Manhattan on the Rocks

Manhattan on the Rocks

When Kristina K Keneally officially opened Central Park off Broadway less than nine months ago at the former Carlton United Breweries site in Chippendale, our US born Premier denied she was trying to Americanise Sydney. To be accurate, she is actually trying to Manhattanise this town. By concentrating as many jobs as possible in downtown corporate complexes and high rise towers ringed with relentless urban sprawl she is transforming Sydney into an American style megapolis. Like New York City commuters, more and more Sydneysiders will be forced to travel several hours each way from affordable housing in the outlying suburbs into the City’s financial district. In Sydney as in Manhattan only a fraction of the overall population will ever live and work in the city centre, despite long term plans to house ever more people in dense New York style apartment blocks.

Last week Kristina K Keneally took a bite from the Big Apple at Baranagaroo when she usurped development control over the massive foreshore site from her Planning Minister, Tony Kelly. Rather than admit her cash starved government was selling precious waterfront acreage for billions complete with development consent, in order to recoup money lost on a bungled Metro project and to make up for a shortfall in state revenues following the global financial crisis, she used her party’s tired old excuse: “Labor is creating jobs.” In putting the interests of a major property developer above the concerns of local residents, she declared “Sydney has such a unique opportunity…to establish itself firmly as a financial services capital within the Asia-Pacific.” According to an economic impact assessment prepared for the government on behalf of the developers at Lend Lease: “When completed, Barangaroo South will house 22,000 employees in high value added areas such as finance and insurance.”

In 2007, then Planning Minister Frank Sartor claimed it was all about creating jobs when he wrestled planning authority away from the local City Council and approved 11 towers at the 5.8 hectare CUB site, locating yet another 6,000 jobs near the city centre.  When the Labor government gave Frasers approval to redevelop the Chippendale site, it was hailed as “the largest single development project in the history of the city.” Fast forward to 2010 and the CUB site looks like a modest urban redevelopment compared to the massive 22 hectares of public land being sold off to Lend Lease at Barangaroo. Four times the size the World Trade Centre site along New York Harbour, Barangaroo is any property developer’s wet dream: prime waterfront land stretching from Darling Harbour to Walsh Bay complete with the right to build a 170 metre high tower on a peer jetting out into the harbour.

Rather than keep money in the local economy by nurturing a broad base of local jobs in a diverse range of businesses — sustainably located around the metropolitan area, State Labor relentlessly pursues an unsustainable and unviable Manhattan model of urban development for Sydney. .Surely if we have learned anything of late, we should know that a development model that focuses on the big end of town is fool hearty. State Treasurer Eric Roosendaal complained bitterly that the State government’s tax base had been badly hit by the GFC when he presented this year’s fiscal budget. And yet NSW continues to pin its hopes on attracting even more global corporations in the finance and insurance sectors into the CBD (who often seek tax concessions only to send profits off shore). As it is, Sydney is already over dependent on employment in finance and insurance. Fifty percent of all jobs is already concentrated in this area, which is why Sydney suffered the most of all Australian capital cities during the GFC. Melbourne, by comparison, (37% of the total employment in the sector) performed remarkably well.

For years high rise development in Sydney’s CBD has been set back from the harbour allowing the City to function on a human scale. Barangaroo would change all of that, setting a precedent that would lead to further high rise development around the CBD. Forcing more people to travel from sprawling suburbs to work for a foreign owned, financial services corporation housed in a glass and concrete tower is neither environmentally sustainable nor economically viable (no matter how many energy efficient ways they find to pour concrete or light a towering inferno). As it is Sydney is already gridlocked, forcing a motorist who travels 22 km a day to spend three days stuck in traffic each year. To say nothing of the pollution and the green house emissions created along the way. And unlike the real deal in NYC, Sydney’s mass transit system is notoriously inadequate.

Perhaps it is merely old fashioned phallus envy that led Herald columnist Elizabeth Farrelly to recently write: “…Lend Lease’s tallest tower, 209 metres above sea level, is only two-thirds the height of, say, New York’s 1939 Chrysler Building, now so little and sweet in context … Barangaroo is the downtown of a supposedly global city. It’s not Surry Hills, or Watsons Bay or Glebe. If there’s any proper place in Sydney for towers, for large floorplate financial district development, this is surely it” Anyone who thinks Sydney should go the way of Manhattan and further concentrate employment in the CBD, crowd out sunlight and fill in the Harbour with landfill should have their head examined.

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