Latest news with #urban planning
Zawya
12 hours ago
- Business
- Zawya
Iraq to build 20 new cities near Baghdad
Iraq is planning to build 20 new residential cities in and around the capital Baghdad to ease congestion in the city and tackle a festering housing supply shortage. The construction and housing ministry has launched studies for the allocation of sufficient land to accommodate the new satellite cities. 'The ministry has started preparing studies for the allocation and expansion of land needed to accommodate 20 new cities in the Baghdad province,' the ministry's spokesman Nabil Al-Saffar said in local press comments on Monday. He said the ministry is also pushing ahead with plans to build an administrative capital In Baghdad similar to Egypt's New Administrative Capital. Officials reported this year that the ministry has received bids from four Egyptian companies and other foreign developers to build the administrative capital. 'Al-Rafeel City,' with an area of 265 square kilometres, will accommodate more than 75,000 people and comprise houses, government offices as well as commercial, education, health and amusement facilities. Last year, Egypt's ORA Developers was awarded the main contract for a new mega residential city 'Ali Al-Wardi, located in the southeast of Baghdad. Ali Al-Wardi is one of about 10 contracts awarded over the past three years to construct new cities that could house more than two million people. The planning ministry said in a study in 2024 that Iraq, OPEC's second largest oil producer, needs to build at least three million houses for citizens in the next five years to shore up the supply gap. (Writing by Nadim Kawach; Editing by Anoop Menon) (
ABC News
01-08-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
Adelaide City Council plans for 50,000 CBD residents without 'destroying the city'
South Australia's first appointed town planner, Charles Reade, was a prominent exponent of "garden cities" — an early 20th century urban planning movement that emerged in response to the overcrowding in British cities during the industrial revolution. Mr Reade, a New Zealander, envisaged cities surrounded by green space, combining the best of urban and rural living. In 1914, before his appointment by the SA government, he toured Australia to spruik the concept, and the Adelaide City Council gave him access to Town Hall to deliver a lecture. Unbeknownst to the council, the title of Mr Reade's presentation was: "Garden cities versus Adelaide slums and suburbs". It was to be an exhibition of the poor state of the city's housing with images of dilapidated alleys and overcrowded backyards projected to the audience on lantern slides. It caused outrage. "NO SLUMS IN ADELAIDE," read The Advertiser front page the next day, quoting an indignant Acting Mayor of Adelaide Alderman Cohen. "We have long held the reputation of being the Garden City of Australia," Mr Cohen reportedly said on October 5, 1914. "I therefore give this statement as to the existence of slums in Adelaide a most emphatic and strong denial, and I defy Mr Reade or anyone to point out the existence of any slums in our city." The slums controversy came in a year when the population of the Adelaide CBD had swelled to a record 43,000 people – more than double the population estimated to be living within the CBD today. Now, the council wants to return to its 1910s population peak. Town Hall adopted a "City Plan" last year that targets 50,000 residents living in the CBD and North Adelaide by 2036. Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith said the target reflects "the need to repopulate the city". "Setting a target of 50,000 means we'll be going back, back to the future, back to the sort of numbers we had in the last century," she told the ABC. Returning to 50,000 residents does not mean returning to the days of slums, Dr Lomax-Smith argues. "There's always progress in building development and the way people live," she said. But the population growth will, according to others, require a fundamental change to Adelaide's skyline. A 2023 council report found that accommodating even just 46,300 residents by 2041 could require building thirty-six 36-storey towers. The city currently has three. Meanwhile, the City Plan outlines that 1,000 new dwellings a year — or 2.7 homes a day — will be needed to reach the 2036 target. "If we were to achieve a doubling of our population in just 11 years, there would have to be cranes in the sky all over the central part of the city," said Greg Mackie, former chief executive of the History Trust of SA and a former city councillor. "But there's a massive amount of potential latent developable sites in the CBD, particularly if you think about the western end." The City Plan forecasts that the West End, including areas around Grote Street, West Terrace and Whitmore Square, can accommodate more than a third of the population growth needed to reach 50,000 residents. But other areas like North Adelaide, North Terrace and the East End are earmarked for much less growth, partly due to their high-level of heritage protection. "To get to 50,000, we don't want to destroy the city," Dr Lomax-Smith said. "It would be easy if we just demolished every building in the city and built tower blocks — 50 tower blocks, easy, get to 50,000 — but they would probably be mainly single-person units, and it would damage the character of our city. "One of the most important things is to protect the quality of life." Finding space for 50,000 residents is one thing — getting them to live in a city is another. "Australians on the whole have not been used to living in a house without a garden and off-street parking," Dr Lomax-Smith said. In the decades after Charles Reade lectured Adelaide about its slums, families flocked to the suburbs in search of more space. From 1947 to 1972, the city's population dropped from about 35,000 to 14,000, according to the council's archives. "Everyone was concentrated on building a house on a quarter-acre block and having their own place to live with their families," said Professor Emma Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Housing Research at the University of Adelaide. "So, there was kind of a gutting out of the city over those years, and it probably reached the kind of peak in the 1980s." While the CBD's population is growing again, it is more to do with migration and international students than suburban families attracted to city living. Most City of Adelaide residents either live on their own (40.8 per cent) or with their partner (25.6 per cent), according to the 2021 census. Just 8 per cent of city households — 970 in total — are couples with children. "The city has become a place where young people live maybe temporarily while they're studying," Ms Baker said. "About a quarter of the people who sleep in the city every night are students, so that's roughly the same proportion that Cambridge has. "So, we're a student city, we're a rental city, and people tend to … move into the city, live there for a while and move out later on as they get older." It's a vastly different picture than the early 20th century when big families lived in small city houses, or "slums". The average size of an Australian household in 1911 was 4.5 people; it is now just 1.7 in the City of Adelaide. Planning Institute of SA president Cate Hart said without families in the city, "what the city council is trying to strive for won't occur". "Single bed apartments to meet a student demand is not going to reach your 50,000 people," she said. "You actually need to build development that will accommodate three and four people per household." Ms Hart, who supports the council's plan, argues the public and private sector need to drive a "culture of living in the city" through good design and a diversity of housing. "Apartment living is not for everybody, and cookie cutter apartments will not drive a new culture," she said, adding that the city would need townhouses, "shop top living" and mid-rise development. The council will need help from the private sector to reach its target, but pulling off a major housing project within the CBD is not always easy. "It's not enough to just zone an area and think 'job done'," said Planning Minister Nick Champion. "Because the nature of private development is it comes in fits and starts, they have to get feasibility and capital, and they have to struggle against construction costs which are quite high at the moment." Further complicating matters is that the City of Adelaide is not the only local government area with housing growth on the horizon. The whole of Greater Adelaide will need another 315,000 houses by 2051, according to the state government's 30 Year Plan released last year. Around a third of this growth is earmarked for the sprawling northern suburbs. Jamie McClurg, executive chair of a real estate developer, said the suburbs are "typically a safer investment" for developers. "Certainly, those sort of markets are easier to produce and deliver stock," he said. It comes as his company nears completion on a major mixed-use apartment development on the former North Adelaide Le Cornu site. The land stood vacant for more than 30 years after various development plans fell over. "There's available land that can be just developed on straight away — it tends to be caught up in a lot of conversations and not probably enough action to my mind," Mr McClurg said. He is sceptical that the 50,000 population target will be reached. "I think that we have seen through the last couple of decade people set targets and not be responsible for achieving them," he said. "I just would expect the people that are leading us to understand the math that they're committing to and deliver on it."
Washington Post
16-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
A developer promised a supermarket for a new neighborhood. Now it can't deliver.
A developer with plans to build apartments and retail on a long-contested parcel of land in an emerging Northwest Washington neighborhood is now asking the city if it can scale back a promise to deliver a large full-service grocery store, which would be the only one of its kind in a one-mile radius. Jair Lynch is one of three development companies involved in the effort to transform the 25-acre McMillan site, previously a long-defunct water filtration facility turned unofficial park, into a new neighborhood called Reservoir District. Some parts of the project are falling into place, including a new District-operated recreation center and nearly 150 new townhouses. But after a decade of litigation and setbacks, Jair Lynch says it can no longer find a partner willing to fill the 55,000-square-foot grocery store it promised would be part of its portion of the site. On Thursday, the developer will ask the District's Zoning Commission to scale back the grocery store's footprint by at least half — an adjustment it argues is necessary for construction to begin. 'Nobody could take the space that was in the previous agreement,' said Ruth Hoang, senior vice president of development for Jair Lynch. The company has signed a lease with a grocer willing to fill a 22,500-square-foot space, she said, and 'we're ready to go.' That shift has confused and frustrated some neighbors in the nearby Bloomingdale and Stronghold neighborhoods, including some who have been involved in negotiations with the developers for years. 'Yes, NIMBYs delayed the project by years, then the pandemic changed market conditions, and now the local economy is at risk,' said Tyler Lopez, a resident since 2020. 'But Bloomingdale and Stronghold shouldn't be shortchanged.' By the time the District purchased the McMillan site from the federal government in the 1980s, the water filtration system — the city's first — had fallen out of use. The ivy-covered ruins remained one of D.C.'s largest undeveloped parcels of land over the following decades as disagreements over the site's future played out in court battles and council hearings. As recently as 2021, protesters chained themselves to construction equipment to slow demolitions. 'At every stage of the process,' said D.C. Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development Nina Albert, 'there has been a battle.' Jair Lynch and its partners, developers EYA and Trammell Crow, joined the redevelopment effort in 2007, when the city contracted with the consortium to outline a plan for the site's future. Plans for a grocery store emerged as part of a 2014 deal between the city, the community and the developers. The type of agreement, known as a planned unit development agreement, or PUD, enables developers to work outside of standard zoning regulations in exchange for public benefits — often affordable housing and neighborhood amenities. 'The grocery store was a big part of the sell,' said Andrea Ferster, an attorney who represented a community group called Friends of McMillan Park in several lawsuits over the last decade challenging the legality of the project. Kevin Rapp, an outgoing member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 5E who lives across from the site and has been involved in the negotiations, echoed that sentiment. 'The Reservoir District development will mean a lot of new people, some of whom can't drive,' he said. 'And there's not much to offer right in this bull's eye.' Between the new townhouses on another portion of the site and the multifamily element of Jair Lynch's project, the development will include roughly 600 new homes and apartments, including nearly 150 affordable units for senior citizens. When the Zoning Commission initially approved the McMillan agreement, Jair Lynch had secured a lease with Harris Teeter to fill a ground-floor space in one building, which Hoang says was the basis for the original floor plan. 'In the subsequent years of delay,' Jair Lynch's legal team wrote in support of the developer's request for modifications in March, Harris Teeter 'lost interest and pulled out of the project.' Amid delays, full-service grocery stores opened in surrounding neighborhoods, including a Whole Foods Market on Florida Ave. NW — another product of a PUD agreement. A second, unnamed grocer briefly signed onto the McMillan project before withdrawing in November 2022, so the developer turned to a smaller-format — and still-unnamed — grocer, signing a lease in December 2024. But since its agreement with the District still requires a grocery store more than double that size, Jair Lynch can't move forward with construction. Kirby Vining, a Stronghold resident who helped lead Friends of McMillan Park's opposition to the project, argues that Jair Lynch could have avoided overpromising and under-delivering. 'Be careful what you ask for and what you promise,' he said in a phone interview. If Jair Lynch had built flexibility into its original proposal, he argued, the developer 'could have building permits right now.' Albert, the deputy mayor, said having yet another hearing on the project highlights a need to rethink how the city negotiates agreements like that with the McMillan developers. 'Over the history of PUD agreements, we've become more prescriptive and restrictive,' she said in an interview. 'I think we need to go back to a more flexible approach.' In Albert's view, the proposed switch to a smaller-format grocer reflects a broader market trend. 'We've seen more of these smaller stores that are full-service and really more neighborhood-scale,' she said. At a meeting with community members last year, Jair Lynch offered examples: the Lidl in Columbia Heights, for instance, opened in 2023 in a 27,000-square-foot space. A store of that size may 'have to streamline or forgo certain on-site services such as an in-store butcher, full-service deli, or bakery,' said Hoang. 'The actual offerings depend on the operator, but the goal remains to deliver a store that meets neighborhood needs.' But in its request to modify their agreement, Jair Lynch noted that its current partner 'could pull out as well if additional delays from appeals or more proceedings arise.' In the event of that grocer canceling its lease, the developer requested conditional permission to shrink the dedicated space to as few as 10,000 square feet to increase the chances of finding a new prospect. 'What they have right now will get a lot of pushback,' said Rapp. 'Nobody around here wants the minimum to be 10,000 square feet.' Grocery stores of that scale or smaller exist in D.C., including the 7,200-square-foot Yes! Organic Market in Brookland. Some neighbors are focused on securing Jair Lynch's commitment to use remaining ground-floor space for retail, telling The Post that the neighborhood needs a grocery store as an anchor for other businesses. 'We need a laundromat, we need a day care, we need a pharmacy,' said Darryl Cunningham, sitting in a folding chair on a Stronghold sidewalk on a humid July evening. To underscore his point, Cunningham rattled off a list of nearby pharmacy locations that have closed in recent years. 'That's what we thought we could expect,' said Rob Irving, seated beside Cunningham. Both men are lifelong Stronghold residents with young children who grew up playing in the former sand filtration site's catacombs and walking more than a mile to buy groceries. 'It gave me strong shoulders,' Cunningham added. According to Hoang, Jair Lynch's retail brokers are in preliminary conversations with possible pharmacies. In a discussion on Jair Lynch's initial request for modification in March, D.C. zoning commissioners expressed mixed feelings. 'I am generally comfortable with what they're proposing,' said Commissioner Gwen Wright. 'We have to make sure it doesn't lose the elements that made it such an important contribution to this part of the city from the get-go. 'I hope we're improving and not going backwards,' added Commission Chair Anthony Hood. So far, the groups behind many of the legal challenges to the project have not signaled interest in reopening the fight. Meanwhile, Jair Lynch is seeking the City Council's approval of a 20-year property tax abatement for the project. Making its case to the council's Committee on Business and Economic Development last month, the developer asserted that the tax break, amounting to $57 million in uncollected revenue, is necessary to make construction 'economically viable' — and to avoid delays that could drive away yet another grocery partner.
