UrbanGrowth Central to Eveleigh Urban Renewal and Transport Program 2014-15 Business Plan

Contents

SITE PLAN    4

1. Executive Summary            5

1.1 Project Description           5

1.2 Project Ambition & Objectives     7

1.3 Strategic Overview           7

1.4 Market Research   10

 (part of index redacted)

5. Project Strategy      25

5.1 Concept Plan         25

5.2 Statutory Planning Pathways        25

5.3 Community engagement strategy 26

5.4 Sustainability Initiatives   27

 (part of index redacted)

Appendix 2: Draft program - see attached PDF document    34

Appendix 3: Concept Plan      35

 (part of index redacted)

SITE PLAN

1. Executive Summary

1.1 Project Description

The Central to Eveleigh Urban Renewal and Transport Program (C2E) is an ambitious project that targets development of 80ha of mainly State Government-owned land and the airspace above the Central to Eveleigh railway line. The Project is in a prime location, strategically positioned to support Sydney's CBD growth, adjacent to large universities, health facilities and vibrant inner city neighbourhoods.

The development projects will consist of:

• Development of super lots for residential and mixed use outcomes on excess Railcorp land
• Redevelopment of Redfern and Central stations to incorporate future transport service needs and significant residential, retail and commercial floor space
• Potential development of podiums over operational rail assets to access airspace development rights

The Project has the potential to add 9,000 dwellings and more than 300,000sqm of commercial space, creating space for more than 15,000 jobs.

 (Part 1.1 redacted)

1.2 Project Ambition & Objectives

Ambition

Create a steady series of successful development projects over the next 20 years with each stage adding to the living and working vibrancy of the immediate neighbourhoods and greater city. Demonstrate successful incorporation of higher density residential and commercial outcomes by achieving excellent urban design, local connectivity, public space and community facility outcomes.

Objective

Identify a technically and commercially feasible pathway to develop Railcorp owned land in the Corridor by:

• Identifying a series of short term (0-5 year) projects that allow delivery of new housing and employment opportunities complimentary to the surrounding community
• Developing winning business cases for redevelopment projects for Redfern Station and Central Station precincts ('Grand Central') as medium to long term catalysts to unlock value in the entire corridor/region
• Delivering excellent connectivity, public space and community facility outcomes able to balance the perceived negative impacts of urban densification

1.3 Strategic Overview

Justification

The Corridor can be justified for project development expenditure due to the satisfaction of several positive urban renewal indicators including:

• large scale housing and employment potential
• location directly adjacent to public transport and employment access
• large scale government land ownership
• catalyst sites at North and South Eveleigh.

The 'challenge' for C2E will be to:

• identify the optimal mix of government/private sector risk and return and associated funding and finance methods
• identify the correct staging and wholesale development parcel delivery framework over short (0-5 year), medium term (5-10 year) and long term (10 year plus) periods.

  (Part in middle of 1.3 redacted)

Wider Economic Benefits

• Houses and jobs will be located dose to the city, existing public transport nodes and existing infrastructure services creating economic efficiency outcomes relative to other locations.
• Allows for expansion of the Sydney CBD increasing agglomeration economies by further creating connections between industry clusters, educational and health facilities.
• Can attract major employers from interstate and internationally adding outright to Gross State Product (education, R&D, ICT, creative industries).

Benefits to the Local Community

• Housing : 9,000 homes, improved diversity and targeted housing affordability outcomes
• Employment: local space for >15,000 jobs
• Transport connectivity: Improved existing walk and bike connections across the corridor, new cross corridor walk and bike connections and new north/south linear connections (Central to Erskineville).
• Quality and quantity of public domain: Creation of new high quality and activated public spaces - renewal of existing public domain especially at Redfern Station.
• Local heritage and culture: Revitalised heritage assets, enhanced experience of heritage and more opportunities and spaces to support cultural activities.
• Community facilities: Provision of new community facilities including schools.

1.4 Market Research

Residential development key indicators (1) BIS Shrapnel Inner City Apartment Outlook 2013-2020

• Highest and best use for projects in the corridor ($10-12k per sqm completed product)

• Strong price growth experienced in Redfern/Waterloo area (may be challenged by high supply 2014-2016 especially in Waterloo)
• Apartment sizes dropping steadily with mix of studio and 1 bedroom apartments increasing based part on affordability and part on increased number of 1 person households
• Strong value proposition in relation to close CBD location, culture/character of area, public transport services indicate ongoing strong demand and price growth

Commercial development key indicators (2) CBRE Research report commissioned for C2E UrbanGrowth NSW 2014

• Commercial values likely to trade on expectations of A Grade rents at a set discount to core CBD Prime and A Grade accommodation (equates to $5-6k per sqm completed product)
• Greatest demand for campus type accommodation in competition with Macquarie Park and other major middle ring business parks - C2E should trade at a premium to these lesser located areas
• Central Station the likely high rise commercial offer but needs to compete with existing 17 years supply available in core CBD areas (refurb and new)
  

Retail development key indicators (3) CBRE Research report commissioned for C2E UrbanGrowth NSW 2014

• Historic retail proposition in area has been poor due to high student/low to middle income demographic
• Recent apartment boom and ongoing gentrification has seen retail proposition change and improve - Broadway one of the highest grossing retail outlets in Sydney
• Central Park (20,000sqm), Broadway (45,000sqm) and the retail strip at Newtown are the nearest competitors
• Central Station is arguably underutilised as a retail facility given the high patronage of the facility
• Scale of proposed development in Redfern/Eveleigh will support a significant retail project (sufficient for full line supermarket anchor)

Key feedback from development industry soundings (September 2013-May 2014)

• Residential development is significantly more viable than commercial from Redfern to
• Eveleigh - residential use is the highest and best use across the entire Corridor
• Redfern and Central Stations provide significant retail opportunities
• The Central Station locality provides the best opportunity for commercial office development but premium and/or A grade office development unlikely to be feasible for 10-15 years
• Development alongside operational rail assets requires pre agreed design and construction standards to reduce time and cost risk in the development process
• The Government will need to part fund and potentially deliver over rail items of infrastructure due to the prohibitive cost and risk and seek return of costs through long term development profits/land value uplifts
• The Corridor should be broken into a series of smaller, marketable development projects
• Suitable overarching planning controls (allowable heights, floor space ratios/envelopes, land use etc) need to be established at a State level to provide comfort on planning risk

(Next 14 pages redacted may include some of Executive Summary)

5. Project Strategy

5.1 Concept Plan

See Attachment 3 (Publicly available document)

5.2 Statutory Planning Pathways

The preferred statutory planning pathway needs to deliver an outcome that achieves:

• The desired long term built form, land use and public benefit outcomes identified
• An appropriate level of planning control that delivers the identified outcomes but retains
• developer flexibility to tailor applications based on market demands and innovation
• An approval process that appropriately reflects the need for TfNSW to play an integrated approval role
• A consent authority that has the capability and market credibility to be perceived as efficient and low risk by the private sector

 (Part Page Redacted)

5.3 Community engagement strategy

Central to Eveleigh has the benefit of an active and engaged local community. Various community actions groups are already in place with Redwatch being the largest and best organised.

The strategy for community engagement has three parts:

I) Proactive and early - the community will be engaged proactively before final concepts and masterplans are finalised and before the formal statutory planning process has begun. The stages can be summarised as:

• Concept planning - development of precinct vision, design principles, identification of local factors that shape key planning outcomes
• Specific issue planning - development of a specific-vision on critical issues such as precinct connectivity, public space design
• Masterplanning - precinct urban design options that indicate the location and scale of built form, roads, public spaces etc
• Statutory planning - mandatory exhibition of final planning proposals

2) Provision of multiple methods of communication to access a representative cross section of the immediate local and regional community. These methods will include:

• Overarching project and specific issues based focus groups with targeted selection
• Overarching project and specific issues based focus groups with existing local community action groups
• Web based survey to access much larger and broad based regional samples
• Active web based discussion forums
• Web based library providing access to historic and contemporary project information

3) Integrated community consultation across urban renewal and transport infrastructure initiatives

• Community benefits will most often be realised at C2E through a combination of transport and urban renewal initiatives - for this reason it is proposed that a collaborative approach is always applied between TfNSW and UGNSW
• TfNSW and UGNSW will jointly approve any new information being issued into public forums to ensure the priorities of each are correctly represented.

5.4 Sustainability Initiatives

For C2E the key sustainability opportunities that will form the basis of a targeted sustainability strategy include:

• Reduced car dependency - increased walk and bike outcomes (reduce the carbon footprint and pollution outcomes of the project)
• Investigation of precinct scale wastewater recycling, heating and cooling schemes, renewable energy schemes through private developer delivery most likely in the Redfern and Central Station redevelopment projects (reduce the carbon footprint and water footprint of the project)
• Housing diversity and affordable housing strategies
• Aboriginal heritage, culture and training and employment support strategies

Other typical sustainability target areas (biodiversity, waste management, building thermal performance, social inclusion, further climate change measures etc) will be workshopped with the City of Sydney to establish if UrbanGrowth's role can contribute further in these areas.

The UrbanGrowth NSW developed PRECINX tool will be used as a basis to calculate overarching sustainability outcomes and to set benchmarks for performance.

 (Next 6 pages redacted)

Appendix 2: Draft program - see attached PDF document (not released)

Appendix 3: Concept Plan - Central to Eveleigh Corridor: Concept Plan (already public)

See Draft Concept and Key Issues summary - June 2014

This document was produced by Optical Character Recognition (OCR)  by REDWatchof the released UrbanGrowth document. It is provided as easily accessable and searchable access to the released document. It is possible OCR errors may have occured and while we have checked the resulting document we can not guarantee that it is without. If you propose to quote or use this document please check it against the original document which is available from REDWatch or the Public Information Officer at UrbanGrowth NSW.The original Sydney Morning Herald article about this can be seen at
Sydney renewal project at Eveleigh likely to be scaled back