The St Vincent’s Hospital
Caritas property and the Foster’s brewery are two city sites that tell a single
planning story. Caritas is Latin for charity, or love, or even mercy. But
there’s not a lot of it about in Darlo at the moment, where St
Vincent’s is proposing to flog heritage-listed, sandstone district
Crown land for a 12-storey development. Not in Chippendale either, where
Foster’s is still chasing 40 storeys on its vast Broadway site.
In both cases there are compelling arguments in the
affirmative. Each, though, is undone by the fleshy government snout that keeps
nudging into the picture. “Conflict?” it snuffles. “What
conflict? This is our trough we’re schlurping from.” Government trough,
yes, which is our trough, too.
Here’s how it works. The Caritas site adjoins the
Darlinghurst cop shop and faces the old jail across Forbes Street. It houses the hospital’s
mental health activities, which it wisely proposes to consolidate on the main hospital
campus. This is a good, desperately needed thing; should have happened years
ago. Caritas, further, is in many ways made for relatively dense housing, and
12 storeys could be fine.
But the deal. Ah, the deal. The Government foots half the
$41million for the new psych-hospital. Rather than cough up the rest, though,
it offers to rezone Caritas, as Crown land, for private sale. That’s bad, for a
start. Plus, it being hospital, no height controls pertain. Only now, with
temptation on the table, does the Government get around to sizing what amounts
to its own pay-off. It’s irresistible; the higher, the yummier.
Dodgier still is the way Caritas qualifies as a “major
project”, so coming under ministerial, not council, jurisdiction. The
legal definition stipulates any building exceeding $15 million “for the
purpose of providing professional health-care services”. That the new
“integrated service cluster” will cost $41 million flips the entire
shebang into the minister’s lap; notwithstanding that Caritas is no health-care
building but a straight residential rezoning, only indirectly “for the
purpose of” (funding) health care. This means any development whose owner
gives government money (or even taxes) will qualify for the minister’s
conflicted purview, provided the proposal is sufficiently gross.
That’s one murky moral game. And yet, objectors are caught.
Since x-fewer floors on the Caritas site means y-fewer beds for St Vincent’s, they end up looking not just nimby-esque
but downright, well, uncharitable.
The conflict on the brewery site, meanwhile, though
differently flavoured, is comparably piquant. Foster’s argues, rightly, that
this is the site for density. Here, in Sydney’s
public transport hub (rump might be more apt), people drive six times less than
standard Sydney
suburbanites. And it’s a brownfield site. Every dwelling here will save perhaps
10 times its own area in needless greenfield
sprawl. That’s all true.
Again, however, government determination to duck and weave,
to slide through the Part 3A slip lane and to pass off conflict of interest as
public interest has generated bitter opposition from usually thoughtful and
measured locals.
After years of dispute, a Government-appointed “expert
advisory panel” will mould the minister’s decision. This panel, comprising
a planning staffer, Chris Johnson, the Landcom deputy chairman, Neil Bird, Lucy
Turnbull and an estate agent, Mike Collins, has such respect for public opinion
that its interim report went to the minister, and the press, before public submissions
even closed.
Further, while Johnson and Bird are in government employ and
rhythmically appointed to government quasi-boards, their colleagues Turnbull
and Collins sit on the Redfern-Waterloo Authority. It’s an arrangement that
might be merely cosy, except that the authority – under the same minister –
will gain handsomely from maximising the brewery development. Why? Because the
minister used the same legal device, Part 3A, to glom CUB artificially to
Redfern-Waterloo, thus funnelling its maybe $25 million of affordable housing
levy into the cash-strapped authority’s coffers. Calculated as a sliding
percentage it gives the minister and his board a direct incentive for massive
overdevelopment.
Sure, it’ll mean demolishing the odd heritage item, but
maybe that’s cool. Collins also chairs the Heritage Council. It’ll put
15-storey buildings on six-metre-wide laneways (think Melbourne, only five times higher). With an
extra 2800 residents and 4800 workers, it’ll more than double Chippendale’s
population.
This divides the site’s much-vaunted 5000 sqm park at 0.5
sqm each. Imagine it. Like Christmas at Bondi, only whole a lot drier. And
exacerbated by the fact that Foster’s says it’ll sell the site, all 14 blocks
of it, in one line. Meaning this last opportunity for a model eco-urban project
will become just another satellite of midtown Meritonville.
Both projects are on the boil just when you’d think anyone
in the Government’s position would want to keep their pants pulled up
nice’n’tight.
Elizabeth Farrelly writes on architecture, planning and
aesthetic issues for the Herald.