Nobody will be happy with Ettalong changes
?", PN 612) whether high-rise development at Ettalong would add to the Peninsula's social character, and the answer is that, of course, it would.
The Peninsula has always been changing, ever since the first unmade roads allowed holiday shacks to be built in proximity to the beach.
No doubt, those owners thought that the place was just as it should be and that its character should not be changed.
However, there was nothing finished or perfect about the Peninsula then and there is nothing immutable about the Peninsula today.
It is adapting to new desires and new people, just as any community has to, if it doesn't want to just curl up and die.
We need to add to the Peninsula's social character, and part of this change will be to provide for the kind of households that want to live in high-rise buildings.
We have already seen many transitions in the numbers and types of households who live on the Peninsula and in the kinds of accommodation they want.
Now, we have to accept the fact that there will be new people with new wishes in the future, and that they have just as much right to be here and to be properly housed as do the oldest inhabitants.
The important thing is that whatever changes are needed be introduced in a way that preserves the best of the existing community and enhances the variety of the urbanscape for old and new.
Unfortunately, it is easy to predict, just from looking at the shambles being created in Ettalong now, that the opposite will happen.
The pathetic inadequacy of the development controls adopted by the Council is only matched by the desperate lack of imagination among developers whose only interest is the maximum profit that can be wrung from a property.
While the Council was in administration, there was much talk about the need for new thinking about our development goals, but, when the community was given the option, it elected the same old tired hacks who drove the Council into administration in the first place.
We now seem to have a Council hell-bent on development at any cost and with minimum participation by ratepayers in any of the decision-making process.
So, the obvious answer to Norm Harris's question is that Ettalong will be changed and it will be changed in the clumsiest possible way, so that nobody is happy with the results, except the speculators who have made a good thing out of a complaisant Council and an electorate that is, apparently, quite happy that this is as it should be.
It is puzzling that Central Coast residents seem so satisfied to live in a sub-optimal environment, when there was the opportunity for it to be so much better.
SOURCE:
Email, 17 Feb 2025
Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy