How Dieppe Grew To Be A Bustling Community Of 25,000 People
DIEPPE – For Harold Daley, the president of TriQuest Investment, the increasing number of people moving into Dieppe, low vacancy rates in the region and low cost of borrowing signal a good time to build apartments.
TriQuest currently has several properties in the Greater Moncton Area, including two in Dieppe.
Promenade Neuf, a higher-end mixed-use property ($1,200/month for a one bedroom to $2,000/month for a three-bedroom) on the riverfront downtown, targets seniors looking to downsize and young professionals who want larger higher-end apartments.
TriQuest is also developing a 60-unit apartment building on Lafayette St. that’s “more affordable,” with unit sizes that are average for the market, Daley said.
“We continue to look for opportunities in Dieppe,” Daley said. “We have a couple of sites that we’re continuing to study, and it’s mainly because of the growth in that market and what we feel is to be the continued growth.”
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Dieppe has seen its population grow steadily in the last 25 years, from 10,650 in 1991 to 25,384 in the most recent census year of 2016.
Mayor Yvon Lapierre served in various capacities in the City Council on and off since 1986. At that time, the population was just between 7,000 and 8,000. He suspects that since 2016, the population has grown to surpass 27,000.
“It’s been phenomenal growth,” he said.
In turn, development in the city has been booming. As of November last year, the city posted nearly $97-million in building permits, almost $40-million more than the same time a year prior. That surpassed its previous record of $90.1-million in 2016. The bulk of 2019’s permits were for residential buildings.
Lapierre said the city’s steady growth goes back all the way to the early 2000s. But the record-breaking figures from 2019 is “special,” he said, noting that last year also included a permit for the intergenerational health hub UNIPlex, which is partly funded by residents themselves.
He said one of the major factors for growth has been “the fact that Dieppe is a Francophone community.” That has attracted Francophones from New Brunswick’s rural areas over the years, mostly from the north, as well as Francophiles.
It also makes Dieppe central to hosting Francophone cultural events. For example, last year, it was among the cities that hosted the Congres Mondial Acadien. It also hosted around 20,000 people for the traditional Tintamarre parade on Acadian Day.
Expansion Dieppe executive director Louis Godbout said while a lot of the population growth traditionally came from movement from other parts of Francophone New Brunswick, the trend changed in the past five years as the city receives more newcomers from other parts of Canada and abroad.
“One thing that’s quite interesting is…we’ve always kept about the same ratio of Francophones and Anglophones. That means we’ve also had a good growth on the Anglophone side also,” he said.
Godbout says more multi-residential development are also popping up in the last five-to-10 years as Baby Boomers downsize, and newcomers who are used to living in large cities “don’t see a need for a single-family dwelling to raise a family.”
“There is a paradigm shift into the housing needs, therefore the multi-residential offering should now be shifting also to include middle range pricing and accommodations for young families,” he said.
Importantly, development happened hand-in-hand with community building, Lapierre and Godbout said.
As office buildings and hotels pop up over the years, so did a Farmers Market downtown, the Rotary St. Anselme Park, and the Dieppe Arts and Culture Centre next to City Hall, among others.
The latest community space in the making is the UNIPlex, an intergenerational hub for health and wellness, as well as business and cultural events. Financed partly by fundraising efforts led by a group of volunteers under the name GoDieppe, the hub is set to open later this year.
“It’s never one single thing. It’s a build up and it attracts people and people attract people,” Lapierre said. “It’s a continuity of community-minded environment and atmosphere that we’re trying to create that hopefully will be part of the Dieppe history for a long time.”
“We try to plan for the long term, and when we see what’s taken place since the year 2000, we’re happy with our success but we’re not going to sit on our laurels and say it happens all by itself…we have to continue to prompt action,” Lapierre added.
Benefits Of Long-Term Planning And Strategic Location
Godbout said the city is not afraid to invest, but it has to be done “in a very sensible and measured fashion.”
“Economic development is on a very long term,” Godbout said, noting strategic plans and master plans for each sector of focus have been developed going back as long as 1993, but updated every five years or so.
“These materials are guiding the decisions that are made within city hall on a daily basis, and it’s driving us to a cohesive goal for the long term as what we have defined in the master plan, what was dreamed up when we did the consultation with our citizens and within city hall,” he said. “You gotta dream and stay on track.”
Expansion Dieppe’s strategic plan focuses on three things: increasing downtown density with a balanced mix of commercial, community and residential; expanding the industrial park near the airport; and further developing the Dieppe Blvd. area which includes the business and tech zone of the industrial park.
Godbout said commercial and industrial developments are key to balance out residential and community developments, especially as single-family homes get more services than the property taxes they pay on average.
The city’s strategic location in Southeastern New Brunswick has helped its case with businesses, he said.
At one end of the city is the Greater Moncton Romeo Leblanc International Airport, the biggest and busiest airport in the province. On another end is CF Champlain, Greater Moncton’s only large mall and the biggest one in the province. In January 2019, TD Bank opened its finance hub and contact centre for over 1,000 employees at the mall, where Sears used to be.
Dieppe is also home to an industrial park with approximately 250 companies. In fact, Expansion Dieppe originated from Dieppe Industrial Park Ltd., an organization created in the 1970s to grow the park. That body was later renamed as its focus turned to the creation of a new downtown and a new city hall. It got its current name in 2013.
“We gained a position over the last couple of decades and we’re benefiting from the entrepreneurs that are investing privately their money in our city,” Godbout said.
Lapierre says the city’s campaign to increase downtown density, which includes adding a skating rink, events, a pop-up beer garden and summer games at Place 1604, also helped.
Tax-based incentives were put in place for downtown development for things like underground parking or the number of storeys in a building, among other things, said Godbout. That’s something TriQuest has benefited from.
“We think these tax-based incentives are key for continued development in the downtown area,” Daley said.
Godbout says the master plan for downtown, which is updated regularly, was developed by his predecessors in the early 2000s. That included the acquisition of lands for multi-residential offerings just a short walk away from the city hall.
Now, Dieppe is working on the second phase of the plan, which includes buying up NB Housing units in Îlot Gauvin to allow for resale and new multi-residential development. For the families and individuals living in those units, the city finds homes in other areas in the city that meets NB Housing’s criteria and upgrades them to today’s specs. It then helps those families and individuals move.
Godbout said the city, Expansion Dieppe and NB Housing developed the “win-win” scenario years ago. The strategy is in line with NB Housing’s aim to have the properties spread around the municipality.
“They don’t want to have them all together in one neighbourhood side by side…We’ve been acquiring a couple of properties every year as we can afford it,” Godbout said, adding the funds for this has been earmarked in the municipal budget.
“On the other side, as we’re doing developments, [the province] gets additional property taxes from the higher assessment value because then we have private sector coming in with commercial projects with much higher density.”
In the past 15 years or so, the assessment value in Dieppe’s downtown – City Hall, Place 1604 and other developments on the streets surrounding that like Champlain, Acadie, Du Marche and Gauvin – has increased about 12 fold to $55-million, Godbout said. That’s excluding any new development coming with the second phase of the plan.
For Daley, Dieppe has been doing a lot of things right. But although he understands that Dieppe is a growing market and has a lot of infrastructure to put in place, he said property taxes could be lowered.
“We understand why they’re high but at some point in order to continue the growth, we’re going to have to figure out a way to stabilize the property taxes in the market,” he said.