RESIDENTIAL redevelopment plans for the century-old Goninan (UGL) rail yards are the latest in a string of property proposals for Broadmeadow.
The most advanced of these is the Hunter Park proposal for the swathe of land between Griffiths Road and Lambton Road, including the Newcastle Showground, the Entertainment Centre and the Harness Racing Club.
Potentially surplus railway land includes the Broadmeadow maintenance centre behind the Hunter School of the Performing Arts and the triangular Woodville Junction site, which shares its western boundary with the former Hamilton North Shell depot on Chatham Road, now on the market.
Next door to the Shell depot, across Styx Creek, is the former gasworks site, vacant after a cap-and-fill remediation was finished in 2020.
As the Newcastle Herald reported yesterday, the City of Newcastle works depot on Turton Road could become part of the Goninan redevelopment, given the sites back onto each other.
That's seven parcels of land in close proximity, with the collective space for thousands of new dwellings.
The state government's Hunter Regional Plan 2041, published on Friday, projects the need for another 101,800 dwellings across the region in the coming 19 years.
Together, Maitland (25,200), Lake Macquarie (20,250) and Newcastle (17,850) are predicted to account for more than 60 per cent of the growth.
Doing this while minimising urban sprawl means lifting population densities in already developed areas.
Infill development - including the CBD-style amalgamation of entire blocks for high-rise - poses fewer environmental problems than greenfield land clearance, but it does have its impacts.
Five weeks ago opposition leader Chris Minns was at UGL promising a return to domestic train building should Labor win the election in March.
But with UGL renting the Broadmeadow site, its ultimate tenure rests with a property trust landlord that has already signalled its desire to redevelop.
Land will generally find its "highest and best use", and property owners are free - within the law - to develop as they wish.
But the transformative potential of these sites on one hand - and the challenges of flooding in low-lying areas and likely industrial contamination on the other - provide a strong case for a close-up examination before too many hopes are lifted too high.
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