Car yard expansion

Car yard expansion

Yet another car yard is being created on Cambridge Terrace, despite the city’s District Plan envisaging high rise apartment blocks.  Jane O’Loughlin reports.

The Cambridge and Kent Terrace will continue to be the home of car yards for the foreseeable future, according to the car dealers Armstrongs.

Armstrong Motor Group Ltd has applied and gained resource consent to demolish the large  three-storey commercial building Seafic House at 71-74 Cambridge Terrace and create a car yard, adding to their existing site.  Seafic House gained its name from its origins as the home of the Seafood Industry Council and was most recently tenanted by paint shop Resene.

Concerns about the proposal were raised by one of the Wellington City Council’s senior urban design advisors, Kate Blagrove, during the resource consent process.  The proposal did not meet the requirements of the new District Plan’s central city zone, she said. Reasons included that the lack of an actual building removed the potential for passive surveillance of the street, had a negative impact on pedestrian amenity, reduced the vitality of the area, and undermined the city centre goals.

Counter arguments from the applicant’s urban design specialist, Graeme McIndoe, said that the proposal would fit in with the existing use of the area, and by preserving a cleared site, was part of a ‘holding pattern’ that would allow for future larger development.

In its application, Armstrong board chair Mark Darrow said Cambridge and Kent Terrace have been a ‘key automotive precinct’ for decades and will ‘continue to be for the foreseeable future’.

Armstrongs had owned the Seafic House site since 2010, with the view to demolishing it and extending the car yard. 

The car dealers needed more dedicated yard space to support the overall business and a dedicated space for an additional premium vehicle brand.

According to Darrow, Seafic House was no longer fit for purpose.  There was no demand for the upper two office floors which had been vacant for over two years, and the building was in disrepair with refurbishment not economic or practical.

The application warned that the building will steadily deteriorate and would be left boarded up to prevent squatters, if it could not be demolished.  “There are enough of these buildings already in Wellington.”

The building would be replaced with a ‘premium quality dealership with appropriate landscaping, streetscaping and high-quality materials, finishes and signage’.

Darrow said it would be ‘in the best interests of Wellington’ for a car dealership to replace a deteriorating building, until the economic factors changed.

“In the longer term (e.g. 10 years or so) the economy of Wellington may make it attractive for Armstrongs to offer all its land holdings for comprehensive multi-storey building redevelopment.”

Lambton/Pukehīnau city councillor Geordie Rogers, a strong supporter of intensification, noted that no one had opposed the resource consent and that the only submitters were in support. 

The site could still be developed to a higher density when economic conditions improved, he said.

He noted that other improvements were occurring in the area, including a new 16-unit apartment building consented for the Myrtle site.

“Broadly what we are seeing on Kent/Cambridge Terrace is a transition towards the direction provided in the District Plan.”