Peterborough Woman Wants To Build New Urbanist Development

listen:

(nat sound…it has stone walls which date back to it being a sheep pasture..)
Ivy Vann walks along her recently-purchased 22 acre wooded property in Peterborough.
(it has a few big trees that were probably left as pasture trees in the days when it was sheep pasture…but most of it has grown up in the past 35 years)

Ivy Vann.(Cheryl Senter, NHPR)

Scrub bush and small trees cover what was once open farmland.
For decades, developers have ignored this piece of real estate – even though it sits less than a half mile from downtown.
But Vann envisions this as a new community, with pedestrian-friendly streets that connect to each other – and mixed income housing – a place where she would like to live – and plans to.
The idea is to create a traditional neighborhood setting that people expect of old New England, not a new subdivision where all the houses look the same.
1181 :55 New England towns have made it increasingly difficult to make the places that we love the best, like High Street, like Pine Street in Peterborough, like Village Center in Amherst, those places are very hard to create under the current zoning.

Vann blames zoning regulations in many New Hampshire towns for forcing new houses to be built far from each other, and far from the main road.
She says it’s a laudable effort to prevent a town from being overrun by development.
But she thinks it’s destroying communities.
1183 :29 by doing that what you do is put the people further and further out from town and you either string them out on long arterial roads so that you have no sense of community, and in order to get anywhere you have to drive someplace it’s hard to walk.

To counter that, Vann’s traditional neighborhood design is based on the architectural concept called “new urbanism.”
New urbanism’s goal is to prevent sprawl by creating what are called smart growth neighborhoods.
Peterborough Community Development Director Carol Olgivie says Vann’s concept is consistent with the town’s master plan.
“1195 1:48 housing is a real issue in NH today, so to provide a range of housing types and at various income levels is very important and will meet a need that exists today.”

The proposed development.(Cheryl Senter, NHPR)

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1219 ( nat sound from public charette)
Vann asked Peterborough residents to share their ideas on the design at a four day long event called a public charette.
Kevin Klinkenberg, a new urbanist planner with 180 Degrees Design in Kansas City, has facilitated about 50 charettes across the country.
He says the process creates less of an adversarial relationship between residents, the planning board and developers.
1208 :34 there’s been such a real change in the attitude towards development nationally people are much more educated about development issues nowadays and much more jaded that development can produce anything good or anything of value, so developers have to work a lot harder to get their projects approved.

And that may be what’s ahead in Peterborough.
Vann and her designers got an earful from neighbors of the proposed community.
Most of them concerned about increased traffic from the roads that connect the proposed neighborhood to existing streets.
Jay Purcell lives on High Street in Peterborough.
1238 3:47 Traffic volume onto High street is really going to seriously affect the quality of just living on that street and I think it’s something that as the density here has increased to 55 units the number of car trips per day for people coming out onto a single access point on high street could really be a problem

Purcell and other High Street residents accused designers of attempting to get as many houses as possible on the smallest parcel of land.
But designer Kevin Klinkenberg disagreed – and even redesigned the plan to push more housing closer to a less-traveled street.
1239 “if we were intent on maxing out the site, the max density on this would be allowed anywhere from 80 to 100 units under the existing zoning that’s already there we obviously cannot do that don’t want to do that Ivy is trying to create a certain kind of feel to the neighborhood”

But Klinkenberg admits it’s a difficult site to build on.
He says that’s one of the reasons the site remains undeveloped.
1207 3:34 there are wetlands on the site, there are some very steep slopes there are a number of neighbors on all sides of the property and you factor all those in together with some limited access points into it and its sort of like doing a triple bank shot.

Ivy Vann stands in a clearing in her recently-purchased 22 acre wooded property in Peterborough.(Cheryl Senter, NHPR)

High Street resident Kevin Corriveau thought the charette process was more of a charade.
While neighbors got a voice in the design, he thinks the final proposed project is much bigger than Peterborough can handle.

1245 3:04 I have concerns, just seeing it double overnight made me quail, it made me feel sick, I really felt like I could gag, and I’m not a bad man, I’m a teacher, I know the impacts developments have on school systems.

But those who don’t abut the property think the final new urbanist plan is just what Peterborough needs.
Architect Scott Swanson owns a building in downtown.

1251 1:02 I’m all for it, throughout America communities are looking at this because we’ve seen the developer approach, where a piece of raw land is scraped clean, roads are put down, McMansions side by side, and you can see they obviously has worked very hard to put together a presentation of this nature and I think they’ve done a great job.

Ivy Vann hopes the charette process will help the project get approved more quickly – saving her time and money.
She thinks the charette turned out just as she expected.

3:03 I believe the neighbors who are unhappy at the beginning are still unhappy now, I’m sure they’re going to report that the charette process did not work because they did not walk way happy, but the truth is the only thing that would have made them really happy is for the project not to have happened.

Vann says small changes might be made to her new community’s final design before it’s presented to the Planning Board in Peterborough.
And they’ll be more public hearings after that.
If it’s approved, it would likely take five to six years to complete.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.