8000+ Sydney Apartment Blocks Flagged For Demolition

More than 8000 old Sydney apartment blocks should be demolished to make way for new development, according to a report by the UNSW's Department of the Built Environment.

The Renewing the Compact City report has identified a number of buildings in Sydney's eastern suburbs, lower north shore and southern beach suburbs that would make suitable locations for urban renewal projects.

According to the report, it was found that there were 17,367 buildings constructed before 1990. Of these 2,600 could be redeveloped into walk-up blocks and 5,700 into high-rise complexes.

Speaking with Domain, Director of the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW Professor Bill Randolph said, "We put together a lot of complicated factors that would govern the viability of these projects, such as cost of buy-out, building costs, management on-costs, and a developer's profit margin of 20 per cent.""Then we looked at local factors such as the size of the blocks, the current floor space ratio and height restrictions."

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Researchers also located the highest concentration of potential development sites as being in the eastern suburbs, lower north shore and the Cronulla area.

CEO of Urban Taskforce Chris Johnson welcomed the possibility of taking blocks "way past their used-by date" and redeveloping them.

"I think the opportunity is enormous," he said.

"This is a terrific chance to remove some literally crumbing buildings and replace them with modern apartments. That, in turn, will revive the suburbs themselves."Mr Johnson did however caution that it all depends on impending legislation allowing a majority of only 75 % of owners to agree to the collective sale of unit blocks. The current legislation stipulates that all owners within a block need to agree to sell to a developer.

View UNSW's Renewing the Compact City report here.