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.

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.

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:

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).

This uninteresting box has a parking lot beside it that could be used for something much better. As it abuts the parking garage, integrated parking would be a possibility.

This building (and surrounding surface parking lots) easily take up over half a city block. This lot is larger than the Centennial Building’s lot so we can imagine something larger than the Centennial Building going in here.

Hmmm, just noticed that the Irving is also taking up a lot of space………