Mill Road Depot redevelopment

The Cambridge Council Depot on Mill Road is being relocated and the site redevelopped for housing. This has been on the cards since 2014, when the Local Plan idenified the site as suitable for housing. After a consultation exercise, the council approved a Planning and Development Brief, but also set up the Cambridge Investment Partnership, a jount venture with Hills to undertake the development. After further consultation, the CIP have developped a proposal, which I feel is significantly flawed.

In general, the proposals offered by the CIP are not in keeping with the Mill Road Depot Supplementary Planning Document adopted by the City Council in March 2017, and have not taken into account the views of local residents expressed at previous meetings about the site.

In particular, I have concerns about issues relating to:
Density
Urban Grain
Open Space and Gardens
Community facilities and additionality
“Affordable” housing and alternative tenures.

1.Density

The CIP proposals are an overdevelopment of the site.

The SPD states that the site is suitable for 167 dwellings at a density of 62 dph. This is already more than the housing density of the surrounding area. (At the consultation meetings with Allies and Morrison it was stated that the local density was about 50 dph.) The current CIP proposal has increased the number of homes to 187. However the density is even greater due to three changes to the scheme as outlined in the SPD

a) The site outlined in the SPD includes the Hooper Street garages, which have since been removed from the proposals. This reduction in the site area means that the number of dwellings should also be reduced.

b) The CIP outline also excludes the site of the old library building.

c) The proposals now include a YMCA hostel for up to 140 single people. With an average home occupancy in Cambridge of 2.5 people per dwelling this creates an additional 56 equivalent dwellings on the reduced-size site, bringing the total number of equivalent dwellings up to 243.. However, it might be more sensible to say that the land occupied by the hostel is removed from the area calculation for the site.

An alternative way of addressing this question is to remove the combined area of the garages and the YMCA hostel from the calculations. At a combined area of about 0.41 Ha removing them reduces the development area to 2.29 Ha. At 62 dph this would suggest that the proposals should have only 142 new dwellings.

The CIP proposals exceed this by over 30%

2. Urban Grain

The SPD says that the development should reflect the local context and that building heights should be compatible with the local surroundings. It is clear that the layout of the CIP proposals bears no relation to the surrounding neighbourhood. In particular:

a) Two North-south streets have been squeezed into the site with a distance between them of less than 50m This does not reflect the local street layout of St Matthews. For comparison the distance between Sturton Street and Ainsworth Street is about 90metres while the average distance between streets in St. Matthews is 77m.

b) The building heights are almost twice those of the houses in the surrounding streets. The SPD suggests that 4 storeys may be acceptable for apartment blocks and 5 storeys adjacent to the railway. The CIP proposal has 5 storey blocks extending 40m into the site from the railway perimeter. Given the proposed ‘grain’ of the site, this can hardly be seen as the ‘edge’ of the site.

3. Open Space and Gardens

While there is more open space proposed that the minimum suggested by the SPD and in fact required by the Local Plan, we might still hope that a City Council lead development might attempt to be an exemplar for the provision of open space.

In particular the high housing density of the CIP proposal seems to have achieved at the expense of any garden space for the houses. In a development where family houses seem to be restricted to ‘yards’ no more than 12 metres length, it should be essential to provide sufficient open space for the new occupants.

4) Community facilities and additionality

The proposals for community facilities are grossly inadequate and do not reflect the SPD.

a) The SPD assumes that the development will provide an opportunity to provide community facilities for both the new residents and the existing local community. The proposal to ask the YMCA to provide community facilities on the site is at the cost of losing the current facilities on Gonville Place. The figures provided to the consultation of 100m2 of community space shows no increase in provision, as this merely matches the existing space on Gonville Place which will be lost under the proposed scheme.

b) The time-line in CIP proposals show that the planning application for the YMCA development, including the community facilities, will not be submitted for planning until after the CIP planning application for rest of the site. It is not acceptable for the CIP to make a planning application based on a promise of provision by a third party in a later application and development. Indeed, the St. Matthews community has seen the folly of this over repeated schemes at the old Howard Mallet Community Centre site.

5) “Affordable” housing and alternative tenures.

The suggested proportion of ‘affordable housing’ is disappointing. The SPD’s references to supporting alternative forms of tenure such as co-operatives have been ignored.

a) The CIP proposals suggest that 50% of the housing will be “affordable”. While this exceeds the SPD, it is a disappointing proposal for land which is already in the City Council’s ownership. If the Council expects at least 40% of affordable housing on land sold for development, the CIP should be proposing considerably more affordable housing on this site, which is land already owned by the Council.

b) The SPD refers to co-operative tenures and in the past the council has shown an interest in supporting alternative forms tenure, such as the Housing Co-operative and the K1 Co-housing project. There is also research from organisations such as the New Economics Foundation to show that alternative approaches to land ownership, such as Community Land Trusts, can enable land value to be retained by the community and house prices to be both affordable and resistant to market pressures. However, there is no mention of these issues in the CIP proposals.

c) The proposals do not describe or discuss the financial model for the development or make any case for limiting the scope of affordable housing and options for alternative tenures and ownership models. Only if this information is provided can the local community and the planning department evaluate the justifications for departing from the SPD or for failing to provide an exemplary scheme for the city.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6s6cnqolxbpwsf8/Response%20to%20CIP%20Mill%20Road%20Depot%20proposals.pdf?dl=0