Development is rapidly taking place in a currently sparse part of Ballarat, west of Wiltshire Lane and between Ballarat-Carngham Road to the north and Greenhalghs Road to the south, but with the potential for industrial and residential properties to be close neighbours.

A planning permit application was recently advertised for 12 warehouses at 14 Concept Drive, Delacombe, in the Winter Valley Business Park, only a stone's throw away from residential development taking place on Mirelle Drive.

While the area is currently home to a mix of uses, City of Ballarat acting director of development and growth Joanna Cuscaden said the area, including industrial and commercial land east of the Ballarat West Police Complex, would become more residential in the medium to long term future.

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"In terms of that area, it certainly will predominantly be residential, but there are parts of the area where we do have employment earmarked, and that's probably where you're seeing some of the warehouses.," she said.

"Warehouses are probably more likely to be able to be situated within close proximity of residential because obviously the impact from them are not as great. However, a lot of that larger industrial areas, we're seeking to push them further away from where we see residential."

The growth of the area is being guided by the Ballarat West Precinct Structure Plan, released in 2016, which covers essentially the city's entire western growth corridor from Alfredton to Bonshaw.

According to the PSP, from 2010 to 2050, the area was projected to accommodate for 80 per cent of the population growth identified for the wider Ballarat West growth area.

The PSP area was forecast to accommodate almost 15,000 lots and a population of about 36,000 people in that time.

However, Ms Cuscaden said there would be some conflict of land use as the area transitions towards its residential future.

"There will be a bit of conflict of land uses in the short term while there's existing land uses that currently already are operating from those areas and, obviously, it's going to take five, 10, 15 years for the area to actually develop into what we see to be largely residential, but we'll also incorporate major activity centres and also smaller activities to accommodate the future growth of the area," she said.

Ms Cuscaden said residential developments should not be approved next to an existing industrial or commercial use so there was no impact on amenity for residents or businesses.

"In the short term, there shouldn't be any residential approved adjacent to an existing use that is obviously going to have a detrimental impact on them," she said.

"A lot of the warehouses won't have those detrimental amenity impacts towards a residential area, so we still do need to assess those applications and make sure that certainly anything that's existing, they're within their rights to continue operating and that's what they do until they decide to move on, which could be 10-15 years for some of them.

"That does certainly form part of our assessment as to what is within close proximity of those existing users, and that's certainly a big issue as well in Melbourne's growth areas, they've got a lot of agricultural land that does have amenity impacts, so it is a balance of the amenity impacts on the new residential developments that we need to assess as part of a planning application."

Ms Cuscaden said council was now starting to see a lot of the development it had planned for in the PSP start to take place, but it was yet to see anything that required it to adjust the plan on the fly.

"Once you get the plan in place, obviously it takes some time for developers to get on board and for them to get their land right and now we're starting to see a lot of the actual development starting to pop up seven-plus years after the plan's actually been put out," she said.

"We haven't actually seen much yet that has been outside of what we expected, and that's because we did quite a bit of work seven-plus years ago to work out what the future population would likely be and then what infrastructure they needed.

"There's probably road widenings and changes to intersections and that kind of thing to really fit a future population to what is horse paddocks or agricultural land."

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