Dunedin is built in an ancient volcanic caldera. It's well eroded, but the hills are steep as and very close to the city proper. Most of the city was built on landfill made in the 1880's where they levelled the ridges into the mudflats between, during the local gold rush. Big buildings have to be built either on what's left of the natural ridge lines, or have to be piled down hundreds of meters. Rough cost of building anything large over the fill is about an extra $100 million, because we get massive earthquakes here, no one wants to do that either.
And the ridge remains themselves, are covered in large, historic buildings. In theory you could knock down First Church, but yeah, that's not gunna get resource consent. All the old shit they built in the gold rush was styled as gothic art, and it's completely beautiful and worth a tonne of tourist dollars through the summer, probably a third of the local economy.
So this latest plan, is to build out past the end of one of the ridge lines, in the harbour. They'll go mine some rock somewhere, pile it up on the relatively shallow rock floor after clearing away the mud, and with a few new roads, sewage lines, power lines, water lines, and so on, they'll be able to start building it. There is no space for roads, so lots of things will need purchased and demolished to make space for them. But they expect the council to build them all this shit on which they will then place a large hotel, which is promised to be complete no later than, yes, twenty years away, ... I don't know either.
I mean, to some extent, that's because the central govt is building a new regional hospital here, which will employ most builders in the city for a long-ass time, because the last one built in the early 80's is not fit to repair. Like, half the price to replace. The 80's were a very bad time for construction in NZ, no regulations at all, crazy govt.
And this particular plan got off the ground because central govt had a basket of money to dish out for regional development, and because the council is fucking broke after building the new stadium (which is slowly sinking into the fill, already) they didn't have any plans of their own, so just snagged some central govt funds by ... signing up for the latest and stupidest fucking hotel concept that someone had put across their desk.
In the gold rush they mostly filled to 5m above sea level. They removed inconvenient ridges that separated the various natural valleys, and widened and filled the valley bases. Some later waterfront fill is only 1.5m up. This hotel is basically trying to build at sea level, with a small wall around it, to save money. It is insane, and we are doing it, or hopefully just misappropriating the central funds and securing the sea wall a bit.
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