Breaking ground
St. John’s developer goes green with Seven Lakes project in Nova Scotia

Eco-friendly real estate development — it’s not a term people usually associate with a sector that’s in the business of bulldozing trees and wetlands and then turning the landscape into cookie-cutter style housing units. But St. John’s-based Penney Group Inc. wants to change that perception.

This summer the developer made the fi rst 30 lots available for its Seven Lakes Development project in Porter’s Lake, Nova Scotia, located 25 minutes from downtown Halifax. The project, which is being advanced by the Penney Group and St. John’sbased NuCove Property Holdings Ltd. , is going where few developers in Atlantic Canada have gone before: employing an “open space” design concept.

Gail Penney, executive director of the Penney Group (the company is managing the project), says this concept requires developers in rural areas of the Halifax Regional Municipality to set aside a minimum 60 per cent of the land they want to develop and protect it forever. The other 40 per cent can be developed. “We knew that open space was on the books,” Penney says. “But no one had ever done it.”

Now that the Penney Group is doing it, what “open space” means at Seven Lakes is that natural land will be preserved, including wetlands, lakes, streams, mature woodlands, fl oodplains and steep slopes. Development plans include building a small commons called “Neighbourhood Greens” that will help bring communities together, a community park that will be developed into sports fi elds, and potentially a multipurpose trail. The aim is to build 634 homes. When completed, Seven Lakes will be comprised of six villages connected to one another by winding trails passing through the community.

Penney says it’s a different way of developing land, and consulting with the surrounding community helped shape the design plans. “We got involved with community members and found out what mattered to them about their community, their land and their families,” Penney says. “We talked to people and tried to fi nd out how to make this work.”

However, time will tell if this kinder, gentler design plan will become the norm or simply an outlier in Atlantic Canada real estate development.