April 2017 | Business View Magazine

104 105 in a high-density reality and using public transit, things of that nature.We have a small cohort of those, but Mount Pearl was designed to be a suburban community.” Residential areas mainly consist of single, detached bungalows and stand-alone frame housing built primarily for families. Though, that is changing with a reduction in young families, and an older citizenry looking for a different lifestyle in condos and apartments with serviced facilities. Simms acknowledges, “The market is start- ing to demand more of that type of housing from us. A few years back, we had 324 condo units under development in the city at one time. That’s an unusual number for us, when n East Port Properties www.eastportproperties.ca Innovation doesn’t happen without teamwork. Neither do firsts. Beclin, in Mount Pearl, is the first business park in Newfoundland and Labrador to be LEED® Certified. That’s a whole lot of green thinking, including natural lighting, high insulation values, managed energy, and recycled materials. Cheers to all for making this happen.  Preferred vendor Mount Pearl, Newfoundland we’re used to having hundreds of single and semi-detached homes being built. Now the challenge is: How do we accommodate two empty-nesters in a five-bedroom house that they don’t want to maintain any more? How do we find a way for them to stay in the city, and have their home, hopefully, sold to a young family that it was ideally built for? We’re working on that crunch of afford- able seniors’ accommodations now. Another area of concern is young families moving to newer devel- oped communities like Paradise.” Mount Pearl’s boundaries are finite, and will eventually become a problem for expanding geographi- cally. Simms notes,“We can expand vertically, but we believe at the anticipated pace of growth in our region, there is more than a decade of build-out to occur before you’d say,‘Well, shut the door, this city is full.’Neighborhood redevelopment needs to be addressed here, as in every community. For example: A large thoroughfare at the heart of our city, Commonwealth Avenue, was historically residential land, and now very much commercial. It’s zoned commercial/residential mix; but is becoming strictly com-