Medical centre backers want commercial zone retained

Press, 3 June 1982, Page 10

Medical centre backers want commercial zone retained

A proposed medical centre development in Armagh Street, which has permission to go ahead, wants Christchurch City Council assurances that future uses of the site can be varied.

Supporters of a special Residential 5A zone designation for the site, now zoned Commercial 3, want council assurances that a decision on the zoning question will not be a repeat of what they say are past commercial intrusions into the inner city west area.

At a planning hearing this week objectors to the council's plan for a Residential 5A zone over the property at 58 Armagh Street said that the site was not really suitable for residential development.

Before Air New Zealand, the site’s former owner, won an appeal decision in 1974, as the National Airways Corporation, the property was in a residential zone.

After the appeal the zoning on the site, just east of Cranmer Square, ■ was changed to commercial. Proposed developers of the $470,000 medical centre said that they already had a council approved building

permit for the two-storey building. However, it would continue only with non-con-forming existing-use rights under a zone change to residential. There might be some question about the project's proceeding if the council were successful in its proposal for a zone change.

After Air New Zealand decided to close its inner-city freight depot, the site, now used for parking, was put up for sale. It was purchased by a Curtis family trust soon after the move for the return to residential zoning was first discussed in public. Mr E. B. Curtis, an optometrist and a managing director of the Corneal Lens Corporation, a manufacturer of contact lenses, would shift from 3 Armagh Court into the new building — along with his associates and the lens-manufacturing business — if the project went ahead. There would also be space in the building for independent medical practices. Mr Curtis said that the building would be of considerable benefit to the area, and would offer a service unique to Christchurch. With its well designed . building and landscaping the project

would provide a buffer between the existing Residential 5A zone and inner-city commercial uses. However, Mr Curtis said that a residential zone over the project could ■ severely limit any future changes of use for the medical centre building. Members of Inner City Operation Neighbourhood (I.C.O.N.),.support the change back to a residential zone. They said that any future inappropriate . commercial use on the site could threaten the character of Cramner Square. The Rev J. H. Roberts said that the site, at 58 Armagh Street, was “a classic example" of a lack of zone stability allowing continued erosion of residential neighbourhoods.

Having the medical centre in the Residential 5A zone would protect the site for the future. “There are some attractive features about the building but residential use would be better,” said Mr Roberts. Mrs Kathleen Hollobon, who lives next to the site in an old house formerly owned by her father, said that it had been inappropriate for Air New Zealand to “cash in” on the 1974 appeal decision favouring its commercial zone when later selling the site to the trust. The City Planner, Mr W. T. Williams, said that the Town and Country Planning Appeal Board, now the Planning Tribunal, had held that Air New Zealand’s activities

were in the national interest, and that its activities on the site should be protected by appropriate zoning. It had been in the public interest to protect the future expansion of the now-closed freight terminal.

Mrs Hollobon said that the national interest argument did not apply to the medical centre project.

Dr J. L. Cameron said that 1.C.0.N. had sought to have residential zoning extended east to the Returned Services’ Association building.

Sites across the street, at 55 and 57 Armagh Street, which had once been investigated by the trust for a possible medical centre project, were now being redeveloped as residential units.

Dr Cameron said that the objectors' argument that no new residential development was being done on vacant sites in the area did not stand up. “In my view, there will be no new’ development until redevelopment stops in existing housing stock,” he said. “It is a matter of economics.”

New town houses will be part of the nearby old Normal School conversion into residential units.

The hearing panel reserved its decision. Sir Terence McCombs, the panel’s chairman said that the inner-city residential area had been “slowly chiselled away” over the years by decisions that allowed areas of commercial use west of the Avon River.