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Newcastle Herald
Newcastle Herald
National
Sage Swinton

Muso's Corner site sets tone for $500m in new city residences

GWH's One Apartments at National Park Street.

The city's west end is set to welcome 1000 new homes between four projects planned within a few blocks of each other in the booming precinct.

The most advanced is 1 National Park Street, where Newcastle developer GWH has recently lodged staging plans for its One Apartments project.

The former Musos Corner site is set to be demolished to make way for the development comprising 22 and 19 storey towers with 193 apartments between them.

The staging plans follows a development application approved by the Land and Environment Court in 2020.

Hunter businessmen Paul Siderovski and Gavan Reynolds lodged those plans before selling the site onto GWH.

More than 800 additional apartments are also proposed across Thirdi Group's Dairy Farmers Towers, Doma's The Store Residences and a joint venture between St Hilliers and Spotlight Group on the former Spotlight site.

GWH director Jonathan Craig said demolition is likely to begin at 1 National Park Street in August and be complete by Christmas, followed by construction starting early next year.

The company is aiming to finish the first stage by early 2025.

While the 76-metre development would be the tallest building in the city if it was built today - eclipsing both 20-story Verve and Sky residences - it won't even be in the top three if other proposed developments nearby gain approval.

Both Dairy Farmers Towers and The Store Residences are 30 storeys, which is double the height of what the city's tallest building was five years ago.

GWH claimed that title with its 15-storey Aero Apartments on Hunter Street in 2017, but it was quickly surpassed.

The Spotlight site redevelopment, where Musos Corner has temporarily moved to, will also be higher at 90 metres.

A fifth project proposed in the vicinity is a 19-storey tower on the Cambridge Hotel site, which would contain 500 student accommodation beds.

The five projects represent more than half a billion dollars of investment in the city, and follow other skyscrapers currently under construction including Wickham's Bowline apartments and the HQ 727 office tower on Hunter Street.

The rapid pace of rising developments comes as no surprise to lord mayor Nuatali Nelmes, who said it was the result of "a lot of hard work" to bring to life long-held plans for more homes and employment in the west end.

"These were just plans for many decades," she said.

"It's very different to having wonderful plans on paper.

"We wanted to set stretch targets and that included not accepting new developments under the 90-metre height limit."

Cr Nelmes said she hoped the incoming federal Labor government's commitments to build more social and affordable housing could play some role in the developments.

She said the National Rental Affordability Scheme could be recharged to allow a portion of the new units to be set aside and managed by community housing providers, without the 10-year sunset clause that the old scheme included.

"It's important to have an inclusive city where everybody has a place," she said.

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