Chatswood Dive Site Watch

Campaign update, March 2026 Since my last post I have lodged a formal submission on SSD-100006957 via the NSW Planning Portal, and have since prepared a detailed letter to Willoughby City Council setting out further analysis and objections. Both are accompanied by a compiled set of source document extracts. The documents are available to download at the bottom of this post. In reviewing the application documents ahead of this work, two further issues came to light that I think are important enough to explain in plain terms here. There are two separate findings I want to cover. The first is an argument about how the planning justifications in this proposal compound one another in a way that should concern anyone thinking about what this site is actually going to deliver. The second is a more technical but significant finding: the concurrent rezoning removes two conditions from Willoughby LEP 2012, but the EIS only tells us about one of them. First: the school argument compo...

Supporting good development. Opposing bad planning. This is a community information page about the proposed redevelopment of the Chatswood Dive Site. We support well-planned development and more housing in the right locations. We are not against change. We are not saying “build nothing”. But we are concerned that this proposal is moving away from what many people understood this site was meant to become. Over time, the public story has changed. First, the site was associated with broader community benefits, including a school and a more genuinely mixed-use outcome. The school has now been dropped. And for the first stage of the development, the formal planning proposal seeks to reduce the required non-residential floor space from 17% to 2% . That is not a small adjustment. It is a major reduction that changes the character of the site. In simple terms, this means the site risks becoming a largely residential development with only a very small amount of retai...