It seems people are only now realising the new Loft Lines waterfront apartments in Belfast will block the view of the Titanic visitor centre. The apartments have been in Titanic Quarter’s master-plan from the outset almost 20 years ago, a decade before the centre was built.
More newsworthy is that the 800 apartments will have almost no residents’ parking, on or off site – and a great deal of planning has gone into this as well.
Getting permission to build housing without parking requires negotiation with planners and councillors. The rules usually require around one and a half parking spaces per unit of accommodation, even in city centres. Student accommodation is a rare exception, which is how so much of it has recently been packed into the middle of Belfast. Objectors who say the student blocks should have been family homes do not always appreciate how much the presumption of the family car makes this unviable.
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A small number of apartment buildings in Belfast have been constructed without on-site parking. To obtain permission, developers had to provide a mix of off-site parking, car club membership and free bus passes for residents.
Negotiations for the £175 million Loft Lines project have been in a different league. Instead of the 1,070 parking spaces it should have under the rules, it will have 107. A fifth will be for blue badge holders and just nine for car-sharing, leaving 81 standard spaces for approximately 1,500 residents, most of whom will presumably be working adults or well-off retirees. The 38 on-street spaces are intended for delivery vehicles.
The first thought this provokes is that people will just dump their cars in surrounding areas. However, they will be uniquely unable to do so in Titanic Quarter as the harbour estate has its own strict by-laws against parking and its own Harbour Police empowered to enforce them. Belfast City Council planners noted this approvingly – a rebuke to useless enforcement everywhere else by the Department for Infrastructure and the PSNI.
So most Loft Lines residents will genuinely have to attempt car-free living.
The over-arching approach to help them is the development’s ‘build-to-rent’ model. There will be no owner-occupiers or individual landlords in the three-block complex. One block of 150 units will offer social and market-discount tenancies through housing associations. Everything else will be owned and managed by one professional landlord, working together with the housing associations to the run the entire site. This makes car-free planning easier and frankly more credible. It will not be difficult to establish where the fault lies for any unmet commitments.
A large part of the plan involves providing on-site facilities to minimise how many journeys residents need to make. Commercial units will be built although there is no guarantee they will be filled. The private blocks will have gyms, crèches and communal workspaces, with promises of shops and bars – self-contained living is key to build-to-rent’s appeal.
Residents in all three blocks will benefit from £400,000 for an enhanced Glider service and free travel cards, plus a separate green travel fund financed for at least five years for car club membership, Belfast Bikes membership and bicycle purchase. A full-time ‘Travel Plan Coordinator’ will be based on-site.
The whole complex will have space for a bicycle in each apartment, 480 further bicycle parking spaces, bicycle repair and cleaning stations, e-bike chargers, a new Belfast Bikes dock, taxi phones and even “a pool of umbrellas”.
Walking is a major element of the proposal: Loft Lines is a 15-minute walk from the city centre and a 30-minute walk from every imaginable amenity.
A condition of approval is that developers must submit a full travel plan before the complex is occupied, to be reviewed annually for five years then again in years eight, 11 and 15.
Is this experiment going to work? Obviously, it is possible to live in Belfast without a car – 40 per cent of the city’s households have no access to private transport. Whether it can be an aspirational lifestyle is another matter.
Loft Lines will be expensive and car-free living will be marketed as one of its advantages. Disadvantages are not hard to foresee. Where do self-employed residents keep a work vehicle, for example? Perhaps the vision will be quickly subverted by anti-social parking or an enterprising business offering cheap long-term parking nearby.
But succeed or fail, Loft Lines is an unusually serious and intriguing effort to put sustainable transport policy in Northern Ireland to the test.
