There’s a model, complete with topographical features, trees, roads and miniature houses, all clustered together, that Ivy Vann can’t bring herself to throw away.
It was her vision for a chunk of land above the Peterborough Elementary School. The Peterborough resident brought it out at a four-day charrette in 2007 explaining the project, according to attendees. She alluded to it last month in an interview with the Ledger-Transcript.
“I could’ve bought a new Mini Cooper for the price of that model,” she said.
The prized model (a base model Mini Cooper starts at about $20,000 in 2016) now sits in her home on Summer Street, on a 20-acre property she once dreamed of placing more than 40 homes on. Dreams that, she reiterates, are pretty much over.
Now she has a new dream: changing bad zoning in Peterborough — a town that she believes has too many large houses on large lots with huge frontages and too-deep setbacks. Things that work against her model of a “better neighborhood.” Things that work against Peterborough’s master plan, which calls for new neighborhoods, she says.
Vann, who is also Peterborough’s state representative, is the chair of the Peterborough planning board (a position she’s held since 2014). In her time, a key zoning change, known as Traditional Neighborhood Overlay District I or TND I, was passed. Among other changes, TND I allowed a home to be built on a 5,000 square-foot lot instead of a half-acre or one-acre lot.
Coming May 9, Traditional Neighborhood Overlay District II (Article 2) is going before the voters. TND II expands on the area in TND I to anywhere where there is water and sewer.
Vann says her property is excluded from each district, but she’s nonetheless excited about the possibility of it passing.
“I would declare victory over bad zoning if we pass TND 2,” Vann said.
Vann arrived in Peterborough in 2006. She and her husband Hugh Beyer moved from a lonely home in Temple, following the collapse of the tech market. They were looking for a rental, but couldn’t find anything affordable in Peterborough.
“We were stone-cold broke,” Vann said.
That changed after a family member died — the Vann-Beyer family took some of the inheritance and spent it on a large lot off High Street and an abutting small property with a home off of Summer Street.
After purchasing the property, Vann walked the land with Swift Corwin, a forester and a member of the Peterborough Conservation Commission. As they walked, Swift made a suggestion, Vann said.
“(He) said, ‘Ivy, you need to build a whole neighborhood back here, this is where the houses want to be,’” Vann said.
Vann went home to tell her husband. He was less than enthused.
The next night though, at the dinner table, he brought the subject back up again.
“So I’ve been thinking about that neighborhood,” Beyer said to Vann. “I think if there were someone who had a not-too-demanding day job and a passionate interest in the built environment, that it could be her project.”
Vann graduated Harvard University in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in English. From 1984 to 1994, she worked her way up from reporter to Amherst section editor at the Milford Cabinet. She wrote a recipe column called “The Kitchen Ranger” and later published a cookbook of those recipes.
In 1994, she started worked as a nursery school teacher, then got her master’s degree in education from Antioch University in 2003.
Despite her background, Vann said she’s always been interested in planning, she said, ever since reading Christopher Alexander’s book “A Pattern Language.”
“It’s kind of a wacko, utopian manifesto, but really, really interesting. He talks about how there are patterns for things, physical things, that make people happy,” Vann said. “I read that book at an impressionable age, and I’ve been interested in those ideas for a long, long time.”
After the purchase of the High Street property in 2006, Vann started reading more and more about planning. She attended conferences and started her own company, One Little Woman. She dreamed of neighborhoods with small homes on small lots close to cafes and bodegas and enclosed squares.
“I went to Seaside, Florida for a four-day seminar on building the new traditional neighborhood and found my people,” Vann said. “I discovered that I had been a New Urbanist my whole life.”
New Urbanism is a movement promoting walkable neighborhoods, like the Vann proposed in Peterborough.
“People panic when you say urbanism because they think Manhattan,” Vann said. “Urban just means more than one house in a place.”
“People are beginning to understand that zoning affects the way we live,” said Vann, who added that she’s sticking with the planning board because “changing the zoning is hard.”
In May 2007, the zoning board approved a request from Vann for a wetlands crossing on her High Street property, which she incorporated as Larrabee Street Neighborhood. The decision allowed Vann to put a road on her property, though the board said she couldn’t connect it to Summer Street, or she’d have to restore the wetlands to their former condition.
TND I, which was passed in 2014, encompasses the Larrabee Street Neighborhood but restricts any site that lacks connection to town water and sewer. TND 2 upholds those restrictions.
The Larrabee Street Neighborhood doesn’t have water or sewer connections.
“It’s the we-hate-Ivy-Vann clause,” Vann said.
Back in 2008, Vann used the state’s less-restrictive condominium law to get approval for five small condos on her property — right before the real estate market crashed. She sunk about $175,000 into engineering and a Mini Cooper’s worth of money on that model.
Now, she’s looking for an investor who is willing to contribute about $110,000, so she can build those condos. But she’s not hopeful.
“Larrabee Street, at this point, it’s kind of a moot point,” Vann said. “Larrabee Street was the catalyst for the town to see that our zoning didn’t work for us.”
Former planning board member Leandra MacDonald, who was chair when Vann proposed her neighborhood and when Vann joined the board, said the planning board was supportive of the Larrabee Street project and felt it “had a lot of positives.”
“(Vann) is somebody who’s really got a vision — think about all the things she did to try to get the community to see it,” said MacDonald, who left the planning board in 2012 after 20 years. “Maybe she’s ahead of her time or maybe the market just wasn’t right at the time.”