This is an aerial shot of a well known bit of Auckland Brownfield. It was taken maybe six or seven years ago. You can see a railway line running diagonally across the image....
Here it is, as it was then, punters waiting for their train...
...the track ran across a number of streets, barriers down, traffic held up, generally severing the town. Not that friendly. Not that amenable for development and change...
...the surrounding urban landscape was low rise, predominantly commercial, retail or perhaps light industrial....
This was how Waitakere City Council visualised it being able to change. How the area could be regenerated. There was the option of undergrounding the railway through the town - or at least putting it into a trench - and allowing development to come much closer to the line - and generally producing a much higher quality urban landscape... So what happened...?
The rest of the photos in this posting were taken on Wednesday 29th of May 2013. Here's how the streets in the town centre of New Lynn look today. Wide and generous pavements, great planting for stormwater, well designed seating in the shade of deciduous trees (good for light in the winter, good for shade in the summer)....
Interesting sculpture and planting....
But it's when you get close to the new station that you really notice what this transformation has achieved - for the area - and for Auckland....
The near building is the Memorial Library. The building behind - so far - is a mixed use office and retail complex, with activated edges at street level. It also contains some parking - so no cars are parked in the surrounding streets...
Across the square from the library is this Anzac Memorial with fountains, and behind it is LynnMall.
This is the base of the high rise complex shown in that picture above. Just opening now. The shops and retail frontages are just being prepared for lease. At the edge to the left you can see a bus - parked. This is the start of the station...
...and across the road is the main station. Bus interchange. High quality seating and amenity for punters. The best coffee stall in Auckland - I was reliably informed...
...and of course access via escalators to the train platform below...
...very tidy, very clean and it's going to be amazing when those electric cables are connected to a modern electric trains...
But that's not all. Back to the interesting complex we saw before...
This poster informs us that an apartment building is going up above it. Looks like about ten stories of apartments....
...Here's a close up of the poster...
A caravan - which was closed when I was there - held some information about the apartment tower. This chart (which I photographed with my phone - sorry for the quality) lists the apartments that will be included. The leftmost column is for the first apartment floor, and so on. The rightmost column is for the top floor - which had the most expensive apartments selling for around $480,000. The others ranged in price from about $280,000 to $380,000. The apartments contain 1 or 2 bedrooms. Some of the one bedroom apartments come with a study. Some come with a balcony. The floor area of each apartment ranged from about 54 square metres up to about 74 square metres. The key thing to notice about this table is the fact that about 80% of the apartments have been sold off the plan.
I am advised - by another reliable source - that the Government average "affordable home" - the Government definition - is that the home would have three bedrooms and be for a family. However, the reliable source who is very much in touch with the affordable housing market demographic for Auckland, told me that the biggest demand by far is from single women. Of all ages. That is the biggest market.
This all suggests that policies for affordable housing which assume the main need is to build a detached house for 2 or 3 child families with a garden and a lawn is wrong.
This is a model of the finished building. The pictures on the wall are the expected views from the various levels.
Take a bow Waitakare City Council. Remember the CCO you set up to implement this brownfield development? Remember how long it took to plan and to get land owner and community buy-in? Worth it wasn't it. New Lynn is an exemplar for Auckland.
1 comment:
Joel - yes an example of proper master planning. Design and plan properly, and see what level of intensification comes out at the end.
It's a far cry from the lazy "up zone" everything we see in the current UP.
Mt Albert is a good example, where last term we tried to start a similar master plan process - so it's very disappointing to see this brown fields area set to fail under current UP.
key in Mt Albert is to cover over rail line (and 3am freight trains!), this needed a co-ordinated master plan, and release of zoning, as above rail rights were negotiated and implemented.
If UP goes through as is, we'll get the normal poor development adjacent to any above ground rail line you find anywhere in the world..... that level of lazy planning can't be allowed to rule the day!
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