LEICHHARDT’S COMING WAVE
How New Development Will Expand the Suburb’s Apartment Landscape
Leichhardt has always been spoken about in terms of houses – the freestanding homes tucked behind Norton Street, the rows of older semis, the pockets that feel more like village than city. Units have played a supporting role in that story: necessary, sometimes convenient, rarely the focus.
That balance is starting to shift.
Across scattered sites – above shops, along the Parramatta Road corridor, in quiet back streets that once housed only warehouses and low-rise commercial stock – you can see a new layer of built form emerging. Not dramatic high-rises, not endless repetition, but a steady pattern of mid-rise and boutique developments filling in the gaps between the suburb’s older fabric.
This isn’t a flood. It’s a tide. Planning controls have been gradually adjusted to allow more height and more yield in particular pockets. Parramatta Road is being reimagined not just as a traffic corridor but as a place people might actually want to live near, with mixed-use projects absorbing some of the future population growth the Inner West is being asked to carry. Closer to the village core, sites that underperformed for decades are being reconsidered as residential.
What this means, practically, is more apartments. More choice for people who want Leichhardt’s walkability, food, and community, but don’t want to or can’t buy into the house market. More homes for downsizers who don’t want to leave 2040. More options for young buyers who grew up visiting Norton Street and would rather sacrifice floor space than suburb.
It will also quietly change the feel of certain blocks. Shop-top housing that used to be a bit of an afterthought will be deliberately designed. Previously sleepy side streets will see a few more lights on at night. The daytime population will increase – more people working from home, more foot traffic scattered through the grid instead of just pooling on the main strip.
For existing owners, the instinct is often to ask, “Will more apartments dilute the suburb?” The answer depends on how the development is handled. Good architecture, considered design and genuinely mixed-use schemes have a way of strengthening a centre instead of weakening it. Poorly executed, they just add shadows and cars.
Leichhardt’s opportunity lies in the middle ground – not replicating the density of the city, but accepting that the village can’t stay frozen in the year 1995. New stock is coming. The only real question is how gracefully the suburb chooses to absorb it.
— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal