Suburbs with land reserved for public acquisition

291 of the 1,264 Australian suburbs published on this site contain land reserved for future public acquisition. That is a count of our own published pages, not of every suburb in the country — the corpus grows, and this page is rebuilt with it. Every one is in New South Wales, the only state in this dataset publishing acquisition reservations as a spatial layer we can read per suburb.

The effect of a reservation is on value and timing rather than on design. Nothing about it stops a house being built, and an owner can hold reserved land for decades without anything happening. What it does is tell you that somebody intends, eventually, to own it — which bears on what the land is worth, on what a lender makes of it, and on how long you should expect to be there.

It is mapped to specific parcels, not to whole suburbs. A suburb appearing below means some land inside it is reserved; whether that includes a particular block is an address-level question for the council. 139 of these suburbs carry more than one purpose at once, and the highest count on a single suburb is 6.

The source data uses 53 distinct labels, which collapse to 36 purposes once the bracketed codes and capitalisation are set aside. Those brackets are worth separating out rather than discarding, because the two halves of a label answer different questions. The words say what the land is wanted for. The bracket says how it is zoned today.

So “Local Road Widening (R2)” and “Local Road Widening (SP2)” describe the same intention over very different land: the first is residential land earmarked for a road, the second is land already zoned for that special purpose. The first is somebody’s house. 33 of the 291 suburbs here carry at least one label with a zone code in it.