How is Melbourne building more towers than California right now?

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by mello

What is driving this incredible boom in Melbourne that will look like a mini Chicago when the current UC buildings are finished?

People obviously know what the big industries are in LA and San Francisco but remember that San Diego has thriving Bio Tech, Aerospace/Defense Contractor, and Pharma/Medical research industries. So California being the worlds 5th largest economy and massive tech hub vs. Melbourne a metro in Australia with 5.2 million or so

Both places have high land costs, materials for construction are just as expensive in Oz I assume, and rents or mortgages for high rise accommodation are very high for average residents. So is Melbourne booming due to Chinese or other Asians parking money their? What are the industries pushing the commercial office space growth?

Does Australia have some booming tech sector, where are all the high paying jobs coming from to push the demand for all of these projects? Is it simply finance and mining? Pardon my ignorance about the Australian economy I just find it funny that this city is blowing away SF, LA, and SD combined.

So we have examples of foreign money and speculation pushing a boom: Vancouver, Miami. (Miami also a retirement and lifestyle destination in Winter) We have true organic high wage growth jobs rushing in to a city facilitating a boom: Seattle. Where does Melbourne fit in this paradigm?

Relative to its size LA and San Francisco and in fact all "newer" western metros are very low-rize in nature.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Chicago isn't building highrises because it's a "giant financial hub" (it isn't) or the third largest metro area. It's building because the core is desirable/successful and the city is pro-development. Chicago has pretty much always built lots of core highrises. Wealth and commerce are concentrated in the core.

Melbourne doesn't need to be particularly wealthy or successful to build tons of highrises. Generous zoning coupled with population growth could be enough. And Australia is a huge hedge for Chinese nationals, even moreso than Canada.

Agreed, Plenty of extremely wealthy European and North American cities that have low heights. I mean Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin etc

Sometimes its zoning recs sometimes its just culturally lower heights are favored.

Im sure nobody would Argue that Manila is a center of global Finance but its the densest city in the world.

[tayser]

There's a couple of reasons, and mostly residential that's U/C but now something like 14 hotels and a smattering of commercial towers. Melbourne has some of the highest net office absorption in the country but adjacent CBd precincts attract lower-rise office buildings (and there's 50-100 years worth of inner-city land to things relatively short for offices if the current trend of bigger floorplates continues).

From the 1980s onwards, the City of Melbourne (local municipality that covers the CBD and the immediate areas) was a dead zone and policies started changing on a range of things: commercial building conversions to residential, overall encouragement for residential spaces in the city, lane clean ups and open spaces in them to small retail/eating/drinking establishments. Long story short: the council has successfully altered the very fabric of the centre of the city over many decades, making it attractive not just for commercial development.

Big buildings ultimately are signed off by the Minister for Planning - a state-based role, not a council one. When Liberals (centre-right) are in power, they're your fairly typical centre-right type of government: less regulation, very business-friendly etc and that was typified by the Planning Minister from 2010-2014 who was pretty much responsible for ticking off nearly all the buildings that have either recently completed or still under construction. A Labor government has been in power and they've introduced many different things (Minister still signs off on big projects - those with a GFA more than 25,000sqm - but councils have a greater say).

Australia is quite open to foreign investment (we've been net capital importers since James Cook sailed up the east coast in the 1770s) and many of the residential towers that have been recently completed or under construction would have decent-sized foreign-buyer components but not all. Like what Vancouver's been going through, government here recognises that opening the tap full is not necessarily the best idea and there's been a range of measures at the federal and state level to slow things down (Fed: foreigners cannot buy exiting property anymore, only off the plan, state: tax on foreign purchases/unused apartments lying dormant).

Population growth: Melbourne has been for the past 8 or 9 in the past 10 years been the city seeing the highest population growth (~80,000-100,000 average per year over a decade - it was 120,000 for the financial year ending June 2018). People have to live somewhere.

In summary: local councils seeing benefit of policy changes decades after they were first conceived, state governments at various times opening and closing the tap for new central city development through the planning Ministry and a stable Asian-timezone country that accepts foreign investment all combine to tell, for the most part, the story of what you see under construction / what has been under construction recently.

This list is 99% inner-city but there's also a story of Melbourne's suburbs - the inner and middle-rings mainly - densifying as well. Public transport projects in the pipeline will go along way to making sure suburban development will be just as attractive from 2030 onwards (see Suburban Rail Loop in the Melbourne PT thread).

db2 on SSC keeps tabs on this list, this is it from October this year - sorry, no imperial measurement (100m = 328 feet, 150m = ~500 feet, 200m = ~650 feet, 250m = 820 feet, 300m = 984 feet):

Originally Posted by db2

Updated height list. Lots of news and action the last couple of days (West Side Place, 435 Bourke). I have done my best to produce an accurate height list for Melbourne town.

• Red, proposed tower, not yet approved
• Purple, approved tower, but project being flipped or project in trouble
• Green, approved tower, not yet under construction
• Blue, under construction,
• Black, completed tower.
• ~ symbol means approximate height, exact height unknown or in dispute.

Order by height above street to roof

• Green Spine East ~356m
• Australia 108 317m
• Eureka Tower 297m
• Aurora Melbourne Central 271m
• West Side Place Tower A 269m
• Prima Pearl 254m
• Green Spine West ~252m
• Rialto 251m
• Queens Place South 251m
• Queens Place North 250m
• Premier Tower 249m
• Victoria One 247m
• West Side Place Tower D 240m
• Swanston Central 237m
• 640 Bourke St 235m
• 55 Clarke St 234m
• Shangri-La by the Gardens 232m
• Melbourne Square T2 231m
• West Side Place Tower C ~230m
• Vision Apartments 229m
• Bourke Place 224m
• 568 Collins 224m
• 120 Collins 220m
• Sapphire by the Gardens 219m
• Light House 218m
• 380 Melbourne 217m
• 158 City Rd 216m
• West Side Place Tower B 211m
• Aspire Melbourne 211m
• Melbourne Central 211m
• 435 Bourke St 210m
• UNO Melbourne 210m
• 88 Melbourne 209m
• 280 Queen St ~207m
• Freshwater Place North 205m
• Eq. Tower 202m
• Melbourne Grand 198m
• Empire Melbourne 197m
• 101 Collins 195m
• Telstra Corp 193m
• Home Southbank 193m
• 80 Collins St North 190m
• 80 Collins St South 190m
• Collins House 190m
• 140 King St 188m
• 268 City Rd 187m
• Abode 318 187m
• 600 Collins St 186m
• Collins Place Sofitel 185m
• Collins Place ANZ 185m
• Melbourne Square T3 179m
• Capital Grand 178m
• 183 A'Beckett St 178m
• Sol Invictus 178m
• Scape Franklin ~175m
• 405 Bourke St 173m
• Avant 172m
• 385 Bourke St 168m
• 63 Exhibition St 171m
• Victorian Police Centre 171m
• Upper West Side Manhattan 170m
• Zen Apartments 168m
• Platinum Tower 167m
• 35 Spring St 166m
• Upper West Side The Fifth 166m
• Southbank Place 166m
• Focus Apartments 166m
• Casselden Place 166m
• Olderfleet 165m
• Ernst & Young Plaza 165m
• SX South Tower 163m
• 530 Collins St 162m
• ANZ Headquarters 162m
• 478 Elizabeth St 161m
• Verve Apartments 159m
• Palladium Tower ~158m
• Wesley Place ~156m
• 87 Queensbridge St 156m
• Paragon 155m
• 500 Bourke St ~154m
• Southbank Central 153m
• Optus Centre 153m
• Crown Towers 153m
• 140 William St 153m
• Collins Square Tower 2 152m
• Marriott Southbank 151m
• Shadow Play 151m
• Aurum on Clarendon 151m
• Urban Workshop 150m
• 555 Collins ~149m
• Melbourne Quarter Tower 147m
• Scape Melbourne 146m
• Collins Arch 146m
• Melbourne Quarter East Tower 143m
• Fulton Lane South 142m
• Melbourne Quarter West Tower 141m
• Marina Tower 140m
• The Peak 140m
• 202 Normanby Rd 140m
• Voyager Yarra's Edge 138m
• VU Tower 135m
• Victoria Market Munro 133m
• Atira at LaTrobe St 131m
• 17 Spring 128m
• Two Melbourne Quarter 128m
• Ibis & Novotel Hotel 125m
• 567 Collins St 125m
• Conservatory 124m
• 295 City Road 123m
• 386 William 121m
• 14 Russell St 120m
• Collins Square Tower 5 111m

[Obadno]

I would Also like to call everyone attention to the climate around Perth

It is a Mediterranean climate bigger than all of southern California which is home to 25 million people or so? Perth only is home to 2ish million with another 500k or so spread out over the entire western 1/3 of the Continent.

Perth and that entire region of Southwest Australia could house many many many millions of people comfortably

[suburbanite]

Originally Posted by Obadno

I would Also like to call everyone attention to the climate around Perth


Perth and that entire region of Southwest Australia could house many many many millions of people comfortably

It's also one of the most isolated large cities in the world though. The climate may be very habitable (not sure how it projects under future warming scenarios), but people who aren't retired typically need a reason to move somewhere.

[tayser]

Originally Posted by Obadno

I would Also like to call everyone attention to the climate around Perth

It is a Mediterranean climate bigger than all of southern California which is home to 25 million people or so? Perth only is home to 2ish million with another 500k or so spread out over the entire western 1/3 of the Continent.

Perth and that entire region of Southwest Australia could house many many many millions of people comfortably

While the lower 48 states in the US may be of a similar size as mainland Australia, comparisons like this are really silly. For one, Australia doesn't have the enormous river systems of the North American continent and Perth is one of the driest places in an already dry continent.

[bilbao58]

Never mind. Misread a post.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by tayser

While the lower 48 states in the US may be of a similar size as mainland Australia, comparisons like this are really silly. For one, Australia doesn't have the enormous river systems of the North American continent and Perth is one of the driest places in an already dry continent.

So is California, Southern California has no navigable rivers at all and had few natural lakes.

You could fit many times the current population in Southwest Australia. Weather you ideally want that or if it will ever happen are different discussions.

[tayser]

Originally Posted by suburbanite

This is a big one too. Toronto's "yellow belt" is still so lacking in intensification due to established residents pushing to maintain the low-rise, SFH character of their neighbourhoods. Mid-rise intensification along arterial commercial streets would do wonders, but that is an uphill battle. The result is more and more density being pushed onto the subway lines with a literal forest only blocks away.



As Mhays said, if you have liberal zoning that is density-friendly in high-demand areas, you're going to get taller and taller towers.

I didn't know if this was the case in Melbourne as well. I remember scanning Google Maps in a different thread awhile back and finding no secondary high-rise clusters, but thinking there some good mid-rise districts where in Toronto you would probably find some new high-rises and old commie blocks.

Google Earth is shite-slow in updating Australian data (even streetview is regularly out of date).

Box Hill's regularly getting ~100m towers proposed and two have recently been built. It's also going to be the northern terminus of the first phase of the Suburban Rail Loop. The local council (City of Whitehorse) is also very pro-development and regularly publishes basic renders of all the proposals in the pipeline.

Box Hill from Doncaster (the next hill over!)



To give you an idea of where Box Hill is, it's ~10km east of the CBD/centre of Melbourne - at the end of a tram route (Whitehorse road stretching into the city on right) and midway along the Belgrave/Lilydale rail lines (on left).



An older render of proposals in BH:



Box Hill in context of all planned/under construction heavy rail projects - BH is on the right at the top of the section marked 'SRL South-east section'

[Fresh]

Originally Posted by Obadno

So is California, Southern California has no navigable rivers at all and had few natural lakes.

You could fit many times the current population in Southwest Australia. Weather you ideally want that or if it will ever happen are different discussions.

Southern California has access to the snowmelt and rains of the Sierra and northern California, Western Australia does not - the climate there has also been drying as a long term trend over the past 40 years.

Don't be fooled by the large open spaces (including forested areas) - Australia's population will always be limited by it's unreliable rainfall and unforgiving soil.

[dc_denizen]

Jina

Also real estate investment due to a dearth of investment opportunity in other sectors of the economy

Australia’s economic complexity is very low, yet they maintain a first world economy somehow

This is what is in store for Canada and the USA if we don’t change course

[tayser]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

Australia’s economic complexity is very low, yet they maintain a first world economy somehow

[JManc]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

i don't know, how is stagnant-ass chicago building more skyscrapers than the entire BOOMING state of texas (or california for that matter)?


some cities just seem to have skyscrapers in their DNA.

Chicago is building a crap ton of residential and Chicago is far more centralized than any Texas city which makes downtown/ highrise living far more appealing. I'd live in downtown Chicago which is vibrant and active but not Houston or Dallas. Austin yes and not coincidentally, has a highrise boom. Neither Chicago or Texas are building a lot of tall commercial towers that I know of.

In Australia, people live in highrises to escape from all the scary animals that want to kill them.

[Fresh]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

Jina

Also real estate investment due to a dearth of investment opportunity in other sectors of the economy

Australia’s economic complexity is very low, yet they maintain a first world economy somehow

This is what is in store for Canada and the USA if we don’t change course

What's in store, 27 years of uninterrupted growth?

https://www.austrade.gov.au/internat...oped-economies

Don't get me wrong, i'm not blind to our country's failings (especially our lacking in tech, innovation, and an over-reliance on property speculation)) but i'm not quite sure what exactly is the 'Australian Fate' you're worried will befall North America.

As for maintaining a first world economy it's no big secret - there's a lot of resources for a tiny population

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by JManc

Neither Chicago or Texas are building a lot of tall commercial towers that I know of.

In the current building cycle going back to 2017, Chicago has built 10 buildings over 150m, with another 7 U/C, and 3 more due to start any week now, for a total of 20.

6 of them (30%) are commercial office towers.

6 commercial office towers over 150m would be an absolute BOOM of such towers in any US city not named NYC.


Additionally, in the early 2000s boom leading up to the great recession, Chicago built a total of 10 new office towers over 150m. So, that's 16 new office towers over 150m so far this century, more than any US city outside of New York.


21st Century 150m+ Office Towers in Chicago:

1. Salesforce Tower -- 254.6m / 835' - 2023 - starts Q1 2020
2. 110 N Wacker ----- 249.0m / 817' - 2020 - U/C
3. 300 N LaSalle ----- 239.1m / 785' - 2009
4. BCBS Tower ------- 226.7m / 744' - 2010
5. River Point --------- 223.0m / 732' - 2017
6. BMO Tower -------- 221.7m / 727' - 2022 - site demo
7. 150 N Riverside --- 220.8m / 724' - 2017
8. 111 S Wacker ----- 207.6m / 681' - 2005
9. 71 S Wacker ------- 207.1m / 679' - 2005
10. UBS Tower ------- 198.6m / 652' - 2001
11. 155 N Wacker --- 194.6m / 638' - 2009
12. 353 N Clark ------ 190.0m / 623' - 2009
13. Citadel Center --- 176.8m / 580' - 2003
14. One S Dearborn - 173.9m / 571' - 2005
15. CNA Center ------ 157.7m / 517' - 2018
16. 191 N Wacker --- 157.4m / 516' - 2002

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by JManc

Chicago is building a crap ton of residential and Chicago is far more centralized than any Texas city which makes downtown/ highrise living far more appealing. I'd live in downtown Chicago which is vibrant and active but not Houston or Dallas. Austin yes and not coincidentally, has a highrise boom. Neither Chicago or Texas are building a lot of tall commercial towers that I know of.

In Australia, people live in highrises to escape from all the scary animals that want to kill them.

Chicago's building a good amount of office towers, especially in the last 6 years. Wacker around Randolph st/the River area is more built up when I left in 2013.

[SFBruin]

I imagine that the earthquake-prone nature of California plays somewhat of a role.

It seems that, in Chicago, they can throw up a highrise around the lakefront pretty much whenever they feel like it, while, in CA, a little bit of planning and engineering is required.

[tayser]

Anyhoo, recent-ish central city aerials originally posted over on SSC.

Morning



Afternoon/evening



Inner-city (~5-7km from the CBD) clusters - real images, envelope diagrams and renders

South Yarra



Moonee Ponds



This is one of my pics, I live around the corner and this one is the tallest proposed or under construction so far, just squeeks under the 100m threshold.




Footscray (renders and real)





Middle Ring suburbs - real/renders.

Box Hill - some of the upcoming projects







The Suburban Rail Loop project has already seen some shenanigans with big land owners, Vicinity centres (shopping centre real estate investment trust) is conducting a masterpolan re-write for its Box Hill Central shopping centre (which sits above the existing Box Hill station) that could have an end value of up to $2billion AUD - watching this space intently.

Monash (which is one of the two new stations that will be built where there is no existing rail service for phase 1) has the highest concentration of jobs outside central Melbourne and has had a lot of TLC from the Victorian Planning Authority re: its structure plan. In shorts: low-rise, suburbany-office-park type stuff intermingled with an enormous university campus (Monash University) - lots of scienctific facilities and high-tech manufacturing is done in the area... the SRL will make this place far more accessible and the entire area will probably shift away from suburban office park central to something far more pleasant. https://vpa.vic.gov.au/project/monas...yment-cluster/

Ditto at La Trobe University in Bundoora (Melbourne's North-east - will be connected on the second phase of the SRL) - less employment space around the campus (compared to Monash) but same idea will underpin the planning re-write: new railway will make it incredibly accessible from all corners of the metro area and the powers that be want employment, residential and industrial uses to intermingle/develop further. https://vpa.vic.gov.au/project/la-tr...yment-cluster/

[mhays]

Originally Posted by bilbao58

If Houston can do it, surely LA could too. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/07/...-requirements/

Houston's requirements are horrific, now minus greater Downtown.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

Jina

Also real estate investment due to a dearth of investment opportunity in other sectors of the economy

Australia’s economic complexity is very low, yet they maintain a first world economy somehow

This is what is in store for Canada and the USA if we don’t change course

Was Crocodile Dundee your only exposure to Australia? They have a pretty sophisticated and diverse economy.