ticket machines have replaced the houses.
Except for a handful of holdouts who refuse to sell.
The three remaining houses are easily spotted when the land titles of the area are examined.
Much like the nail houses of China.
These houses of Footscray have car parks either side.
And across the back fence.
Houses along Geelong Road are still being acquired to expand the car park.
With no block too small to turn over to parked cars.
But the residents of Federal Street are yet to fall victim to the advancing cars.
So where to next?
In 2015 the northern edge of the car park was closed to make room for the ‘[email protected]’ student accommodation complex.
With work starting on sealing the rest of the gravel car park.
But with high density development of Footscray taking off, replacement of the car park by more apartments is the most likely outcome.
Or it was, until the October 2018 announcement that the State Government would spend $1.5 billion to build a new Footscray Hospital on the car park site.
Footscray’s crumbling hospital would be rebuilt opposite Victoria University’s Footscray Park campus under a $1.5 billion election pledge by the state government.
Premier Daniel Andrews announced on Sunday that a returned Labor government would fund a new 504-bed hospital that could accommodate an extra 20,000 emergency department admissions and 15,000 patients each year.
The new hospital would be built on the corner of Geelong and Ballarat Roads, a site chosen from a shortlist of three locations including the current hospital site on Eleanor Street.
Construction would begin with two years and the hospital would be open by 2025.
But will the slow and infrequent route 82 tram be upgraded to cater for the extra passengers – I doubt it!
Footnote
In 2017 Stephanie Convery also wrote about the car park at Victoria University:
At Victoria University in Melbourne, where I worked, car parks have slowly swallowed entire blocks of residential properties save for one or two isolated outposts; in one case, a house, a shed and a garden surrounded on three sides by a vast concrete wasteland, divvied up for hire at $10 an hour. Handwritten signs hang on the fence, chastising users for noise, rubbish, graffiti. Part of me can’t imagine who would want to continue to live with such inhospitable surroundings – a sentiment I’m sure developers exploit as often as possible – but another part of me thinks, if this place were the product of my hard labour, if this was where I had made my home, I probably wouldn’t want to leave it either.
