And throughout the city, not a tear was shed. (The new building will be much nicer)

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Tired of looking at these tired, old, shabby railway-era industrial buildings?

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Pretty soon you won’t be. If this passes council, and the developer is actually able to build it, it will soon look like this:

But wait, there’s more. Phase 2 will include a row of townhouses which will fill in the rest of the lot:

The apartment building will also have 64 units of underground parking (1 per unit), and four penthouse suites. This is a high-quality development that will add density to the area and will hopefully reduce some of the issues in the nearby “student ghetto”. Hopefully the city will ignore the NIMBYs and allow this to be built.

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Many people have been tired of looking at the old TRA building on Queen St. which currently looks like this: (that picture was from 2 years ago, it actually looks much worse now)

One group hopes to replace it with this:

TC Land Holdings (who are somehow related to PlazaCorp, the strip-mall developer) have filed an application to build this 32 unit apartment building on that site. Some might say that 32 units is a bit small, but the actual lot isn’t that big:

As you can see, it pretty much fills the entire lot, leaving only enough space for 14 parking spaces. There will be another 26 spaces located on the first floor of the building. Due to flooding concerns, there won’t be a basement.

Hopefully the project won’t get derailed by soil conditions (or the fact that it’s built on an old dump). This will be a great addition to the downtown and will bring in some much-needed residents. Some density advocates would wish for a larger building, but considering the technical issues, I think this is the best anyone could do.

Planning Advisory Council members will be voting on this on Wednesday, April 20th. It will then have to pass council at a later date, probably in May.

Update: Building is under construction. Here is the website that has some leasing information: http://www.westpointebytheriver.ca/ The prices aren’t listed, but the extra “e” on “pointe” implies that it will be expensive.

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As part of the “Sustainability. By Design.” process, we’ll have a quick look at Fredericton’s current municipal plan. Overall, it isn’t all that bad, however, there are a few particular areas that need a second look.

High density residential needs to be required in certain areas, especially large lots near major arteries. This will be needed to reduce the cost of delivering municipal services to a neighbourhood.

Section 3.4 insists that the look-and-feel of Brunswick St. needs to be preserved for “historic reasons”. If we want to expand our downtown, wouldn’t Brunswick St. be the logical choice for an increase in density?

Section 3.5 residential town plat – the worst example of NIMBY appeasement. Some parts will need to be redesignated for higher density housing, especially along transit corridors such as Regent, York, and Smythe. This will pit the environmentalists against the heritage preservationists, which might be entertaining to watch.

Section 3.7 seems to tow a hard line on the student ghetto. An effective transit system will allow students to move farther away from UNB/STU thereby reducing pressures on this neighbourhood.

The biggest mistake they made is that you can’t download the municipal plan as a single PDF file. That makes it really hard to find things if you are just looking for a few key words.

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As part of his “State of the City” address, Fredericton mayor Brad Woodside announced “Sustainability. By Design.” which appears to be a buzzy term for updating the municipal plan. That plan was created in 1991, last updated in 2002 and amended several times later whenever a proposal didn’t fit the plan. The biggest problem with that plan is that it isn’t very green. It encourages sprawl, has no ties with transit and focuses on heritage preservation over density.

This is exactly the same thing that Halifax did a few years ago in their HRMbyDesign process. Saint John is doing it too with PlanSJ. Municipal plans do need to be updated every few years as demographics and focus change so this isn’t an unexpected process.

Here are a few points to consider when thinking about urban planning:

• Don’t use this as a venue to bash other people’s lifestyles. (Yes, I’ve said that before)
• There will have to be several versions of the document, depending on the outcome of Alward’s promise for municipal reform.
• The cost of transportation will go up significantly in the next few years. Public transit won’t just be for students and poor people, it will need to be included in the municipal planning process.
• Active transportation and walkability will be a greater consideration when designing neighbourhoods.
• Existing neighbourhoods will need be retrofitted to conform to the new standards. This will be a difficult process, but it must be done as “obsolete” neighbourhoods will become the slums of tomorrow.
• Heritage will have to take a back seat to sustainability. Heritage buildings won’t necessarily be torn down, but heritage “look and feel” zones will be less important than density.

In the end, it will have to be a big compromise for all of the involved stakeholders. Here’s hoping that all parties involved get a chance to voice their opinion and that cooler heads prevail.

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Too often the car-haters treat the cul-de-sac as the enemy of good urban design. They aren’t the most efficient for driving, and they do cost a little more to plow in the winter, however, with proper planning, they can be better for walkability (and bikeability). All it takes is a path that connects the dead end to the road running behind it.

We’ll take this example in Fredericton’s Lincoln Heights:

Doesn’t look very walkable, does it? How about we add the interconnecting paths (that actually exist) to the map:

This provides a nice balance. You can easily walk or bike around the neighbourhood and many of the residential streets have low and slower-moving traffic. Planning doesn’t have to be about punishing car owners, you can compromise and still have a great neighbourhood to live in.

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Found this stuffed in my door the other day:

This is in reference to the subdivision of a large lot at 1530 Lincoln Rd. Since my last post about it, the application had been revised to only be 6 lots instead of 7. This means that the application no longer needs to be voted on by city council, it only needs to pass at the Planning Advisory Council (PAC) level.  The PAC ended up denying the subdivision over the issue of the driveways being too close to a dangerous intersection.  However, City lawyers were asked to look into the PAC and see what their actual scope is. Turns out, they can’t actually deny a subdivision application that meets the zoning requirements. They can only decide whether 8% of the total property must be given up as parkland, or a cash equivalent be provided. This means that the most the PAC can do is hope they can inconvenience the developer into having to give up 8% of the land and annoys him enough that he eventually resubmits an application that solves the issue with the driveways.

The authors of the flyer seem to think that this is a human rights issue. Rather than letting this one go and trying to permanently close the loophole, they are hoping that this can be magically overturned by having a bunch of people showing up to a meeting. I’ve seen that before with the UNB woodlot and Acadian Lines bus station rezoning. Hopefully this group won’t bring drums.

To be fair to the protesters, the driveway configuration is dumb, but it will mostly affect the safety of people that end up buying those lots.  It will also affect the developer as this debate will reduce the desirability of the lots and therefore reduce the price, which will reduce his profit margins.

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This building is just run down. It has been renovated many times, badly. They can’t even be bothered to paint the siding, which has been mismatched since the ice storm of 1998. If you look in the windows of the upper floors, you can see that some of them have been boarded up from the inside. There are even remnants of the old King of Donair sign that hasn’t been properly removed. I think this is a perfect example of how Fredericton’s unsightly property by-laws don’t actually work.

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This 1970s era blight occupies a prime corner lot yet it doesn’t make use of the corner at all. All that is on the corner is a blank brick wall. They must consider Fredericton pedestrians really ugly as they put the ground floor windows up high so they can’t see out. The doors to the bank are actually on Carleton St., away from the more major Queen St. It looks like there are doors on Queen, but they are only emergency exits. In fact, the sole purpose of that alcove is so that panhandlers can use it to jump out in front of you to aggressively ask for change.

Although there are also a lot of of other smaller buildings around it, this lot is fairly large and could be redeveloped into something much nicer as it goes quite far down Carleton:

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There’s a lot of debate about what to do with the train station. I’ve briefly mentioned it before in a post, but I’ve been curious about why nobody has already fixed it up on their own. To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me whether they tear it down or fix it up. I’m actually going to try to be objective here.

Unfortunately, nobody has actually measured the building. I had to use the ruler tool in Google Earth to make this estimate, which may end up being very wrong.  I am roughly guessing that there is 4000 square feet of usable space in the building.

For the moment, we’ll assume that there will be 4000 square feet of total rentable space.

A few years ago, I was told by a real estate agent that buildings cost $100/sqft to build new. I’m not sure that’s 100% accurate, but that’s the figure we’ll use for now.

So to build a building the same size as the train station, it would cost $400,000. The net rent on a building in the same area is about $8 per square foot per year. This means that it will take 12.5 years to recover the building cost. Operating expenses and taxes aren’t included in the net rent. Usually money has to be reinvested into the building for renovations after about 20 years as parts of it get worn out (like the roof).

The formula used to get the years to ROI is:
(cost to acquire / square feet / net rent)

So for a quick summary, we have:
(400,000 / 4000 / 8 ) = 12.5

Now, many sources tell us that the train station will cost up to $2 million to fix. So plugging it into the formula we get:
(2,000,000 / 4000 / 8 ) = 62.5
Yikes. 62.5 years is definitely not commercially viable at all.

Let’s just run another similar sized building through the formula. We’ll take the Electric Motor Service building as a comparison. On June 22nd 2009, the values given were: Cost: $495,000, sqft: 5881

So we’ll plug them into the formula:
(495,000 / 5881 / 8 ) = 10.5

Depending on the current state of the building, 10.5 years is pretty good.

So for the train station repair to be commercially viable, $1.5 million will have to come from somewhere. It will either be J.D. Irving (who refused to pay much less for the basic maintenance that was required for the station to not get into its current state) or taxpayers (who will not be happy at paying for something that J.D. Irving broke).

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