Anderson C-Train plan riles residents

Plans to redevelop Anderson C-Train station in southwest Calgary has some residents worried the mix of high-density housing, greenspace and shoppingwould drastically change their community.

The city plans to build "transit-oriented development" in a handful of neighbourhoods with C-Train stations. In a bid to curb urban sprawl, planners envision high density housing, mixed commercial use and plenty of green space.

"Calgarians, in what we've heard, they do want that. They don't want to see us continually to grow out," said Karen Holz, a spokeswoman for Plan It Calgary, which recently held an urban planning forum that attract 250 participants.

But that concept isn't sitting well with someresidents living near the Anderson C-Train station who are concernednew developmentwill create more traffic and parking congestion.

The Willowridge Community Association is telling residents the plan calls for more than 24 highrises in and around the station.

Past president Greg Humphreys said the neighbourhood willfight the plan because it would drasticallyalter a community that has taken decades to build.

Area resident Nick Koznuik said younger people will have to deal with the fallout from the proposed changes.

"I still say you got enough land around without making more congestion," he said.

Debbie Chin, who sometimes parks at the Anderson station to take the C-Train, said she is worried about the proposal because it's already hard enough to find a spot in the city's park-and-ride lots.

Good planning, says city

The debate over "transit-oriented development" cropped up first in the northwest community of Brentwood, where the city is planning to build enough high-density housing to add 6,000 people to the neighbourhood.

The proposal has galvanized the community, which held a public meeting earlier this month that attracted about 150 residents, many concerned about the impact of such growth.

But city planners said the goal is to plan for changes, rather than recreate another Heritage Park C-Train station where the London condo development happened without proper planning in place.

"Certainly we know from all of the population projections, and the demand for higher density housing in the city, that these are plans that are going to occur over a very long period of time," said Mary Axworthy, director of land use planning for the city.

Axworthy said an example of good planning is the northeast community of Bridgeland.

"We worked hard to make sure that there's a good transition between the existing single and two-family areas in Bridgeland with two-, three-, four-storey development adjacent to theneighbourhood and then working out more towards the LRT station where the higher density towers might be."

The city is also looking at high-density development around Banff Trail, Lions Park,and Canyon Meadows. A plan for Chinook station was approved in June.