Capital Quarter

There's no office tower going up at Captial Quarter. The tower going behind what will be Number 4 is apartments I think. I won't hold my breath on that either. JR Smart had planning permission for ages at the Herbert Street on a residential tower only to sell it on, what are the bets they do the same, although I hope they don't. We haven't had a new non- student homes residential tower for a while in the city centre.

Oh yes - my apologies - getting mixed up with no.4 in front of it. Anyway if that tower happens then presumably it will be the last construction to complete capital quarter. Maybe demand for apartments will increase with all the planned activity for the city centre - including the number of office workers at Capital Quarter itself (although maybe folk wouldn't fancy living quite so close to work!)

Student tower has been approved! Now hopefully we'll see some actual work being done on this site...

Let's hope so!

Outline planning permission is set to be approved for the 23-storey No. 5 Capital Quarter tomorrow, while detailed planning permission for No. 4 is also set to be approved.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales ... ide%20p$16

One thing I noticed looking at the planning docs is another is that yet again, Cardiff City Council have been brow-beaten in to reducing the S106 contribution, especially for housing, because of "viability" issues.

The Policy is for 20% of homes to be affordable - quite a lot lower than in much of England (although, admittedly, property is cheaper than Cardiff than much of England). That would have equated to 30 properties on or off-site, or about a £2 million contribution to the council. The developers (JR Smart) have gotten a consultancy to "prove" that such a contribution would have made the scheme unviable. Instead, they have to pay about £500,000 for housing, which would be about a 5% affordable contribution.

The whole problem is the ability to negotiate here. If these contributions were fixed in stone, everyone would know they would have to pay them. That would mean that if they wanted to be sure of making a profitable development, the developer would be willing to pay the initial landowner less for the site. So it would be the initial landowner who would bear the cost, not the developer. Higher affordable provision would be "viable" because land prices would be lower.

As it stands, developers know they can negotiate down these contributions so end up bidding up land prices more than they otherwise would. So poorer residents (and the taxpayer subsidising private sector rents or temp accomodation) suffer.. while landowners get higher prices for their land.

The outline permission for the 23 storey building that will be to the east of the Dock feeder was granted yesterday. Along with the student accommodation of 25 storeys (?) to the west of Dock feeder it means that this could be a really impressive set of towers from Smart.

Great aside from the poor quality. Just look at their website, they specialise in industrial boxes in out of centre industrial parks. It shows.

I think that these would have to be quality materials & would represent a step up for them. From looking at brocheres & images etc I think these towers will be fine.

Looks like an increase in height for the Herbert street tower, taking it up an extra floor to around about the 80m mark
http://planning.cardiff.gov.uk/online-a ... APR_118668

Looks like an increase in height for the Herbert street tower, taking it up an extra floor to around about the 80m mark
http://planning.cardiff.gov.uk/online-a ... APR_118668

That's going to be taller than ours on Bridge St by the looks of it. Less number of floors but the floor-to-floor height is slightly greater.

Nice to see them using a mixture of materials too. The engineered/stone should look good with terrocotta rainscreen cladding (although, normally, I utterly hate rainscreen cladding of all types)!