I've been around development projects since I was born, literally. My dad was a construction foreman when I was a baby, and sometimes he'd just stick me in the truck when he went out on the job sites. As I entered the business of engineering and planning, I always sought to understand the issues, and not simply react emotionally to a project. Or to others' impressions of a new project.
I've watched, read, practiced and observed for 30 years since I graduated as a young engineer, one who wanted to do things better in response to what I then saw as a growing problem with our environment.
Working as a consulting engineer, I almost always have ended up of the proactive side of the development debate - I've been part of a team designing those new projects. Sometimes I am completely disgusted with ignorant, rude, and insulting comments from uneducated people who seem to assume that those of us designing a project are not thinking about how to do it right. I've had "hippie-chick" BFA grads tell me that because I became an Engineer, my opinion was no longer valid! I was "part of the system". Let me tell you - perhaps the best change, maybe the only change, comes from within a system.
I've learned that almost always, objections to new projects are based on the objector's perceived loss of PERSONAL finance (usually property value). Most often, it is coated in a thin veneer of environmental concern, aesthetic concern, safety concern, or some other concern that is usually totally wrong, and only has any force of effect because of the emotional connotations associated with it.
The other objector that always rings so false is the misled conscientious complainer. This is usually a young person who has been convinced by another, older person, who has sway over them, that something is wrong. They usually cry at microphones at public meetings. I feel bad for them. But, ignorance really is no excuse.
So, to lessen said ignorance, here are the four big falsehoods that are trotted out whenever someone wants to slow, stop or otherwise hinder a project. Don't get me wrong - most certainly, not all development is good development. But it is important to be able to understand what makes a development good, and what makes it bad. All too often, well, almost always, the public objections are over misunderstood things that are not a problem, and the real problems with development are missed completely. Sometimes we even stop a project that needs to be stopped, but for the wrong reasons completely.
1. Density
The number of people living on one acre of land is a measurement that planners can make, because most of them can count. It has absolutely no bearing on whether a development is good or bad. There are excellent, highly dense developments. There are great densely populated cities and neighbourhoods. And the reverse holds true. A high density is not, in and of itself, a bad, or a good thing.
2. Height
The height of a building has almost nothing to do with whether it is bad or good for a community. At some point, in a city, shadows already exist across a street at some time of a day. By definition. But a tall tower, set back from a street facade makes no difference in what we all experience from the street once that shadow reaches across the street. In some cities, this is encouraged, as it cools the street. Height is something we need to start allowing, but in trade for leaving more land open at ground level - get back more park space, pedestrian areas, and treed shady spots, in trade for allowing the office and residential indoors to stack on top of itself. Don't be against a project just because it is high. This is not New York, sure, but it also is not the old part of Paris either.
3. Heritage or Historic Character.
Remember, at one time that nice old building was the newest avant guard design. It sits there demonstrative of its period, an example of the Architecture of its day. Our city now has almost 20 years of no new architecture in the downtown. Some day an architectural historian might look at Halifax and wonder what happened here over that period, and surmise that perhaps a disease that attacked the local design skill IQ and rendered us all worshipers of the 4.5 story boxes littered around our outskirts like un-scooped doggie do. We need to keep the best examples of every period's architecture. No one can be the judge of which has more value, because they are all no more than what they are. We need to allow today's designs to find a place in our city beside the existing well designed, and well built, older building stock. This is not Sherbrooke Village, we are not making a museum here. Even worse is fake history. Restore, but don't mimic or save only the facade. A building is a three dimensional work. Keep the good examples, and let the others fade into history.
4. Traffic
Here lies the issue with the most common moronic public perceptions. Tell someone that the traffic on their street will rise by 100 vehicles a day and they have a fit. Stop and think about what an increase in traffic really means. Take the design capacity of a street, and find out what percentage of that already happens on a road or street. Then calculate what percentage decrease in capacity the projected increase will cause. In almost every single case, this is almost nothing. If you could take the "anti-traffic increase" person at a public meeting, and stick them on a street with the before, and the after, traffic activity of almost every single development I've seen, they could not tell you which scenario they were in. I am sick and tired of someone saying, "this will double the traffic on our street" when they only have 200 trips a day now. 400 a day is nothing.
When its all said and done, traffic engineering is little more than voodoo anyway, and as Jane Jacobs said in her final book "Dark Age Ahead", Traffic Engineers have never got anything right. I am certain they don't consider human factors enough. Cars do not flow though streets like water through pipes, or current through wire. They go where people aim them. They take U-turns to avoid congestion, and sometimes, they choose another route altogether.
Traffic modelling is so fraught with uncertainty, I don't rely on it as a positive or negative factor in assessing any development. No more than I trust ghosts or magic.
Now, of course there will be exceptions to the above. Plenty of them, maybe. But in them lie the greatest errors people make when opposing a development. And for sure, it is usually a development that they think will affect their own financial situation, or they have simply become addicted to seeing their name in the media as the standard go to "no person".
My next missive, when I get around to it, will be the things we really need to be making sure are done right that we almost never do. You can complain about anything I write by commenting below.
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