A public airing on the intensity of intensification

‘A pang’ of Hamiltonians gather to learn and talk about the changing face of the city

In a building, the design annex of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, that might have been a laundromat in another life for all I know (that’s how much James North has changed), on a street that’s being made over into something that erstwhile urban guru Richard Florida might’ve doodled once on a napkin, a crowd gathered to talk about intensification.

Intensification and gentrification, polarization, displacement, change and adaptability.

They filled the room, these Hamiltonians, so that many had to stand at the back. It was a big crowd. They milled around before and after the speakers, with a kind of nervous excitement.

What is the name for such a collective — a pang of Hamiltonians?

I don’t know, but this city is in such a state over the pace of its growth, the shape of its future, the crazed hormonal spike in its housing prices and the change in its neighbourhoods, that people scarcely know what to do with themselves.

So they come out in droves to meetings like Tuesday’s Getting Ready For Intensification, put on by the Useful Knowledge Society of Hamilton.

It’s a positive thing overall, this experience we have here, compared to the past, but one about which we’re feeling strangely anxious because we don’t know how it’s all going to play out, but it could be very good. Or not. Not if gentrification and displacement run rampant.

And consequently some of the questions asked of the speakers at the meeting were veiled appeals for clairvoyance.

Tell us what’s going to happen? Very understandable. Of course, no one knows. But it felt kind of good, in a Hamilton kind of way — we’re not used to the luxury of wondering how big we might get — just to be asking, speculating.

“City’s are adaptable,” said McMaster University geography professor Richard Harris.

It might sound obvious, but he illustrated it in such a compellingly researched and nuance way it took on a different meaning.

He graphed the changing patterns of income distribution by geography, polarization of neighbourhoods, the rise of secondary suits and multiple occupancy in single-family dwellings.

I can’t do justice to it all but his portion of the evening’s program furnished a larger historical context for the potentially profound changes Hamilton is going through now.

He charted the doubling of housing prices in the last five years in certain areas.

He, along with MC Ryan McGreal and the evening’s other presenter, renowned architect John van Nostrand, helped put corrective lenses on some of the assumptions we hold.

Harris showed some surprising information on condo conversions and where they’ve happened most, historically.

McGreal noted that fully 70 per cent of Hamiltonians work in and around the city, only about three per cent commute to Toronto.

Jason Thorne, the city’s general manager of planning and economic development, was on hand.

He noted that only 20 per cent of Hamilton’s planned intensification development is slated for downtown.

And van Nostrand gave a refreshingly diverse characterization of who really are the stakeholders in intensification.

“All the people who live here are developers,” he said.