State of Australian Cities Conference 2015 Solomon Heights: A Zombie Subdivision? Elizabeth Jean Taylor 1 , David Nichols 2 and Victoria Kolankiewicz 2 1 Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University 2 Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne Abstract: Recent work from the Lincoln Institute has identified the phenomenon of the ‘zombie subdivision’, described by authors Holway, Elliot and Trentadue as ‘the living dead of the real estate market’. The authors’ case study examples are recent formulations, their residents casualties of the profligate early 21st century. Yet there remains in many quarters of the western world examples of much older, and perhaps by dint of age even more problematic, ‘zombie subdivisions’. Solomon Heights, 10kms west of the centre of Melbourne, Australia, on what has now become prime riverside real estate, is a case in point. Although subdivided into a residential pattern during the 1920s, the site had been rezoned industrial in the mid-1950s under Melbourne’s first comprehensive city plan. It was thereafter left fallow, for reasons unclear, without basic urban services like water or sealed roads. Environmental social issues have since come to impact on the site, while landowners seek the opportunity to build. In a submission to the 2009 review of the city’s urban growth boundary, Solomon Heights owners urged that: The alternative of now acting now…is to commit Solomon Heights to a further period of prolonged stagnation—a period that exacerbates the effects of 100 years of inaction. This paper examines the history of the ‘100 years of inaction’, with particular attention to the efforts by the current responsible LGA to broker a satisfactory outcome for all stakeholders. Keywords: town planning, urban history, zoning, urban environmentalism, property rights. Introduction In 2009, hundreds of public submissions were made to a review of Melbourne’s Urban Growth Boundary convened to consider moving the city’s 2002 notional boundary, in order to accommodate an unexpected surge in population (State Government of Victoria 2010). A core consideration was the provision and cost of urban infrastructure. The review covered broad questions of metropolitan strategy: the location and calibration of growth. While some submissions weighed outward and consolidated growth, submissions from landowners on the fringe submitted views on far more statutory, small-scale questions of property rights and values (Taylor, 2015). One submission came from representatives of 130 landowners of a little known part of metropolitan Melbourne. Well inside the Growth Boundary, this land was in Sunshine North, with views across the revived Maribyrnong River to the Central Business District, ten kilometres to its east. Although first offered for sale in the mid-1920s, the site’s many lots had been rezoned industrial thirty years later under Melbourne’s first comprehensive city plan and left fallow thereafter. The landowners urged that: The alternative of not acting now… is to commit Solomon Heights to a further period of prolonged stagnation—a period that exacerbates the effects of 100 years of inaction. This paper examines the history of these ‘100 years of inaction’, with particular attention to the efforts by the current local government to broker a satisfactory outcome for all stakeholders. We argue that the history of this unusual, stagnated urban site shares many characteristics with so-called ‘zombie subdivisions’ and thereby demonstrates many complex relationships in land markets and planning that otherwise go unexposed. It also demonstrates competing determinants of land value, and the influence of government (in)action on land markets. Solomon Heights highlights inconsistencies between strategic and statutory planning instruments, and unresolved tensions concerning the definition of and compensation for property rights for use and development. Arguably, the ongoing stagnation of the site and the entrenchment of its conflicting property interests demonstrates an inability of the Victorian planning system to deal with situations other than developer-led growth. This is especially notable in light of the site’s increasing strategic planning value.