City gets $225K to study southeast corner as possible new neighbourhood

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Fredericton will use $225,000 from the province to determine whether a new neighbourhood should be added to its growth strategy, as the city contends with a rapidly growing population.

The city’s growth strategy currently calls for four new neighbourhoods to focus housing development, including one at Brookside Drive, in the city’s northeast, at Bishop-Hanwell-High Pointe, and in uptown on Knowledge Park Drive.

According to city planning director Ken Forrest, each of those is expected to accommodate 5,000 to 6,000 new residents over 25 years.

However, the uptown neighbourhood has lagged behind the others in producing new housing, attracting no development so far. That’s because the growth strategy calls for development of wooded land across from the Grant Harvey Centre that currently belongs to the University of New Brunswick, Forrest said.

Forrest and Coun. Jason LeJeune, who chairs economic vitality committee, declined to say whether UNB had indicated a reason for not pursuing the housing development plan to date.

“It was ideated through the growth strategy, but with any process like that you’ve got to have two partners that see something being mutually beneficial,” LeJeune said, speaking with reporters on Monday. “I can’t talk to UNB’s side of this … we see it as a viable area, but we don’t own the land.”

“Our challenge is, we’re dealing with a tremendous amount of growth and on the south side of the river we only have one new neighbourhood functioning to accommodate that growth,” Forrest said. “So it gets to a point where, how much longer can we wait for that to light up, or do we look at another option?”

To that end, at its Monday meeting council voted in favour of accepting $225,000 from the province’s Regional Development Corporation to fund a study of the potential new neighbourhood in the Doak Road area, off Alison Boulevard, south of the Fredericton Co-op.

LeJeune and Forrest said that study, which will involve external consultants, would help define the geographical area of the neighbourhood, the costs of servicing it, and the return on investment over time.

The land identified by staff is much larger than the Knowledge Park-area growth node, but that’s because the city is looking to select a smaller section within it to develop, Forrest said.

“That requires a fair bit of planning and engineering analysis, so we can ultimately come back to council with a realistic sense of, if we wanted to relocate the growth node, here are the capital investments that would be required to accomplish that task,” Forrest said.

The planning director said the goal is to complete that study during 2024.

Even if council sees that neighbourhood as a viable option, LeJeune said, pursuing it would mean updating the municipal plan – a process that would require “significant” public consultation to finalize.

Even if that is the outcome of the study, he added, that doesn’t mean the city won’t also look to develop the UNB land in future.

“We’re not necessarily considering a switch. It may be an augmentation,” LeJeune said. “We don’t necessarily have to close out the existing growth node to augment it with another growth node at the Doak Road … that would be a decision of council in the future.”

LeJeune said the Doak Road area is attractive to council for the nearby amenities.

“We’ve got great proximity to transportation, to commercial districts, to highway if people need to commute, we have really close links to highways, recreational facilities like the Grant Harvey area and recreational facilities like the woodlot, actually,” the councillor said.

Long-term plans set out by UNB call for sections of the woodlot to be preserved alongside development, Forrest said, noting its current recreational traffic.

“(UNB) did a plan for the woodlot a number of years ago that talked about allowing development on small portions of the woodlot and then conserving other portions,” he said. “We’re not the landowner, but I think it has always been the intention that significant land would be preserved within the woodlot.”