A view of uptown Saint John. (Image: Brad Perry)
A resident of Saint John is raising concerns about the amount of undeveloped parking lots in the city’s uptown.
Colin O’Brien, a student in community design and urban planning at Dalhousie University, said he doesn’t think it’s something everyone is aware of.
“In our core there we have a number of prime real estate lots that are zoned for commercial parking which is hindering our efforts to develop our core. This is a place where people want to live, want to work, want to play,” he said.
In a thread on social media, O’Brien drew attention to four different lots that he said adds no value to the uptown, generates few taxes, and encourages urban sprawl.
“These lots are largely sitting vacant for a long time and some of these decisions have been made in the last decade when they were approved for a commercial parking lot and right now uptown is seeing a lot of potential here, we’re seeing a lot of development. We have the Gothic Arches, the Telegraph, we’re seeing potential projects down the line like the Wellington,” he said.
O’Brien said we know from Develop Saint John that between 5,600 and 8,800 housing units will need to be built in the next decade, which proves the demand.
Donna Reardon, a Saint John city councilor, sits on the parking commission.
“Any of the lots that the parking commission own, if they were to get an offer from the developer on those lots, our policy is that we would always consider and sell that lot at fair market value for that developer,” she said.
Reardon said the question has always been should they be used for parking or for development.
“We looked at all the parking lots to try to sort out what was going on with parking lots, and we discovered that a lot of the parking lots were just registered as vacant properties and were being used as parking lots,” she said.
Reardon said from there the lots were determined to what are legitimate parking lots, and what could be used as parking lots. From there, they all were rezoned.
“With that rezoning came certain criteria. So if you wanted to have your private lot used as an income lot as parking, you now had to have it paved, and you had to have it curbed, and you had to landscape it. So that happened to all the parking lots that were being used in the uptown area, and some people just said no, I’m not going to do that,” she said.
Reardon said if a lot isn’t being used for parking, it has to be grassed or greened, which has happened to some but it isn’t always apparent.
She said if a building came down tomorrow, there’s a bylaw which requires that spot to be developed or be landscaped.
She agrees completely that parking lots need to be looked at for the potential of development.
Reardon said it really depends on what we want the uptown to look like. She said if we incentivize development, it’ll happen, otherwise, we should dis-incentivize to avoid empty lots.
David Hickey, a Ward 3 councillor, says as a councillor for the area that parking has always been a challenge.
“It’s been a tough balance for us to strike because we need to make sure that we’re doing our job in promoting active transportation,” he said.
Hickey said they need to balance the reality of the need within the city whether that’s retail business or commuter traffic.
“The challenge becomes when we have these private lots that really do hinder the attractiveness of the neighbourhood, they hinder the look and feel of a neighbourhood that can really impact furthering a neighbourhood,” he said.
Hickey said it’s far too cheap to own these lots and it is a priority to get these lots developed, and it’s conversations like these that need to happen to figure out where people want the neighbourhood to go and what do they want that neighbourhood to look like.
Meanwhile, Colin O’Brien said the ideal situation is to see some sort of development of a building or to make the lot itself attractive. He said he encourages city staff to reach out to the property owners to see what progress can be made.
“We need to have property owners really that are willing to put in the money to develop these lots so that we can make our core a contender for future companies, high tech industries, all these industries that are coming up these days to make Saint John more attractive to them,” he said.
