Watch, listen and learn
The developer whose family owns a whole city block is challenging Hobart’s approach to CBD height limits
THE planning environment in Hobart is “quite sensitive at the moment”, says David Lee.
It’s a diplomatic observation from a polite young man whose family has been quietly buying up prime Hobart CBD real estate since 2000 and plans to spend up to $200 million redeveloping it.
“So we want to tread carefully,” he adds.
David says Riverlee, the company his father founded, is taking a wait-and-see approach to developing the 7000sq m block it acquired piecemeal over years in what it saw as a “sleeper” city with vast untapped potential.
The consolidated site encompasses the Odeon Theatre and former Tattersalls Hotel in Liverpool St, with street frontages in Watchorn and Murray streets, too.
He says Mona’s David Walsh is encouraging such circumspection. When he took initial plans for a culturally activated mixed-use precinct to Walsh, David says he left the meeting without a plan.
“Basically, he said something like ‘this is s..t’,” he says. “He said ‘absolutely not’.
And then he said ‘if you want to build a cultural precinct, you can’t manufacture it. Culture is not built by developers, it is built by people.”
What was really needed, Walsh advised, was a cultural “attractor” and an open canvas. That’s what we have
now with the new $5 million off-street In the Hanging Garden redevelopment, which was launched in time for Dark Mofo, but will operate year round. Part of a precinct partnership between Mona and Riverlee, the new music venue, food and drinks hub and meeting place will be closely observed to ascertain what people are most loving.
“Over the next year, we’ll watch people and listen, then we’ll go towards that direction,” says David.
The Lee family’s relationship with Mona and specifically Dark Lab’s creative director Leigh Carmichael developed over a few years when Carmichael, who talked about his mission to retain live venues in the CBD in this column last year, asked them not to activate the demolition permit they had secured for the historic Odeon Theatre.
From those unlikely beginnings, a shared vision and friendship has grown between the key players.
The overarching site plan is highly likely to include a midrange hotel, apartments and co-working spaces, which David thinks are the way of the future for many more small operators and start-ups. The cosy collaboration vibe will be activated when both Mona’s Dark Lab and Riverlee move their offices on site. David emphasises that this will not be a luxury precinct, but more of an everyday beating hub of the city.
And so to the question of high-rise development, when I meet David at Hadley’s Orient Hotel, where a Dark-Mofoinspired art bar is serving a special menu throughout the festival.
The 30-year-old Melburnian offers a fresh perspective. And while it does involve some high-rise, he says it does so in a sensitive way. He is not a fan of blanket building height limits, saying they kill creativity.
“A mandatory height limit prohibits creative expression. It prohibits design excellence and it prevents innovation with design,” he says.
He backs a different regulatory approach in Hobart’s CBD. Called plot ratio planning, it was adopted by Melbourne over the past few years as a control measure.
Essentially, it allocates a certain amount of development yield based on site area. Say you have a 1000sq m site area; with a plot ratio of 10, you could theoretically build a maximum of 10,000sq m of area, but you could choose to do it in vastly different ways.
“You could build a block of 10 storeys boundary to boundary, and that’s not good for anyone,” David says.
“Or you could build one that’s 20 levels and provide areas of articulation, activation and a little more setback for lifestyle, parklands and retail activation on the street. Or you could build one that’s 30 levels and provide even more area and setbacks and breathing space between buildings.”
The regulation keeps developers in their place, he says with a laugh, emphasising that he does not believe Riverlee is your average profitat-all-costs developer.
When plot ratio was introduced by Melbourne City, David says most developers didn’t like it. “Melbourne used to be a free for all, with buildings as high as the sky can go. [Now] when they buy a site, they know exactly what they can build so they don’t get ahead of themselves and they don’t overpay. It just provides some sensibility to the process.”
He says Riverlee also supports mandatory inclusionary zoning, whereby a developer must make a percentage contribution to social housing in one of several ways. It’s well established in Sydney, but Hobart has no regulatory provisions for it.
It’s a State Government matter, but David says interim connections can be made.
“We need to partner up with those housing providers and build a model together,” he says.