Urban planning A Helsinki man could get almost a million euros by condemning his home to be demolished – A rare opportunity for a few to make residents of a residential area nervous

Jami Lindhin the house passes by the daytime past the train every few minutes. The detached house, built in the late 1990s, is located right next to the Park’s station, but in the future there may be an apartment building on its site.

Lindh, like five other residents of the area, has applied for a plan change for his detached house plot. If the formula is changed, Lindh will sell its plots to the construction company Toivo Group, which is planning to build two blocks of flats on the plots.

The background is Helsinki’s efforts to intensify construction, especially along good transport connections. In the general plan made in 2016, the blocks of the Park’s station have been marked as a nearby city center, which enables the construction of apartment buildings.

It would make sense to sell the land to Lindh.

“Our family situation is such that there will be helplessly too much space in this house in a few years. Even though the house is not terribly old, it still has its own worries, and big repairs should be made if you want to live longer here. ”

Plot according to Lindh, the sale is likely to be better than the sale of a house alone. The exact sale price is not yet even known, as it will be affected by how much building rights will be granted if the plan change goes through.

“Yes, it’s probably less than a million left,” Lindh estimates.

Overall, Lindh considers the zoning project for the Park Station area to be smart. The plots are located right next to the train station, and a new school and kindergarten building has just been completed in the adjacent Suuntimopuisto.

“Building around the finished infrastructure is the most sustainable development that can be done now. Even more should be built in such places. ”

Formula change is looking for six owners of a detached house plot, but a city architect Joakim Kettusen according to the neighborhood, several property owners have also expressed interest in the plan change.

According to Kettunen, the apartment buildings designed for the plots will be “unusual”. This means that the houses consist of parts of different heights.

The highest parts would be six-story and the lowest three-story. According to Kettunen, those parts of apartment buildings that are directly adjacent to detached houses could be only one floor higher than detached houses. That is, if a detached house is two-storey, the part of the apartment building directly next to it would be three-storey.

The highest, six-storey sections would be located directly next to the station pier on Simakuja and Raidekuja.

In the park however, the plans worry many.

When a city plans a change in formula, it almost invariably arouses opposition from some variety in the area. According to Kettunen, however, there has been even more feedback than usual about the park.

Chairman of the Park Club Maija-Liisa Pennanen according to many residents of the area consider the construction of apartment buildings in the area of ​​detached houses a very bad thing.

“People have moved to the Park specifically to live in a spacious place and to see another detached house from the window, not a wall of several meters.”

Pennasen According to the residents, Helsinki’s urban planning is bumpy. He says that several park residents have wondered why the city has banned the construction of garages in the yard, for example, and that apartment buildings are clearly being planned that stand out from the housing stock.

“The city has been very careful to ensure that the area has a unified look. How now does one or two urban planning change so radically, ”Pennanen wonders.

Although the changes made possible by the general plan have been known to the residents of the area, the experience is still, according to Pennanen, that the possible apartment buildings were already mentioned during the project. Residents do not have a complete picture of the development of the area, Pennanen says.

“It would have been desirable for the city to have been informed at the time the matter was first initiated.”

No worries However, according to Joakim Kettunen, there are no plans to start building large-scale apartment buildings in the Park. In the general plan, the plot efficiency of the park is marked almost everywhere as 0.4, which means that there may be detached houses, terraced houses and detached houses in the area.

According to Kettunen, the current plans concern two nearby blocks of the station: the area between Suuntimopuisto and Puistolantanhua Street and the Raidepolku and railway line.

“We have tentatively thought that the zoning work applies to these two nearby neighborhoods of the station. There are no plans to start expanding this terribly. ”

According to Kettunen, the residents’ wish to see the overall plans for the area more clearly has been heard. According to Kettunen, planning principles are being prepared for the development of the whole of the park and Tapulikaupunki, and they will be brought to the residents to see now in the spring.

“There has been a lot of feedback that more comprehensive planning should be done in the area rather than zoning individual plots. It would certainly have been worthwhile to make the design principles available for feedback first, as the project has caused a lot of confusion. ”

Kettunen emphasizes that the various construction projects are directly affected by the layout of the area.

The master plan allows for the construction of new housing in an existing urban structure. This type of construction is also in line with the city’s current strategy. In addition, station areas have been developed in Helsinki in recent years, which now also applies to the Park.

Instead, if a resident of a detached house applies for a building permit for a garage, for example, the application may fall into the current town plan. Thus, different existing formulas allow for different buildings, even if the formula areas are located close to each other.

This is because building permits are interpreted as a town plan, not a general plan that provides a framework for more detailed planning.

“But the city can always be contacted if the town plan could be appealed,” says Kettunen.