Making changes to established neighbourhoods always raises some hackles
PLANS FOR THIS ROGER Moore are anything but Saintly.
No, not the British actor who played Simon Templar (The Saint) and, later, James Bond. In this case, the area around Roger and Moore streets in Waterloo, where some of the residents aren’t chuffed about plans for a large development that would change the character of their neighbourhood.
Lands currently occupied by ODC Tooling & Molds and some adjacent properties owned by the company – six single-family houses and a triplex – would be cleared in favour of a mix of townhouses, stacked townhouses and apartment buildings up to six storeys high. The proposal also features a mix of commercial and office space.
To do that, Ontario Die Company Ltd. is looking for a zone change to permit medium-density development in what is currently a low-density area, mostly older, single-family homes.
Residents worry that adding 300 units – expected to offer up 630 bedrooms – would create congestion, traffic woes and densities unsuitable for the area.
Caroline Armstrong, a senior who lives on Moore Street across from the plant, is part of a group organizing against the development.
“I moved from Toronto to get away from all of that,” she says.
“When I go to Toronto, it’s always getting worse. I really don’t miss that. I’m always so glad to get home to my little Waterloo ... but it’s not so little now,” Armstrong adds.
With development in the area, particularly on nearby Union Street, there have already been changes in the neighbourhood, not all for the better, she says. Even some of the smaller projects have created problems, particularly during the construction phase. With a much, much larger build proposed, she and her neighbours are more than a little worried. They’ll be looking for an explanation about how simple logistics of issues such as traffic and parking will be addressed – the information provided so far isn’t reassuring.
“That’s an incredible amount of people to add to the area – there’s already a problem with parking. Where are they going to go?” asks Armstrong. “I think the density is bad enough, but the traffic on the street will be a real problem.”
Her concerns, and those of her neighbours, are not unexpected. They arise with pretty much every new development of any size, in every community. There are legitimate worries about increasing densities and how they’ll fit into the existing neighbourhood. Once built – and developer-driven growth almost always proceeds, whether by legal force or complicit officials – the problems are rarely as bad as the worst-case scenario, but the project almost never provides benefit to the established residents.
That’s where the pursuit of dollars – the reason for development – and a provincially-imposed mandate increased densities and infilling of so-called brown-field sites conspire against residents of many a neighbourhood.
In theory, this is the kind of mixed-use development – combining residential, commercial and retail uses within walking distance of each other – that is now touted as the standard to combat the suburban sprawl that has shaped the way we live for the past five or six decades.
The description of socalled compact communities puts me in mind of Europe, where densities are higher and people live within an easy walk or bike ride of most of the amenities of daily living. Because most communities developed before the advent of the automobile, they’re very much people-centric as opposed to the carcentered towns and cities of North America. A development like this – or any other project – is not going to change that, so traffic and parking (this proposal calls for 325 parking spaces in total, essentially just one for every unit) will be a problem. And likely worse than claimed, as officials continue to overestimate how many people will opt for alternatives over having a car.
This is not Europe, where people actually do walk and cycle as a means of transportation, not just recreation. Public transit is convenient and well used. In short, the antithesis of how we do things here. Living there, you can quite easily do without a car.
Trouble is, that ideal isn’t likely to translate here, the land of vinyl siding, asphalt and big-box retail.
In all the talk of more human-scale communities, there’s no mention of aesthetics. For me, that’s the make-it-or-break-it part of the equation: our ugly built environments foster neither pride of place nor a desire to be out on foot, interacting with the place where we live something to enjoy in its own right. It’s going to take a monumental effort at creating something better to get us out of the suburban model: Shifting from our box of a house to our box of a car to the box where we shop and the box where we work. The insides may be nice and comfortable, as we shut out the world and the others who happen to live in the same town, but the shared spaces are not conducive to creating the kind of community envisioned by proponents of a liveable city.
When urban advocacy pioneer Jane Jacobs, for instance, argued that people make the city, she was countering the orthodoxy of pseudo-utopian planning that saw the destruction of inner cities in favour of ugly, soul-crushing concrete highrises that quickly became worse than slums, ultimately torn down as a massively expensive – and not just in monetary terms – failed experiment.
Cities and communities are about people, but the
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built environment helps to shape our perception of the place we live, either negatively or positively. Far too often, it’s the former and not the latter.
Planning paradigms shift – like anything else, there are trends – but is guided by developers out to maximize profits. That means cheapest and mostest, as in cramming as many units as possible into a given space. Politicians and bureaucrats fixated on unsustainable growth, even though the long-term costs outweigh short-term gains, are happy to oblige. And in the few cases where that’s not the case, the legal system can be brought to bear.
The Waterloo development is just another salvo in an ongoing war, largely of attrition, in which people attempt to have some control of their communities and homes.