About 200 people crammed into the tiny St. Peter’s Church off Kearney Lake Road Monday night to give their opinions on the rollout of the Birch Cove Urban Design Study.
City staff and planners from Ekistics, a Dartmouth design firm, presented a “consensus plan” for land that includes the Chinatown restaurant on the Bedford Basin, Irving Oil and Farmer Clem’s on the water side of the Bedford Highway and, moving up the hill, St. Peter’s, United Gulf and Wedgewood Motel property.
The proposal calls for a roundabout to replace the present Kearney Lake/Bedford Highway intersection, two 12-storey “mid-rise” towers on the Chinatown land and five other four- to eight-storey “low-rise” buildings in the areas. It includes a waterfront trail/boardwalk, a marina and several plazas making up a “village cluster” concept.
Residents’ concerns were primarily about increased traffic from the 400 to 500 residential units and more commercial properties in the plan, and about a reduction in view planes. (Presently, property owners can build up to 35 feet, but unlike in the plan, no views at all are protected.)
For more on the situation, see tinyurl.com/birchcove.
This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2010.
I attended the meeting, and Tim is right, there was a lot of concern about traffic and private viewplanes. I had good intentions of speaking in favour of the plan, which gets a lot of things right (density, transit, recreation, green principles), but I thought better of it when I heard how upset some of my neighbours were about their own views and the height of the proposed buildings, and about traffic levels, which everyone seems convinced are on constantly on the rise, despite traffic studies that indicate otherwise. I also wonder whether there isn’t a little bit of xenophobia about those future apartment/condo dwellers (hey, they’re people too!).
I encourage interested parties to read the plan and email Paul Morgan (HRM planner, morganp@halifax.ca) and provide feedback before April 2nd. There are legitimate things to criticize in the draft master plan, but I’m really excited about the potential recreational opportunities and future hookup to the waterfront trail network (although I’m sure that that I’ll be an OLD man before the trail is complete!).
Most of all, I would like to re-focus the discussion on what we have to gain by carefully designing a vibrant village centre. I suspect that urban design is really not on the minds of most Birch Cove residents, but I want the planners/developers to know that some of us are keenly interested in high quality design and materials, and village centre that maximizes the potential of this site.
And I’ll try to muster the courage to speak up at the next public meeting 🙂