If you attend a public hearing on a proposed infill project, you’ll be amazed at both the variety and repetition of reasons for why a project should be turned down. The fear is real, and developers typically do a lousy job talking to the neighbourhood and allaying those fears. Here are a few of the most common ones, all candidates for a bingo card you can bring to the next city council meeting!
Too Much Traffic
A favourite! We all can agree that our car is never the problem, it’s all those “other people” who drove their cars into our way. But for fun, let’s do the math and realize how teeny, tiny this issue really is. By the way, if you have too much traffic on your street, it’s not local neighbourhood traffic, it’s “through-traffic” from all those poor sods who are avoiding the stop lights on Main Street and using your street as a short-cut.
- Take 32 units, 57 parking stalls, all used by tenants, and assume the extreme: everyone leaves and returns in a 4-hour time frame
- Rush hour outbound: 57 vehicles leave, averaging one every minute
- Return: 57 vehicles come back over 180 minutes, averaging one every 3.25 minutes.
- Reality check: take your phone, put it into stopwatch mode, watch a car go by and count 60 seconds before the next car. Is that the extreme rate of traffic you’re upset about? And remember, having all 57 vehicles leave or return in one hour will almost never happen.
Parking Battle on Street
They will take all our on-street parking – forcing us to park blocks away from our homes!
- In small and medium American cities, apartment dwellers have between 1.1 and 1.3 vehicles per unit.
- If that holds true here, a 32-unit apartment could have as many as 42 cars, or as few as 35.
- Where good public transit or walkability exists, the numbers are lower.
- With 57 parking stalls there would be at least 15 spare spots – which really is a waste of 3500 square feet that could be trees, landscaping, a play area, or a great community patio.
Loss of Privacy
Are the apartment neighbours going to spy on us? We assume they’ve got nothing better to do, and let’s face it – we’re so interesting.
- Reality check: In most homes, we have windows that allow us to look onto the neighbours’ yards, or even into their homes.
- How much time do you spend in a day, week, or month, looking at what your neighbours are up to? If you notice them at all it’s likely only cursory.
- Good neighbours are our protection, not spies or voyeurs.
Loss of Trees
This is a valid concern, especially if the trees that are at risk of being destroyed belong to you. When they don’t, you must acknowledge this fact and work towards the best compromise.
- Developers and builders are often aware that trees are desirable and valuable.
- Cities and communities can help by laying out expectations in development agreements, that set out measures for protecting property-line trees.
- Most developers are open to fair solutions and will amend plans or add plantings to replace lost trees.
Shading of Neighbour Yards
A three-storey apartment is going to shade my whole backyard! I won’t be able to enjoy my yard anymore.
Let’s look at that:
- Like many folks within the original Steinbach mile, your lot is quite big compared to most urban yards.
- Along Home Street, site of a recent re-zoning for multi-family, many yards are 150’ deep by 60’ wide.
- Spring, summer, and fall, are when most people make significant use of their yards, with most gardening and BBQ action happening between May and September
- A shading study on a potential 47’ high 32-unit apartment on Home Street with the minimum 3’ side yard setback, shows that shade on a June or July day will cover about 30% of a neighbouring yard by around 4:30pm. Which means that 70% of the yard will still be in the sun.
- As seasons change and depending on your yard dimensions the shading effect will also change, but it will never eclipse a full backyard. You may want to relocate your vegetable garden to ensure more sun, but you’ll be okay.
Character of Neighbourhood
This objection is at the heart of much of the NIMBY motivation. How can anyone do an infill development, especially a multi-family building, without affecting the character of the neighbourhood? And what do we mean by character?
- Why is it so important that buildings all look alike? Is that the real lifeblood of a neighbourhood? Or do people (in all their variety) make a neighbourhood a lovely place to live?
- Keeping “neighbourhood character” unchanged is often a not-too-subtle form of ‘othering’ (fear of people who aren’t like us).
- These ‘other’ people who want a nice neighbourhood to live in, are surprisingly like you and me, or in other words: good people and neighbours.
- An in-person tour of a neighbourhood can help us better understand “character”. Homes built 60-80 years ago are challenging to keep repaired. This rough-looking home still has original windows, the next yard over has pallets as a fence, that home’s siding needs paint, and across the street the yard is overgrown. Is this the character we want to preserve? Or is this a neighbourhood ready for renewal?
Noise
In Canada, we spend upwards of 85% of our lives indoors. Apartment dwellers are even more likely to remain out of sight and sound.
- And should a tenant make a lot of noise in their unit or on their balcony, it’s the people in the adjacent units that will get them to stop, because they also value quiet, just like you.
- Car doors, car alarms, late night coming and going are an issue in every downtown and are not specific to multi-family buildings
- Underground parking reduces car related noise.
Crime
This objection sounds a little desperate. I heard it raised in relation to a luxury apartment recently, with the concern that tenants paying top rent, would spend their nights prowling the neighbourhood selling drugs and starting gangs.
- Anyone who uses this obvious red herring, must back it up with evidence.
- Full of “othering” intent and false stereotypes.
- When criminal activity does occur in our community, we don’t look to the building to explain why it happened, we ask the person who caused the offence or harm.
- Let’s keep it that way.
Construction Issues (damage to our properties, disruption to our lives)
All the problems that could happen have one or more interested parties to address them: engineers, building authorities, developers, building contractors, and insurance companies.
- The best prevention is communication.
- Ask the developer to meet with neighbours to explain how they will mitigate noise, traffic disruption, damage to trees, parking and any other issue related to the project.
- There’s a role here for cities too, setting standards for how infill development is carried out, and the duty of developers to engage in sincere mitigation measures.
Light Pollution
This is a legitimate issue in urban centers where outdoor lighting is unregulated (Most towns and cities in Canada).
- LED lights are bright and cheap
- Installers need more training to understand the implications of poorly directed lighting on the health of humans and the environment.
- “Dark Sky” fixtures direct more of their light towards the ground while avoiding light spill to non-target areas.
- Ask an infill developer to specify Dark Sky fixtures. The difference in cost is minimal and the fixtures tend to be better quality and easier to service.
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