A good place to develop? Teacher plans a neighborhood in Peterborough
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
PETER J. CLEARY
Keene Sentinel Staff
PETERBOROUGH — Peterborough’s downtown could be home to new affordable housing if a town resident has her way.
Ivy Vann is planning to put a new road and high-density residential area on 22 acres she owns off High Street.
“I want to create a new street which will look just like the rest of that part of Peterborough,” she said. Generally, she knows she’d like to build houses that are affordable to schoolteachers and nurses, she said.
But when it comes to specifics, she’s turning to her neighbors for a little help.
Vann has scheduled a four-day public design workshop, called a charrette, for next week. A charrette combines work sessions by a professional design team with public meetings, according to the National Charrette Institute.
Her plans for houses go well with the town’s master plan, which has a goal of building toward the center of town to avoid sprawl, said Peterborough Planning Board Chairman George A. Sterling. The new development is within walking distance to downtown.
“It looks like a perfect fit,” Sterling said, adding that the master plan suggests putting houses on Vann’s land.
Vann bought the land to build just one house with her husband. But as they thought about what to do with the land near downtown, she said, they decided they didn’t want to build in a way that would limit future development.
Vann said she doesn’t have any experience as a developer.
“I’ve never done it before in my life,” she said. “I’m just a schoolteacher with a vision of truth and beauty.”
In a charrette, the design team works all day to come up with initial ideas. People then comment on it at a public meeting, and the team uses those comments to guide its work the next day.
It’s like taking the idea that two heads are better than one, and multiplying it many times over, Sterling said.
And interactions among the design team, town officials and neighbors will help narrow down what will go on the land, Vann said.
When the team arrives in Peterborough next week, Vann said, it will be starting with just a base map of the land showing topography, wetlands and zoning regulations. Team members have already toured other towns, including Keene, Hancock and Jaffrey, to get a sense of the region’s architecture.
Vann said she’s hoping the best design will come out of the charrette, and she’s not planning on vetoing any ideas other than the truly outlandish.
She’s also not planning to build ugly houses, she said.
“I don’t want to build something that looks like you shook it out of a box from Houses R Us,” she said. She’d like to use as many environmentally friendly materials and design practices as possible.
She’s not sure how many houses she’ll put on her 22 acres, which is zoned to allow four houses per acre. In high-density development, some of the land must also be set aside as conservation land, Sterling said.
The project is being privately financed, and Vann said she’s not planning to build any houses until they have buyers.
She’s hoping to go before the planning board this fall and may start building next year, though she said she’s not expecting to quickly build out all of the land.
Public meetings for the four-day charrette will be held at the Peterborough Historical Society on Thursday, Sept. 14, Friday, Sept. 15 and Sunday, Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. On, Saturday, Sept. 16, the design team will have an open house at 6 p.m.