Posted on seacoastonline.com: August 11, 2010
The attempts of city planning officials and developers of the proposed Borthwick Village to create a continuing care retirement community provision in the zoning ordinance are getting harder to support.
The project increasingly deserves the metaphor of peeling back layers of an onion.
A CCRC concept in the city is valuable. The city and region need additional housing options for our older citizens. We all know about aging baby boomers and how they will impact life in America. According to the developers, the proposed Borthwick Village could deliver significant property taxes with less demand on services than an office building. However, concerns of spot zoning were present late last year and that is more true now with the latest report that density limitations for the Borthwick Avenue site were crafted specifically with the proposal in mind.
It is hard to recall in recent or long-term history a project and a zoning amendment process handled as questionably as this. So while the concept of a CCRC deserves support, the process the city has taken up to now doesn’t.
It is hard to support a senior-living center for 400 residents when city officials determined that number as appropriate based on what the developers need to make the project financially viable. Planning officials should have looked at CCRCs around the region and nationally. This should have been transparent so the pros and cons of Borthwick Village’s proposed size could have been appropriately debated.
There is little assurance in the suggestion that density limitations currently set for the proposed Borthwick Village are comparable to the Islington Street corridor. It is hard to imagine a developer with a large tract of land could build a modern neighborhood with a density similar to that of Islington Street. It seems implausible that a hypothetical developer could build a modern Elwyn Park or any other neighborhood with similar densities. Any such plan would face widespread concerns over the impact on traffic, sprawl, school enrollments, police and fire and so on.
What would happen if a developer wanted to build a four-story apartment building for 400 residents in the way of work force housing? Would our planning officials set density limitations as equally favorable to the developer? Is there any concern the proposed density limitations could set a dangerous precedent for other housing proposals?
Why shouldn’t Borthwick Village face the same scrutiny? One answer may be the unique way this whole zoning amendment process has been handled. Some city councilors say they have difficulty separating the zoning provision from the specific project. Somewhere in this process there should have been a forceful attempt to separate the two efforts. However, setting density limitations to meet the developers’ proposal is just another fouling of the process that makes this separation nearly impossible.
The only correct thing the city can do, and what it should have done a year ago, is to develop the CCRC provision in near total separation from the Borthwick Village proposal. It should not matter if the final provision makes Borthwick Village a non-starter. The only thing that should matter is creating a CCRC provision in a way that best serves the city as a whole while allowing this sound concept in general to be possible in Portsmouth.
