The St Vincent de Paul Society has filed plans for a 165-home residential precinct at Lavender Bay, directly adjacent to a heritage-listed church on Sydney’s North Shore. The project, proposed by the Society’s Community Housing Provider arm, includes adaptive reuse of a school building. The development sits near two major transit hubs.
Scale and Composition of the Proposal
The proposal includes a main tower of 20 storeys sitting on a three-storey podium. This podium would contain 88 market-rate apartments and 19 budget units.
Above the podium, two ground floor retail tenancies are planned. A heritage-listed school building next to St Francis Xavier Catholic Church is set for adaptive reuse, adding 77 budget units. An extension to this building would provide a seven-storey, 58-unit co-living component.
A five-storey basement beneath the main tower is designed to house 118 car spaces.
Almost half of the homes on the site at 1-19 MacKenzie Street and 211 Blue Points Road would be classified as budget.
The 5992-square-meter site is located on Cammeraygal land next to North Sydney Station and less than 500 meters from the Victoria Cross Metro Station. The 1881-built Gothic sandstone building on it would be conserved and upgraded for continued use as a place of worship. The total cost of the HDA-approved project is expected to exceed $288 million.
The precinct links the station to Blue Street Plaza.
St Vincent de Paul Society Housing Australia provides about 1500 rent affordable homes nationally for about 2500 people. Vinnies is an international volunteer organisation of the Catholic Church with 650 op shops across Australia.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of this large-scale project.
The shift from a quiet, heritage-conscious streetscape to a high-density, commercialized precinct fundamentally alters the daily experience for the small number of residents currently living in the immediate vicinity.
The visual dominance of the proposed towers would cast long shadows over the parkland and the building, creating a stark contrast between the historic architecture and the modern residential form.
Development Context in Lavender Bay
Site-wide high-density use has been requested in a concurrent rezoning proposal. The proposal seeks a six-fold height limit increase from 12 meters and 8.5 meters to about 73 meters.
The proposal seeks a six-fold height limit increase from 12 meters and 8.5 meters to about 73 meters. About 200 meters south-east of the church’s site at 64-66 Lavender Street and 3-7 Middlemiss Street, developer Central Element is planning 160 apartments across two towers of 32 and 23 storeys. About 750 meters away in the North Sydney CBD, Freecity’s 51-storey, $1.5 billion hotel and residential tower has been approved. Further north at Victoria Cross Metro station, student accommodation provider IGLU paid $87 million for a 24-storey maximum site in August.
