No picnic: planning for parks a challenge as city grows
KITCHENER — As condo towers crop up throughout Kitchener’s downtown, access to cool, green places to de-stress will become even more important for those who live in them.
Gail Pool lives just steps from Victoria Park, and he fears an influx of condo dwellers could strain the city’s signature park. “People need green space. It’s an essential part of living. I have a nice yard. I can sit in my yard. But if you’re going to have 10,000 new people within a 10-to-15minute walk of Victoria Park, that’s where they’re going to go for their green space.”
Coun. Frank Etherington, who lives close to Victoria Park, has similar fears. “Every sunny weekend the park is packed. I believe that’s going to get much worse because developers are not providing enough recreational space.”
City parks staff will keep a close eye on Victoria Park, said Cory Bluhm, Kitchener’s executive director of economic development. “We would not want Victoria Park to degrade, in terms of the grass wearing away and just the physical beauty of it, because too many people are using it,” Bluhm said.
City parks staff will be keeping an eye on the state of the park, he said. But, he admits, “in an urban context, we don’t have swaths of land we can create a new Victoria Park out of.”
Young families will want playgrounds, dog walkers will want a place to take their pets, and the city may simply have to buy land, or use land it already owns, to create new parks, says Mayor Berry Vrbanovic. “I don’t believe that we’re going to be able to rely on Victoria Park to be our only green space . ... Some of it will be recognizing there are lands that, quite frankly, perhaps we won’t be building on, lands that will need to be purchased, or lands that we perhaps have that won’t be able to be sold.”
The new parks won’t likely be sprawling affairs, he said — enough for a swing and a slide and a couple of benches — but the core will need more of them, he believes.
Housing booms can bring other unexpected challenges, Bluhm said. The number of dogs in Los Angeles has skyrocketed as the population grows, with four dogs moving to the city for every 10 new units being built. A similar trend in Kitchener could mean 2,000 more dogs downtown in the next five years. “It’ll be a challenge.”
Parks staff here are cognizant of the situation in Toronto, where a failure to ensure adequate park space was part of a boom in condo towers around the Rogers Centre. The city now has plans to build a Rail Deck Park over the rail corridor for a pricey $1.7 billion.