Mirvac going its own Daring Harbour way

Eight months after the City of Sydney’s senior planner suggested Mirvac’s plan for a 35-storey Darling Harbour office block would morph into a high-rise residential tower on the Harbourside shopping centre site, that is what has happened – except that the proposed building has grown to 44 floors.

I don’t know Russell Hand, officially the City of Sydney’s planning assessment senior planner, but he strikes me as a perspicacious chap. In his initial response to Mirvac’s Harbourside redevelopment proposal on December 1, he advised the NSW Department of Planning and Environment:

“The proposal appears a shroud to attain a large tower building envelope for office use and later convert that tower entitlement to residential use. In the current property market, the scale of the proposed tower is not required at this time. The SEARs should include a requirement that the Proponent enter into a Voluntary Planning Agreement to confirm the office land use of the SSD application and no permanent residential use.”

That was but one of many reservations Mr Hand had about Mirvac’s plan in a City of Sydney submission on the developer’s application for Secretary’s Environmental Assessment Requirements (SEARs) – a first step in getting ministerial approval for a “State Significant Development”.

On August 3, Mirvac sought a new SEARs, the shroud removed to reveal the residential tower nine storey’s higher than the Sofitel hotel being built further to the south, next to the new convention centre. If approved, the Mirvac tower will dominate the western Darling Harbour skyline, destroying the existing “stepped” Pyrmont/Ultimo development – a concern for the City of Sydney and the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage.

By way of necessary disclosure, I am one of the many Pyrmont property owners who would be adversely affected by Mirvac’s plan, part of a view, but I’m also a fan of urban consolidation when it’s done well.

Trying my very best to put a vested interest aside, Mirvac’s proposal is poorly scaled and positioned, doing Sydney’s Darling Harbour built environment and the city more broadly no favours. Instead, it is an example of a developer effectively gaming the planning system to garner windfall profits from rezoning a commercial site, predominantly a three-storey shopping centre, and play the planning game with a professional’s advantages to end up with a residential skyscraper atop a shopping centre.

The big money for developers isn’t made from building something and selling it – it’s buying land used for once purpose and getting it rezoned for another, more valuable purpose. A wave of a minister’s or local council’s planning wand makes many unearned and undeserved millions. It’s one of the reasons cities should have longer-term broad development strategies and grab, on the public’s behalf, the lion’s share of “windfall” rezoning profits.

It’s impossible to know how serious Mirvac ever was about the office block, but that was plan put on public display, complete with the usual aerial artist’s impressions that, purely coincidentally, were from a perspective that minimises the visual impact of the building. The new proposal moves the tower 25 metres further away from Pyrmont Bridge, but still on the northern half of Harbourside where its considerable shadow would fall over what was to be community area on the shopping centre roof and caste a separate shadow across Darling Harbour, rather than “sharing” the Sofitel shadow at the southern end.

Darling Harbour, having been developed by a separate authority, falls between Sydney’s planning cracks – potentially to a developer’s advantage. As Mr Hand wrote, the site has no planning controls for appropriate building height, floor space or design quality. He said it was more suitable for “lower scale, campus-style office accommodation, as is the dominant build form of the Ultimo/Pyrmont peninsula”.

“The proposal should address the original planning consideration and framework for Darling Harbour, being a precinct for the people with open space and highly accessible and varied leisure activities,” he wrote.
“The original purposes of the precinct should guide the design choices of the redevelopment.”

Right – good luck with that. It’s much more likely the design choices will be based purely on gaining the maximum number of dollars per square metre. Which is where governments need to override that simple aim with what would be best for the precinct.

If the government was looking for advice, I’d suggest letting Mirvac have a tower, but at the southern end of the site and making it a smaller building than the big new hotel. That way a stepped flow down towards the harbour would be possible and overshadowing the suggested community rooftop avoided.

But I suspect Mr Hand wouldn’t predict that happening – the power and inside knowledge of our biggest and richest property developers tends to mean they end up getting their own way.

Michael Pascoe is one of Australia's most respected finance and economics commentators with over four decades in newspaper, radio, television and online journalism. He regularly appears on Channel 7's Sunrise and news programs and is a regular conference speaker, MC and facilitator.