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Public Engagement Session #1

4/25/2016

 

How Can We Rejuvenate Spring Garden West?

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The first public engagement session kicked off at St. Andrews Church Hall on Tuesday, April 19th 2016.  It was a good turnout with approximately 80 people in attendance. After showing a video to introduce the project, Louie Lawen, President of Dexel opened the evening by welcoming everyone and thanking them for attending.
 
The purpose of the event is to gather information from the public that will help the developer and architects design the public spaces, streetscapes and form of the development.  This is a developer led engagement not a HRM engagement. The developer wanted to hear back from the public before they start designing instead of after; this is different from the usual process.
 
Lead facilitator, Tim Merry, acknowledged the elephants in the room around height and developer cynicism. He asked people not to hold back and bring their opinion but don’t be attached that it's the only opinion that matters.

A presentation was given by architect, Chris Crawford from Ekistics on the city and neighbourhood context regarding the development. Nick Lopresti, an architect with Dexel also  highlighted elements that Dexel was looking for feedback on.  

Brent Toderliane an urban planner from Vancouver and consultant with the project spoke to how he will be following the project and holding it to a high standard. He reviewed slides on how he will assess the project for good urban design strategies.
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Click on the slides below to review the presentation. Scroll down to see the outcomes of the public engagement and direct transcripts of the information gathered from the tables.

Why is this area important to you? 
  • It’s our neighbourhood
  • It’s a main gateway
  • Green Boulevard
  • Opportunity to Make Great Neighbourhoods
  • Commercial with Residential
  • Share this area with others
  • Walker.. Wind tunnels, please consider
  • Trillium, Park Vic, wind…
  • What needs to be rejuvenated?


How Can We Rejuvenate Spring Garden West?

CONTEXT, CONNECTION & CORRIDORS
  • Context - East. What is happening in the block beyond Carlton? Killam Development? Don’t approve in isolation.
  • Attractive, welcoming gateway/ entranceway to SGR / downtown core
  • Becomes a catalyst for the corridor
  • Having a uniform connection from Spring Garden to Carlton
  • To connect SGR with subject neighbourhood SGW
  • Are you thinking about what is already being built? You haven’t addressed the context well. There are so many buildings being built or about to be. We ask for less height and Killam took some height off. Will you do that?

NEIGHBOURHOOD LIVABILITY & FAMILIES
  • Affordable for families to live and businesses to stay local
  • Families
  • Impact on livability & liveliness of the neighbourhood
  • More people in the neighbourhood to support locally owned restaurants and shops.
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LOCAL BUSINESSES & RESTAURANTS
  • Encourage small local business
  • Small and multiple food options
  • Food locations and groceries
  • What is your plan during this long construction period? It will ruin this area if it takes so long.
 
AFFORDABILITY & ACCESSIBILITY
  • Affordable rents for businesses & restaurants
  • Continue to be accessible / affordable for all economic levels / people who currently access the area
  • Accessible to all ages
  • Foster / retain / encourage more community (how building interacts with street and neighbourhood)
  • Business owners who are currently there, will they be able to afford? They do well in this area because of the population
  • Affordability 

QUALITY DESIGN
  • Quality design (durable, interactive, attractive, etc.)
  • Honesty in representing the architecture
  • If the architectural renderings you present are nice and we like them but how can we know that your building will even look like that? Like the Nova Centre?
  • Mixed use density

LEED GOLD IN PUBLIC
  • Extend LEED Gold into public domain - use warmth of grey water to defrost sidewalk
  • What is LEED design?

MITIGATE CONSTRUCTION IMPACT
  • Mitigate construction impact
STREET EXPERIENCE
  • Great street experience
  • Safety: 7 X 24 well lit
  • More of a destination
  • Outdoor space, cafe, gathering place
  • Orientation & shelter along street edge
  • Maintain fabric of streetscape
  • Inviting streetscape, place to wander, business to explore, quiet shady places to rest
  • Commercial and restaurants including sidewalks and summer seating
  • Generous sidewalk and green spaces along street
  • Is there enough street space? If you have outdoor restaurant and shop space we run out of sidewalk.
  • Create an urban village ambiance - Spring Garden Village
 
GREEN SPACE
  • Engaging green space
  • Gardens and flowers and grass in front - not building the buildings right on the sidewalk
  • Green spaces with trees - not only terrace green space)

WINTER SCAPE
  • Renderings - this is Halifax! No leaves for 7 months so what about a winterscape - heat lamp?
  • We need something we can use year round not just 2 or 3 months of the year? How is this building going to provide this?
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HEIGHT, WIND & LIGHT STUDIES
  • Concerned about following through with wind, traffic and light studies
  • 28 story bldg? Why?
  • Sunlight to other properties
  • Will it affect the air space for the helicopters landing at the hospital?
 
BIKE & CAR PARKING & TRAFFIC
  • Does not constrict SGR cars traffic
  • Parking- coordinated with all of SGR, affordable, accessible, coordinated signage for parking, enough/ more
  • Parking, provide enough for the public not just for residents or customers of the stores in the building)
  • Bike friendly with secure parking for bikes
  • Making wider - better pedestrian and cyclist streets 

​PUBLIC ACCESS WITH A VIEW
  • Year - round access to public realm with a view

BALCOM SQUARE
  • Do not close the street by the church
  • If you close Balcom Square you would lose 5 parking spaces. You keep eliminating easy, accessible parking for people coming into the downtown. They might be able to afford underground parking.
​REVITALIZED!
  • Enliven rather than rejuvenate
  • Revitalize instead on rejuvenate
The architects will review the information from the public engagement sessions and incorporate the comments into the design. This will be presented at the second engagement session and the public will be able to breakout into specific sessions for comment. 

SCROLL OVER PICTURE TO ENLARGE

The next public engagement session will take place at St. Andrews Church Hall on Wednesday, May 11th 2016.  Doors open at 6:00pm with a presentation starting at 6:30 pm.  RSVP HERE.

Light, Height & Sight: Learning from Stakeholders

4/14/2016

 
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​To begin the public engagement, it was important to meet with key stakeholders to review the presentation and engagement process. Three stakeholder sessions were held on April 7 & 8, 2016 with technical experts and planners, neighbours and associations in the area.  

Stakeholders attending represented HRM, NS Power, Dalhousie, Heritage Trust, Ecology Action Centre, Halifax Alliance, The Planning and Design Centre, The Spring Garden Business Association, The Heart & Stroke Foundation, Walk-N-Roll, and neighbours to the proposed development. 

An overview of the public engagement presentation was given along with a presentation on the actual engagement process.  We asked stakeholders what questions will the public have and what more information do we need to share with them? They gave us the following feedback.  

What are the questions the public will have?

​What more information do we need to share with them?

CONTEXT
  • Context is important - need to consider what we want Spring Garden to be
  • Need to consider how the land uses (green and retail interact). Current diagrams don’t communicate.
  • Define the big picture 30,000 ft view
TIMELINE
  • Length of Construction period?
  • How does it fit with the Centre Plan?
DEMOGRAPHICS
  • Changing Halifax demographics, older not decrepit
EDUCATIONAL PIECE
  • Streetscapes, learning from the streetscape
  • Recognizing history plaquing
  • Interpretation, plaques, historic buildings
  • Identify plant life, identify tree species
PUBLIC ART
  • People like public art
  • Public art spaces for NSCAD
  • Performance Public Art
  • Theaters and concert or art spaces
A DESTINATION
  • 4 season destination
  • City needs to move forward
HERITAGE/HISTORIC CONCEPT
  • How will the historic, (Carlton) and modern interact?
  • What will happen to the other side of Carlton?
BALCOM PARK
  • Programming
  • Public Ownership
  • Offer to program the park to make street take over successful
  • Closing street will fix very dangerous corner
  • Create another Victoria Park? Turn median into a park?
  • Daycare and senior drop off at Balcom Square
STREETSCAPING
  • Interpreted promenade, trees, buildings, people and landscape
  • Evergreen trees and clean snow on streetscape 
  • Attention to the beauty of Spring Garden Rd
  • How is it going to be better for people walking by?
  • Treed median
AFFORDABLE HOUSING
  • Affordable housing and affordable retail
  • What % of affordable housing?
SOCIAL HOUSING
  • It’s time to understand social housing (Positive - Need)
  • Social housing a negative - public perception
RETAIL
  • Small scale shop fronts are important
  • Food desert, need a grocery store (could be small scale)
  • Need small retail space options
  • The nature of retail, who are you catering to?
  • Small storefronts; articulation and affordable
  • Local businesses not franchises
ATRIUM
  • The atrium is great for the public if it is not just going to the offices
  • Take the atrium from Spring Garden to Robie
DENSITY & BUILDING HEIGHT
  • Is this taking too much density?
  • Concerns around building heights, people don’t necessarily care / understand developers need for height / density
  • What is the discussion of the towers?
  • Too hard to get in and out of tower buildings
  • Emphasize that density is the solution to traffic and affordability issues
  • More shape in massing 
  • Height/massing a solution not just a problem
  • Height? Jarring?
  • Let people know it’s not a carte blanche for all but why height is important for this site​
LIGHT & SIGHT
  • Sun and shade created by the building
  • Skyline? Where will it be?
  • Sightline?
  • Interfere with light?
  • Human scale
CONSTRUCTION
  • Protect sidewalk during construction
  • Paving of sidewalks, consider persons with visual / physical disabilities
  • Be a good neighbour, provide contact info during construction, inform people when they are closing streets
BIKE PARKING
  • Incorporate bike parking
PARKING
  • Public Parking
  • Parking on the site and the impact to the neighbourhood
  • Is there public parking?
  • Is it paid or affordable parking?
  • Improved public parking
TRAFFIC
  • Traffic impact
  • Impact on traffic on closing right turn from Coburg on Balcom
  • Volume of traffic increase?
PEDESTRIAN TRAFFIC
  • Robie Spring Garden intersection should be thinner, more pedestrian friendly
  • Shorten pedestrian crossings
  • No “beg” buttons
  • Taking back the street for people
TRANSIT
  • How it connects to the building
  • High quality bus shelter = important
  • Regionally significant transit corridor
RELATIONSHIPS & PROXIMITY TO HOSPITALS
  • People who travel to the area from outside of Halifax and NS
STUDENTS
  • How do we manage student takeover?
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS
  • What’s the context of other future developments?  Aggregate impact?
  • Acknowledge other things that are underway

Advice or questions about the Engagement Process

PRESENTATION
  • Be out of the box - no mic in the middle
  • Get the fears on the table
  • Show positive and negative opinions
  • Mass is the elephant in the room
OUTREACH
  • Connect with DAL Public Relations
  • Engage people at the hospital who understand patient flow and decreasing services
  • Connect with DSU & SMUSA. Put tables in the SUB or at JUST US
  • Make sure you get students input on what is missing locally, maybe pop up
  • How do the 2 topics invite people to really discuss and provide critique for questions around gross area, business model, height and density etc..
  • Pop up engagement in Balcom Park, talk to people

The first public engagement session will take place on Tuesday, April 19th from 6:30 - 8:30 pm at ST. Andrews Church Hall  -  6036 Coburg Road.  RSVP here.

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