Austral residents rage at council over ‘joke’ concrete garden beds

Sydney homeowners are fuming after giant concrete garden beds started popping up in their streets, gobbling up precious parking spots in a suburb where space is already at a premium. In Austral, in the city’s booming southwest, where the average home now costs about $1.195m, residents say the baffling council design has turned a daily parking headache into an all-out suburban war, with cars dumped on grass, across driveways and streets away from home. The controversy is the latest planning flashpoint for the fast-growing suburb, which last year made headlines over its unusual diamond-shaped roundabout. Now, locals say newly installed streetscaping features are making life even harder in an area already struggling with narrow roads, small frontages and limited off-street parking. “Honestly, if I’m going to describe the design, it’s not a design. It’s a joke,” one resident told Nine News. Residents in Sydney’s booming southwest suburb of Austral say giant concrete garden beds are wiping out precious street parking, sparking anger in an area where homes cost about $1.2m. Source: Nine News The so-called three pits have so far been rolled out in five local streets but council says more ...