PEOPLE considering buying land in the latest paper estate development should talk to June Esposito.
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For 24 years she has been fighting to build on land she bought in the Heritage Estate back in 1988.
Mrs Esposito is maintaining her rage over what happened to her and more than 1000 other Heritage Estate land owners.
The Shoalhaven Landowners Association president was worried other buyers might be left with nothing but false hopes and empty promises from the latest attempt to sell a paper estate.
Mrs Esposito questioned why a developer would attempt to rezone an old paper estate when others in the Heritage, Jerberra, Verons and Nebraska estates had faced such difficulties.
“It would be interesting to see if there would be another scam so close to where we were,” she said.
“It’s hard to think anyone who could consider themselves an investor would want to buy that land and think they could make money out of developing it, after all that’s happened,” she said.
However if rezoning attempts are successful, Mrs Esposito said it might present an opportunity for the Heritage land to be rezoned.
She is meeting a barrister next week to see if there are any options still available to the owners of the 1100 Heritage Estate blocks, with the latest push to rezone adjoining land “an interesting development”.
In the years following her purchase in 1988 she met regularly with Shoalhaven City Council officials in an effort to broker a rezoning deal, even agreeing to have the landowners pay extra rates to cover the costs of providing services to the blocks.
The owners also paid for a commission of inquiry, that recommended 730 blocks be rezoned for residential development, before Environment Minister Pater Garrett stepped in during 2009 and ruled the land was too environmentally sensitive to be developed.
Yet a short distance away the land bought by Stockland, which was originally supposed to form a wildlife corridor because the Heritage land was deemed too disturbed, was completely cleared and the wildlife corridor was shifted to Heritage.
“It was a total injustice,” Mrs Esposito said.
She feared efforts to rezone land south of the Heritage Estate might provide more evidence of, “If you’re a big developer, you can do what you like”.