Kitchener Council will consider the Staff Report on the Recommended Growth Options for the Regional Official Plan.
At issue are the Growth Options proposed in the Regional Official Plan Review.
Delegation
to City of Kitchener Special Council Meeting
Monday, 30 May 2022
Mayor Vrbanovic, Councillors, Staff and fellow
residents of the city of Kitchener:
As a resident living on Strange
Street in Cherry Park who, as you know, has taken a close interest in the
process of decision-making in relation to residential land use planning and
development in Kitchener, has made a number of previous spoken and written
delegations to Council and is the husband of Councillor Chapman (who is not
responsible for the following views), I write today in support of Proposed Option
4 in relation to the Regional Municipality of Waterloo Municipal Comprehensive
Review- Land Needs Assessment, the basis of the Regional Official Plan (ROP), as
presented to you in a document written by Kevin Eby, Kevin Thomason and Mark
Reusser. Given that the purpose of the ROP is to plan land use for the next
thirty years the seriousness of what is at stake is evident.
What brings real gravity to (y)our
deliberations, however, is anthropogenic global warming as the First Nations
are the first to say. I am a retired academic from Wilfrid Laurier University
where I taught sociology for 40 years. As a sociologist my theoretical interest
has always been in the possibility of socially organized life. “How is society
possible?” has always been sociology’s foundational question. Call it the
possibility of liveability. But today, the question is not theoretical. The
possibility of socially organized life on earth – of liveability for earth’s
people - is an actual, live question, pressing on us with unprecedented force. A
big part of this bears on the way we put together the material infrastructure
of our built environment, so as to minimize our collective carbon footprint. It
has to do with the relative distribution of urban and rural land, the materials
we build with, the energy sources we draw on, the size and scale of the
buildings we erect, the distribution of road and rail and the corresponding
amount of traffic each sustains. So transportation is critical. And that means
maximizing public transportation and
minimizing the private kind. And that, in turn, means intensifying in the designated greenfield area (DGA) sufficiently to
sustain a viable public transportation system of electric buses and trains within
it. In short, exclusionary zoning
has got to go.
Without expanding the Community
Area, gentle intensification in the DGA designed to provide the “missing middle”
– everything from accessory units to stacked townhouses - reduces the need for
30/40/50-storey hi-rise towers in the downtown. According to my cursory reading
on hi-rise towers, they are just environmentally and socially awful ways to house
people. Of course, the horse has already left that barn.
This brings me to my second point.
Liveability depends not just on sustainability but also on affordability.
44-storey towers of one- and two-bedroom condos with a handout to a non-profit
to build a handful of affordable units is the last thing that’s needed here,
when about 7,000 households are on the affordable housing waiting list and
1,000 people survive in shelters or tents. Such
hi-rise developments make life unaffordable for low-income people and drive
them out of the region. They are, on the other hand, a gift to the investor
class that already owns about a quarter of the housing in the province,
while it withholds building the housing for which it’s already got permits to
build. You really must put a stop to that, using all the legislative tools
available to you. Social equity demands it. You know how to do it. For goodness’s
sake, do it. Furthermore, the Region’s plan to build 2,500 affordable units
over five years, while helpful, is not going to cut it. Inclusionary zoning is needed yesterday.
Option 4 has been worked out in
detail. You’ve all received the document. In contrast to the Region’s 3
proposed options, Eby, Thomason and Reusser’s submission “recommends
a no-Community Area expansion Option 4 structured around a Designated
Greenfield Area (DGA) density of 60 people and jobs per hectare and an
intensification target of approximately 65%. Option 4 is based on an
intensification rate reflective of recent and long-term trends being
experienced in the Region of Waterloo and the need to continue to aggressively
promote a sustainable urban form anchored on an expanding rapid transit system.”
I urge you to adopt it for its considered approach to ensuring a liveable
future for the residents of Waterloo Region based on sustainable and affordable
land use development.
Peter Eglin
Kitchener,
ON
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