It’s still a couple of weeks before my year in review column, but if there’s one thing I can’t stop thinking about this year, it’s what happened at this one committee of adjustment meeting in the spring.
An applicant proposed to sever his property in order to build a new house on the severed portion. He expressed some concern about a really old tree on the property, and he acknowledged that a tree like this is kind of a big deal to the neighbourhood. He then pledged that if it came down between building the house and saving the tree, he would save the tree.
Guess what happened next? A dozen people got up to the podium and spent much of the next hour demanding that the applicant save the tree.
I mean, were they not paying attention?
When I think about NIMBY these days, I think about this episode. Why? It’s not enough that there might be a problem with this application from the point of view of the neighbourhood, but they went out of their way to create a problem…
Save the tree?
Okay.
Case closed.
The root of NIMBYism, which, if you’re unaware, means Not In My BackYard, is a negative reaction to change. Sometimes it’s as small as a tree, and sometimes it’s as big as the size of a 20-storey development, but no matter the scale of the project, the breadth of the housing crisis has made us turn NIMBYs into an all-purpose villain.
In February, Mayor Cam Guthrie set the stage by encouraging Guelph’s NIMBYs to defect and become YIMBYs – Yes In My BackYard.
“More often than not it is the same recipe of complaints from every neighbourhood. Not every development is going to destroy the value in your home, cause accidents and have children or animals run over or cause massive parking issues or have a design element that you don't like,” Guthrie said.
“You play a pivotal role in getting housing built. Welcome it where possible, write letters or delegate to council saying you want developments because you want to welcome new neighbours to your area and create new friendships.”
I’ve got to say, I’m not sure “make new friends” is the winning anti-NIMBY message the mayor wanted it to be, but it’s nice that he tried to turn a frown upside down instead of telling people to suck it up.
He is right about one thing though; a lot of the complaints are the same no matter the project, and this week’s planning meeting, the last one of the year, was another round up the usual complaints moment.
All the correspondences to council about a redevelopment project on Janefield Avenue mentioned traffic and parking, and at least three of them mentioned the protection of wildlife in this built-up subdivision in this area sandwiched between College and Stone and one block over from the Hanlon Expressway.
Before going further, I now raise myself up on my tiptoes because I don’t want to mitigate these people’s concerns. Change is hard, especially when it’s in your own backyard, and who knows, maybe this slight change to the area will be the proverbial last straw. But let’s stop and think about this question, what if it’s not?
As discussed in this column before, nobody wants to embrace the NIMBY term. Nobody gets up at a council meeting and says no, they say “We like development, just not this development. And not here.” If everyone’s convinced that we can’t build or change in their backyard, we can’t build or change in any backyard.
Changing this attitude, I’m afraid, isn’t simple. I understand the frustration about NIMBYism, and as an attendant at every planning meeting I share it, but no one’s ever changed minds by yelling, marginalizing, or expressing passive aggressive disinterest. We need to call the question about how we turn NIMBYs into YIMBYs and not just tell the NIMBYs to get over it.
How do we do that? First, we have to understand that there’s no trust between most of the YIMBYs – government and developers – and the NIMBYs. In this era of exceptional distrust of institutions, it should come as no surprise that when a government or a developer says, “Trust us”, the entire community says, “No thanks.”
I’ve already commented on the Official Plan meeting on December 5, but the one thing I will add is that it was utterly unhelpful in the effort to sell the changes to the OP when Mayor Guthrie talked about how much he trusted local developers to follow up on their commitment. People didn’t hear that as an endorsement, they heard that as collusion.
Now it’s understandable that a mayor who’s been in power for nearly a decade would develop a trusting relationship with that community’s business leaders without it being nefarious, but we live at a time where no one takes anyone’s word for anything. Trust is built, face-to-face and over the long haul, so that’s the first thing to fix.
It’s also the hardest to fix and admittedly even I’m not sure what to do.
I think being more proactive helps. If you’re building something and it’s a little outside the norm in the neighbourhood then it might help to go the neighbours first before going to city hall. It would help if people can identify a project by a face and a name as opposed to a company logo and a big green and white sign.
But on the residents’ side there’s an important mental block they have to vault too. This town is hopelessly tied to nostalgia, images of what Guelph used to be 20, 30 or even 50 years ago. We also love to tout the greatness of Guelph and then we get shirty when other people want to move here and enjoy Guelph too.
And the city’s got to change. If you don’t want to eat up more greenspace, the built-up areas have to take more density and higher buildings that will breach the character of areas that have enjoyed a certain flavour in the past. I’m sorry, but we can’t have housing for everyone when we don’t have housing for everyone. It’s a paradox, and that’s why we need to build.
What we can control though is how we do it; communicate, build trust, and have an open and honest dialogue about a project while knowing that we all need to compromise in order to ensure that we can act quickly and smoothly to get our community the housing it needs.
In other words, we need to get to a point where someone says that they’ll save the tree, and we believe them.
