Woodlands Central will serve as one of the business hubs outside the city, featuring its own retail and food complex by 2017, reported the media.
A joint development by HDB and the National Environment Agency (NEA), the $31.1 million project will be built in the open space next to Woodlands Sports Hall and bounded by Woodlands Street 12.
Facilities planned for the hub include a supermarket, a hawker centre with 80 cooked food stall, five commercial schools, 60 retail shops and around 200 parking spaces.
Woodlands Street 12 is also set to be widened, with a new slip road added from the street to Woodlands Avenue 3 to support future traffic within the area.
Notably, plans to develop the new hub comes after HDB announced a relocation exercise in 2012, in which six blocks in Woodlands Centre Road will be relocated under the Selective En Bloc Redevelopment Scheme (SERS) to replacement flats in Woodlands Drive 70 by 2016.
HDB noted the move will affect around 147 households, 78 hawker stalls and 200 businesses in rental shops.
NEA was quoted in the media saying the new hub will partly ensure there are adequate cooked food stalls within the area. Presently, Woodlands only has one NEA-managed hawker centre.
Residents also see an urgent need for more food options once the crowd flocks in with the upcoming development of the Woodlands Regional Centre.
One part of the regional centre is set to be a retail hub known as Woodlands Central, which will be spread across a 30 hectare area around the Causeway Point and Woodlands MRT.
Meanwhile, the Woodlands MRT station will likely be busier once it becomes an interchange that connects the North-South Line with the new Thomson Line by 2019.
Image source: URA
Muneerah Bee, Senior Journalist at PropertyGuru, edited this story. To contact her about this or other stories email muneerah@propertyguru.com.sg
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