Page 137 - Beyond Decommissioning

118 Beyond Decommissioning

While many owners wrongly believe that leaving a site empty and unattended is the
most economical means of management prior to redevelopment, demonstrating the
potential of a site helps to build confidence in both owners and stakeholders. Phased
construction working in parallel with interim use helps to prove the value of the site,
thus reducing risk associated with future phases.
There are long-term benefits in applying temporary use strategies to development
projects. They can not only deliver a rapidly deployable stopgap for longer-term
regeneration, but they also become a model of the character and potential of the
new use.
There are good opportunities by developing temporary income streams and
enhancing desirability for future tenants. Furthermore, businesses may also flourish
in the interim and provide readymade tenants that can migrate into permanent space
over time—a form of soft marketing for subsequent redevelopment.
The temporary use of vacant buildings or land until they can be brought into per-
manent commercial use is a practical way to use the inevitable pauses in property
transfers. These pauses typically stem from the traditional sequence of design, autho-
rizations, build, market, tenant, remarket that every development undergoes.
Interim use not only ensures early benefits to communities while encouraging com-
mercial, retail, and leisure activities during redevelopment, but it also helps investors
secure “proof of concept” in terms of future phases. A few schemes follow to prove the
point.
(1) A fully moveable redevelopment providing easy-to-let temporary accommodation (say, for
up to 5 years) generating business, training, and employment chances, while other parts of
the project are being built.
(2) A redevelopment where future phases gain momentum from the success of earlier phases.
(3) A redevelopment which is eminently flexible throughout each phase, responding to a
community’s needs, changing markets, trends, and financial influences, while still provid-
ing reusable spaces that can be moved as the project phases go ahead.
Pockets of land that are either difficult to develop, in public sector ownership,
awaiting agreement on long-term regeneration plans, represent one of the best afford-
able and viable options on which to deliver temporary housing (QED, 2017).
The redevelopment team may choose to develop sites incrementally or in phases.
By doing so, a project can proceed, which otherwise would not have been economi-
cally viable; sometimes income generated from initial stages (e.g., cleaning up a por-
tion of the sites where minimal contamination is present) can be profitably used to
finance subsequent phases of site cleanup and redevelopment. This is the very concept
of partial de-licensing described in Section 5.5. Regulatory acceptance is generally
required to allow for incremental redevelopment of the site as less contaminated
portions are released from regulatory control and redeveloped. In some legislation,
regulators may see the entire site as one entity, which cannot be subdivided. If the
principle of incremental redevelopment is endorsed by the regulators, the completion
of phases of the redevelopment should be coordinated with the regulators and the con-
tractors to ensure it does not interfere with the cleanup of the remaining areas on site.