Blacktown Council has commenced a corridor-wide planning reset stretching from Mount Druitt to Toongabbie, formally opening discussion on how an additional 50,000 dwellings could be accommodated across six established station precincts.  

The Mount Druitt to Toongabbie Corridor Strategy is positioned as a direct response to the NSW Low and Mid-Rise Housing Policy, which already permits residential uplift of up to 6-storeys within 800 metres of stations and town centres.  

Council’s analysis shows that those controls alone could deliver 23,000 additional dwellings between Toongabbie – Mount Druitt. The corridor spans 6,524 hectares and includes Mount Druitt, Doonside, Rooty Hill, Blacktown, Seven Hills and Toongabbie.

Despite its scale, the corridor currently averages just 6 dwellings per hectare, materially lower than comparable metro corridors such as Parramatta and Canterbury-Bankstown.  

Rather than applying a uniform uplift, Council is testing whether a place-based planning framework should replace fragmented state controls. Three scenarios are proposed: no change to existing controls, amended controls applied uniformly or tailored precinct-by-precinct planning that stages growth alongside infrastructure delivery.  

The strategy explicitly includes town centres, employment land and industrial precincts in its investigation area.  

This discussion paper marks the first step in the process. How density is distributed, which town centres carry uplift and what infrastructure is leveraged or funded will set planning expectations across Blacktown’s rail corridor for the next decade.