The 2019 City of St. John's budget includes waiving development fees for builders who create a plan for several existing neighbourhoods in St. John's.

LeMarchant Road, Water Street west and neighbourhoods in the east and west ends are included in a list of eight potential sites.

To learn more about the city's potential, through the lens of an urban planner, CBC spoke with Tom Horrocks and Lydia Lewycky.

Q: We are at the corner near Water Street, Leslie Street and Blackhead Road, which — looking east — is included in the city's intensification plan. As planners, when you look down this stretch of road, what potential do you see?

LYDIA: Well, it has a lot of potential. I think it's kind of an area in transition and there are a lot of industrial sites for light industrial uses that eventually you may think about moving to other areas of the city.

Sometimes cities incentivize those sorts of moves when there is land that the city feels is, you know, of high value in prime land that they redeveloped for other uses.

You can see areas where there's some new commercial and restaurants or potential for restaurants, and, it's also a really lovely residential neighborhood.

Q: Looking for Water Street, there's already a pretty new building that's vacant. It's a commercial lot. Do you expect that many people won't want to build in these areas because they're not up and coming — so to speak?

TOM: As Lydia alluded to, it's an area in transition, and that building that you're talking about down toward the east end ... kudos to the developer that adaptively reused that property into something that, I think, they're hoping for more commercial retail.

It's sat vacant for a while now, and hopefully as time goes on, things will turn around and people will see this as a positive place to locate their businesses, and in some of the older buildings down there we've seen just that. We've seen new businesses come in and set up, and that's really positive for the area.

It just takes time. The market dictates.

A view of Water Street west, looking east. (Google Maps )

Q: The list of eight intensification areas is very specific. In some cases, specific to an intersection. Are there any neighbourhoods or areas around the city that you would hope to see on that list?

LYDIA: I think the city needs to continually update the urban core, update the downtown, and the city centre. That may be on [the city's] radar, regardless, and it just wasn't an area that was identified specifically.

The more you develop on the fringe areas of the city, the less opportunities come available financially and economically to drive your core area. - Tom Horrocks

We need to really be careful with our downtown core. We're losing some businesses now and we want to ensure that we keep rejuvenating. There's still potential for infill downtown and in city centre entire neighbourhoods, and we need to look at those opportunities as well.

Q: From a planning perspective, are areas like Hebron Way and Kelsey Drive positives or are they troubling? Because they are bringing in new business or could be moving some businesses outward.

TOM: Well, I think it's positive in some ways and negative in other ways. I mean, if they're drawing businesses from the downtown area where it's the core of your community, then perhaps that's not desirable in some cases because it's leaving gaps in existing buildings that need to be filled. And we need to maintain that momentum.

So, obviously when you go to Hebron Way and Kelsey Drive and Stavanger Drive it's perhaps cheaper to develop out there and develop purpose-built buildings that are cheaper. You got cheaper land costs, you've got all the surface parking that you want, but the downside is sometimes there could be a negative effect, that the more you develop on the fringe areas of the city, the less opportunities come available financially and economically to drive your core area. And that's, I think, a little bit concerning.

Q: One of the things the Home Builders' Association brought up was NIMBY — this Not in my Backyard mentality. Do you think that really rings true for some of the areas that are within these intensification areas? I mean, we're looking at the former Grace Hospital lot. Some of these places are, quite frankly, eyesores.

LYDIA: The Grace Hospital is a good example. From a residential perspective, what would you rather look at? A dilapidated building or new construction?

Some sort of appropriate infill, and infill could be housing. It could be townhouses; it could be single family; it could be three- or four-storey apartment buildings; a mixed-use, with commercial and residential, commercial on the main floor and residential on upper floors. There are all kinds of opportunities there.

I think we have to be sort of careful about the NIMBY idea. People hear densification and I think their mind right away goes to a zero- to 10-storey high rise or some kind of high rise, and that's not necessarily what densification means.

Q: From a planning perspective, if you had the keys to the city to reconfigure and plan, what would you do? Would you waive development fees for all areas? Would you include more intensification areas?

TOM: I'm not sure if waiving fees is enough of an incentive. You know, there could be other ways to create incentives.

Examples like this, of going out and talking about the opportunities publicly and getting the development community involved and interested and engaging with planners and architects and engineers early on, is a really important step. And looking at the municipal plan and looking to see how, you know, the community has decided that they want to see the community unfold over the next five or 10 years.

We've gone through a series of ups and downs over the last three or four decades in the city — some extremely powerful in terms of growth and others not so great. So you know those all affect the market place and people's attitudes about development and where it needs to be and where it can go economically because that's really going to drive it.

A view of downtown St. John's, as captured by photographer Dale Brow. (Submitted by Dale Brow)

LYDIA: I think we need to sort of have a little bit of sober second thought when we're looking at new development, where it's going and the impact of large commercial developments. What impact does that have on other areas of the city? If you look at the Stavanger Drive area, the Target store closed down, Rona is closing down, Costco is moving out. That's going to have a huge impact on that area.

So sometimes we need to really think about those consequences and what does it mean to all of us — as taxpayers — and maybe sometimes we have to have the guts to say, 'Well, no, we don't want that kind of development here,' or 'It's too early for that kind of development here.'

We're also an aging population. Out death rate is higher than our birth rate. So we need to think about what are the effects of all this kind of sprawl down the road.Maybe not in five years' time but in 10, 15, 20, 25 years' time.

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

The City of St. John's has identified eight areas deemed in need of "intensification," over the next 10 years. (City of St. John's)

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