The Goulburn Street car park is where Sydney’s dreams go to die.
No building in the CBD has been so derided quite like the rundown brown brick structure. Despite being ridiculed as an “abandoned Soviet hospital”, successive ideas to cheer up this dilapidated site never seem to get anywhere.
Turn it into a public high school? That ended up somewhere else. A “green building” covered in plants? Never happened. And a rooftop bar with contemporary dance and live music? The mayor said it would be “incredibly expensive”, and nothing eventuated.
The much-maligned car park’s days could be numbered.Credit: Steven Siewert
In fact, the only thing to actually transform the site was one that wasn’t planned at all: a gang of Fairfax photographers illegally plastered one side of the car park with a “guerilla gallery” of city life photos.
But change is on the horizon. The City of Sydney is considering giving up its lease on the site – which it has until September 2060 – for the state government to build homes for essential workers.
After Labor deputy lord mayor Zann Maxwell moved a motion last month to ask the chief executive to consider offering it to the government on “favourable terms”, the site’s owner, Transport Asset Manager of NSW (which owns the state’s rail assets), and Transport for NSW are now both open to discussing the site’s future.
Labor deputy lord mayor Zann Maxwell is proposing the city sell the rest of its lease back to the government.Credit: Steven Siewert
“The site has the potential to deliver well-located housing and contribute to the NSW government’s housing targets,” a Transport for NSW spokesperson said on Monday, adding that the site had already been included in the 2022 rezoning application for Central Station. That application included proposals for a now-abandoned “super-deck” over station platforms. It is still waiting on determination from the Planning Department.
In 2018, Property and Development NSW offered the City of Sydney $75 million to buy out the council’s lease of the car park, but the council rejected the offer (it makes about $8 million in revenue annually from the car park’s operation).
“I was doing some work internally to try and find some creative solutions, some less obvious options,” Maxwell said. “And this is what we discovered. I think that it’s a great option because it’s already owned by the state government. It’s a site that is underutilised. I often walk past it during the week, and I see how many empty spaces there are in there.”
One key challenge in building on the site is what is at the base of the car park: the train tracks running from Central Station. Development above train lines is notoriously complicated, as buildings have to be engineered to withstand collapse if hit by a derailed train.
“Transport has told me that preliminary engineering work has confirmed that the car park can be demolished without affecting the rail corridor below,” Maxwell said.
“Let’s make a deal [with the state government]. This site must deliver affordable housing, and if that’s locked in, the City should be willing to negotiate a discount to turn dead space into something that truly serves Sydney.”
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