Latest news with #urbanrenewal
News.com.au
20 hours ago
- Business
- News.com.au
‘More than double their market value': ‘Megalot' phenomenon making homeowners rich
Property owners in some of Sydney's most affluent neighbourhoods are joining forces to become overnight multi-millionaires. Rather than offload their home alone, residents in affluent harbourside suburbs like Mosman and Cremorne are selling at 'more than double their market value' to developers in 'megalot' amalgamations. In May alone, two groups of property owners – five along Cremorne's Benelong Rd and Gerard St; the other five along Mosman's Rangers Ave just two minutes down the road – were involved in collective sales worth an eye-watering $100 million combined. It's a sign, experts say, of the future of urban development in Sydney. A team of UNSW and Macquarie University researchers recently published Reassembling the City: understanding resident-led collective property sales – a study funded by the Australian Research Council that cast a spotlight on the phenomenon. Professor Simon Pinnegar from the UNSW City Futures Research Centre and Professor Kristian Ruming from Macquarie University's Housing and Urban Research Centre both contributed to the study. 'Collective sales have been a part of the urban renewal landscape in Sydney for many years,' the pair told pointing to developments surrounding the North West metro. 'The current wave being seen in Sydney's high value land and property markets – the likes of Mosman, Roseville and Gordon – reflect areas where the 'business of densification' stacks up given current feasibility considerations: large lot sizes – which means you only need to get 4 to 6 properties together, rather than 10 to 12 – and the ability to command premium sales prices for the apartments that will result.' Director of residential sales at Savills, Stuart Cox, has been involved in a number of these amalgamations. He told the agency already has 'another good raft of sites coming to market in the next two weeks'. Mr Cox estimated more than 200 homes have now sold across 'the heart of this site rezoning' – the North Shore – driven by the NSW State Government's Transport Oriented Development (TOD) Program, which is designed to increase housing supply near new transport hubs. The new controls gave the green light to medium- to high-density apartment blocks with a six-storey height limit and 2.2:1 floor space ratio (FSR): which is your site area x 2.2 x the sales rate for that area, Mr Cox explained. 'Buy for $3 million, sell for $10 million' For homeowners, the 'primary appeal' is 'a belief that they will be able to sell their property for a much higher price, compared to if they sold individually', Professors Pinnegar and Ruming said. 'Coming together to sell 'in one line' means that they're able to deliver the larger amalgamated sites that developers require for higher density development,' they continued. 'By facilitating the assembly process among them removes a traditionally complex task for developers, and so homeowners think that by coming together they will be in a better position to negotiate a higher sales price.' The median price of a four-bedroom home in Mosman is $5 million. '(But) if they've got amazing views like they have on Rangers Avenue – the one we sold looking straight back at the whole CBD from the ground floor – they're selling from anywhere from $13,000 up to $15,000 a square metre of GFA (gross floor area),' Mr Cox said. 'And then the ones on Balmoral Slopes, they're selling anywhere from $15,000 up to $20,000 a square metre. So if you think about it, a 1000 square metre house block can yield 2200sqm of GFA, which times 220,000 is $40 million. 'A lot of these homes are worth like 13, 14 or 15 million. They get more than double their market value.' Mr Cox said a lot of younger couples – those in their 30s and 40s – partaking in collective sales initially bought their properties for 'three or four million and are getting 10 million'. 'So they can now go, buy a more improved, more modern home for their family,' he said. 'Because none of them want to move out of the area – they obviously all love Mosman, they love the schools and the proximity to all the amenities.' 'How well do you know your neighbours?' The possibility of achieving such a high sales price is no doubt appealing. But, as Professors Pinnegar and Ruming found in their research, 'it is far from a simple process, (and) while some sales may proceed in a straightforward and timely way … it is a complex and often fraught journey for many'. Collective sales present two key challenges – the first entirely dependent on the answer to the following questions: How well do you know your neighbours? And, more importantly, do you all get on? 'Pleasantries over the fence and agreeing to put your neighbours' bins out while they're on holiday is one thing, but tying your property interests and largest asset together, requiring all to up sticks and move elsewhere, demands quite different levels of co-operation and trust,' they said. Each individual household will come to a collective sale from 'quite different starting points, household circumstances, and future needs', as well as with conflicting sales price expectations and preferences as to the agent they want to use or developer they want to sell to. 'Group dynamics come into play and there are many reasons that can cause groups to fall apart,' Professors Pinnegar and Ruming said, adding it's 'not uncommon' for this to happen over the sales process. 'It is also important to remember that some people just don't want to sell their home, no matter what price they might get. These people love their home and neighbourhood and don't want to leave – or at least not yet.' Mr Cox also warned it is 'highly critical in all these deals that they get one solicitor representing the whole group'. 'You can't have eight owners with eight solicitors,' he said. 'The deal will never get over the line.' The other challenge raised by Professors Pinnegar and Ruming is that it can take 'a very long time' to finalise the sale – which can be attributed to everything from owners holding out for a higher sales price to the way developers tend to buy these properties. 'In most cases developers purchase options on the land, providing owners a small percentage upfront, with the final sales occurring at a later date,' they said. 'As time passes, market and economic cycles shift, and expectations of owners in the collective may change. Some sales fall over, requiring homeowners to go through the process again. 'Developers will also closely track viability and feasibility of development tied to market conditions, availability of finance and evolving planning parameters. In our research, we spoke to owners in collectives who had been looking to sell for many years.' According to Mr Cox, the typical settlement for these deals can be as long as two years. 'No one's buying these sites for a six-week settlement, because obviously these homeowners live there for many years,' he said. 'It's going to take these developers at least 12 months to get their DAs in most instances, plus the Construction Certificate after that. Every deal up there at the moment is around that 18- to 24-month settlement.' 'It's not a bad life for some of these people' Whether in Mosman, Marrickville or Merrylands, according to Professors Pinnegar and Ruming 'residential densification through TOD will be the fundamental defining feature of urban development in Sydney in the coming decades'. 'The government's planning reforms place a great deal of expectation that land assemblies will occur, that sites will be amalgamated and new residential supply will be delivered through density,' they added. 'Much of the new supply to be enabled through the TOD Program rests on assumptions that land assembly is something that the market will drive and make happen. In reality it is a highly contingent and intensely 'peopled' process, involving a great deal of complexity. 'So yes, we will increasingly see these developments brought forward through collective sales and land assemblies, but not in a seamless, timely or indeed particularly strategic way.' As for where these homeowners go when all is (hopefully) said and done? In terms of putting down fresh roots, Mr Cox said, it often isn't far. 'I think you're going to find a lot of them are going to have a lot of leftover cash,' he said. 'A lot of them have talked about buying back into these developments because they love living in the area – they don't want to move away from the area. 'So they're selling their home for, say, $10 million, buying a three-bedroom apartment for $6 million, $7 million – which will be a very high-security, lock-and-leave scenario – then they go travelling with the balance of the funds. 'It's not a bad life for some of these people.'
South China Morning Post
3 days ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Donald Choi takes helm of Hong Kong's cash-strapped URA amid mounting challenges
A veteran property specialist with experience in leading major Hong Kong real estate groups has been appointed to steer the cash-strapped Urban Renewal Authority (URA). The government on Thursday announced the appointment of Donald Choi Wun-hing, the former CEO of Chinachem Group, as the authority's managing director from June 15, for three years, when the incumbent chief Wai Chi-sing is set to retire after his nine-year leadership. '[Choi] has a deep understanding of the local land and housing planning, the property market, conservation of historic buildings, green buildings and innovative construction techniques, among others, and is committed to creating quality and vibrant urban living in Hong Kong,' the Secretary for Development Bernadette Linn Hon-ho said. 'I am confident that Mr Choi will lead the URA management in furthering the important task of urban renewal, as well as effectively handling the challenges of building decay while maintaining the financial sustainability of the URA.' Choi, an architect by profession, was the CEO of Chinachem Group from 2018 to August 2024 before his retirement. He was also previously the managing director of Nan Fung Development and a director of the well-known architectural firm Foster and Partners. Choi has also served the industries as a former president of both the Hong Kong Institute of Architects and of the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design. Since the 2022-23 financial year, the self-financing statutory body has been struggling with its deficit, which stood at HK$3.9 billion (US$497.5 million) in the 2023-24 financial year.
South China Morning Post
4 days ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
With urban renewal, China is buying its economy time
In recent months, the Chinese government's deliberate pace in responding to economic headwinds has frustrated markets. Faced with persistent weakness in household consumption, a drawn-out property downturn and growing external uncertainty, many had hoped Beijing would turn to bold stimulus measures or administer direct cash transfers to citizens. Yet time and again, officials have signalled their intent to stay the course – doubling down on slow-moving structural reforms rather than short-term fixes. The State Council's latest campaign to promote urban renewal offers a case in point. Urban renewal is not a novel concept. Since the programme was first flagged in the 2019 central economic work conference, local governments have improved ageing neighbourhoods, redeveloped dilapidated housing and repurposed underused land – progress reviewed at length at a State Council press conference last week. Alongside a fresh set of high-level guidelines, the government pledged more fiscal and policy support for the programme to achieve tangible results by 2030. The push underscores a pivot in China's preferred growth strategy: away from debt-fuelled expansion on the urban fringe and towards more deliberate, infill-oriented development within city cores. From a policy perspective, urban renewal serves short-term needs. With residential housing activity still tepid , upgrading older buildings and the surrounding infrastructure helps keep construction activity afloat and provides a buffer against unemployment But the deeper value of urban renewal lies in its long-term spillover effects. Renovated buildings and neighbourhoods can trigger a wave of follow-on spending – from home refurbishments and appliances to smart home systems. Better parking access and charging infrastructure can spur car purchases. Upgraded public spaces can raise property values, enhance quality of life and generate more stable local tax revenues. In short, renewal is a slow-burning stimulus – one that works through second- and third-order effects rather than headline-making injections.
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Robert Campbell, Architecture Critic in Love With Boston, Dies at 88
Robert Campbell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of The Boston Globe who for more than 40 years wrote with clarity, wit and, yes, love about a city in transition, died on April 29 at an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Mass. He was 88. The cause was complications of Parkinson's disease, his son, Nick Campbell, said. Mr. Campbell began writing for The Globe in 1973, a heady time in Boston. The era of slum clearance, or so-called urban renewal, was ending, and suddenly there was an interest in preservation. While the scars of that urban renewal — both social and physical — remained, the city was starting to turn itself around. Mr. Campbell's mission 'was to make sure that Boston recovered properly,' Alex Krieger, a professor emeritus of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, said in an interview. 'Not that he would put it that way.' Mr. Krieger continued: 'He loved cities more than he loved architecture, and that made him an important figure in describing architecture in terms of its impact, positive and negative, upon the city. He didn't mince words. He was a kind of gentle scold.' Of the 'ungainly and airless' Leverett Saltonstall State Building, in the government district, he wrote, 'The Saltonstall Building is to architecture what H.R. Haldeman is to statesmanship.' (It was June 1973, and the Watergate hearings were in full swing.) Of the vast and grim City Hall Plaza, which he likened to an empty parking lot or the site of a Nazi rally, he wrote: 'It's always too big, too empty, too grand. There are too many things it doesn't have enough of' — by which he meant 'enormous sidewalk cafes with parasols over the tables' and 'shouting street vendors selling eggplants and knishes' and 'people making speeches about how the Communists are stealing our bodily fluids.' He concluded: 'In other words, life.' Yet he approved of the Brutalist monument — or horror, to many Bostonians — that was City Hall. 'Even if you're in the majority who think City Hall in its present form is ugly, here's a thought: Ugly people can be great. So can ugly buildings,' he wrote in 2008. 'City Hall is powerful and memorable, with the rugged majesty of a fortress, or, closer to home, with the muscular grandeur of the famous generation of 'Boston Granite Style' commercial buildings of the late 19th century.' Although Mr. Campbell was a practicing architect, he wrote not for those in the ivory tower but for the citizens of Boston. He was instructive without being pedagogic or preachy. He was never pretentious, nor was he folksy. He abhorred jargon — a staple of architecture-speak — and bureaucratic myopia. He believed in preservation, but he was no reactionary or regressive. In person, he was flinty and astringent and a little shy. 'He was not pining for the golden age of Classical architecture,' Mr. Krieger said. 'He was just as critical of people who were trying to mimic history as he was of the modernists who seemed ignorant of the longstanding attributes of urban places.' 'Reviewing a building is a little disconcerting,' Mr. Campbell declared in one of his earliest columns. 'It doesn't make sense to treat a building as you would a book or a movie. No one needs a review to tell him whether to see or buy a building. Worse yet, no one can define where a building begins or ends. It doesn't have a frame around it.' It was how a building fit into its surroundings — how it elevated or disrupted or ignored them — that mattered to him. 'Architecture is the art of making places, not primarily an art of making things,' he wrote. 'It's the art of using buildings and landscape to shape space. A place can be your bedroom or your street or your neighborhood, a garden or a park or a city. It can be any space that human beings have created for habitation. The best city is the one with the most livable places.' As he wrote in 1985, 'Good urban design is based on the essential truth that cities are made of streets, not of isolated buildings surrounded by empty air.' Take skyscrapers, which he divided into two categories, the Diva and the Dagwood, in a 2015 column. 'The Diva, self-centered, ignores everything that's around it,' he wrote, citing as an example the hulking 1960s-era Prudential Building in the Back Bay neighborhood. 'It stands, or rather poses, like an opera star on an empty stage. A Diva is usually set back from the street, behind empty space in the form of a lawn or a plaza.' He continued: 'Developers often praise such space as a gift to pedestrians, but that's hogwash. A plaza isn't there for the people, it's there to show off the Diva, or at best fulfill some bureaucrat's square-foot calculations of required open space. No matter how elegantly they might be paved or planted, urban plazas are boring, windy and little used.' A Dagwood, unlike a Diva, bellies up to its neighbors, resembling, in Mr. Campbell's view, three buildings stacked atop one another, which reminded him of the 'absurdly tall' sandwiches favored by Dagwood Bumstead, from the long-running comic strip 'Blondie.' The bottom bit, Mr. Cambell wrote, is 'the part of the tower that lives in the human world, shaping the street space and nurturing pedestrian vitality.' Mr. Campbell was instinctively pro-Dagwood, but he did love the John Hancock Tower, the shimmering edifice designed by Henry Cobb, who worked with I.M. Pei. A dazzling Diva, he called it, although he added the caveat that 'a city of Hancocks would be monotonous and inhuman.' It was for his writing about the Hancock, among other columns, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1996. The tower had been beset by all sorts of mishaps, notoriously the failure of its windows, which began blowing off while it was still under construction in 1973. The Plywood Palace, people called it. Mr. Campbell called it a 'haunted high-rise mirror, which always seems to be reflecting clouds as if it were brooding on its own grim beginnings.' Myths about why the windows were flying off abounded, and he set out to debunk them, hilariously and methodically. In the process, he learned not only why the windows had failed — it had something to do with the solder used to hold the frames together — but also that everyone involved had agreed to keep the reason a secret. Between 1982 and 2005, Mr. Campbell and the photographer Peter Vanderwarker collaborated on a column called Cityscapes, for which Mr. Vanderwarker would choose an archival photo of a Boston neighborhood and then photograph the place in its present state. He would send the paired images to Mr. Campbell, who would write a short essay to accompany them. Mr. Campbell never knew what Mr. Vanderwarker might send, and Mr. Vanderwarker never knew what Mr. Campbell was going to write until he saw it in the paper. They collected their columns in a book, 'Cityscapes of Boston: An American City Through Time,' published in 1992. 'He shaped the way a whole generation of architects looked at the city,' Mr. Vanderwarker said. 'He was very much out of the Jane Jacobs mold. He loved streets. He didn't see buildings so much as objects, but as set pieces. He once described them as seniors in a class photo, all jostling each other.' Robert Douglas Campbell Jr. was born on March 31, 1937, in Buffalo. His mother, Amy (Armitage) Campbell, was a feature writer for a local newspaper before her marriage; his father was an accountant. Robert was an English major at Harvard and wrote his honors thesis on the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He went on to study journalism at Columbia University and then worked as a staff writer for Parade magazine. But what he really wanted to do was practice architecture, so he returned to Cambridge, where he attended Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He graduated in 1967. For the next six years, he worked for Sert, Jackson & Associates; he then went out on his own, working mostly as a consultant for civic projects and cultural institutions, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He was a founder of the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a partnership between the United States Conference of Mayors and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to his son, Mr. Campbell is survived by a brother, Charles, and a sister, Anne Birkett. His marriage to Janice (Gold) Campbell, a lawyer, ended in divorce. 'I've always thought that a good model for any critic is Alice, the heroine of 'Alice in Wonderland,'' Mr. Campbell wrote in 2004 in the magazine Architectural Record. 'Alice is constantly running into creatures who are crazy — the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit — but they're crazy in a special way. They're obsessed by ideas, and they ignore real-world experience.' He added, 'Alice isn't fooled or overly impressed by her crazies, and neither should any critic be.'
CBS News
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Lincoln Center to get massive $335 million redesign. Here's a look at the new plans.
New renderings have been released showing the massive $335 million redesign coming to Lincoln Center in New York City. The new plans for the crown jewel of Lincoln Square open up the west side on Amsterdam Avenue, increasing accessibility. "This project has been, in some sense, a few years in the making. And, in another sense, it's been in the making since the birth of Lincoln Center," Lincoln Center president and CEO Mariko Silver said. The view from Damrosch Park looking west. Brooklyn Digital Foundry What is now Damrosch Park, and a massive wall that symbolically blocks out those who live across Amsterdam Avenue, will soon be a new, inviting and vibrant space to welcome all members of Lincoln Square, the city and what stood before: A neighborhood known as San Juan Hill. Giving new life to San Juan Hill During Black History Month in February, CBS News New York unveiled the history of San Juan Hill, a predominately Black and Puerto Rican community that was destroyed in the late 1950s to make room for Lincoln Center. "The politicians called it urban renewal. But in the African American community, we called it urban removal," said T.S. Monk, the son of legendary jazz pianist and San Juan Hill legend Thelonious Monk. Monk and Stanley Nelson, the director of the film "San Juan Hill: Manhattan's Lost Neighborhood," both agreed the next step for Lincoln Center was to remove the wall facing one of the last tangible structures of San Juan Hill - the Amsterdam Houses. Now that's becoming a reality. View of the plaza area in front of the amphitheater at Lincoln Center. Brooklyn Digital Foundry Along the west side, there will be new trees, parks, venues, water features and the wall - now a door for all to Lincoln Center. "We want to bring that spirit forward," Silver said. The project will begin in the spring of 2026 and conclude in 2028, giving new life to a legacy that was almost forgotten. "We want people to be proud of this neighborhood, we want them to feel like they belong in this neighborhood," Silver said. "The neighborhood actually belongs to them."
