We’ve heard a lot about how things have changed because of the pandemic, but it’s refreshing to know that despite everything, the conventional thinking about planning in Guelph has remained exactly the same.
This past Monday, council heard the planning application to build 24-stacked townhouses at a property on Victoria Road North next to St. John Catholic School. There were a couple of area people who were delegating against the plan, but the reaction that got the most attention was when someone said that they were concerned about “the type of people” who live in these developments.
Here we go again.
No one asked this person if they could clarify what they meant by “the type of people” because I think we understand implicitly that “the type of people” is a more benign code for anyone that’s not a white, middle-class professional with a nuclear family.
I know, your monocle just fell in your martini glass. “Outraged!” you say.
The greater crime these days is to being openly accused of thinking something despite the fact that you’re actually thinking it. So yes, j’accuse once again the people of Guelph for an open, and frankly hostile, attitude of selfishness when it comes to sharing this town.
I honestly don’t need to watch planning meetings anymore because they rarely deviate from their well-established rhythm. We open with a caveat that we’re not against growth or development, and they segue to the reasons why this particular spot is not the “right place” for growth, or we explain why this specific growth doesn’t fit the character of the area.
Then, usually, there’s some general reminiscing about the good old days in the neighbourhood, homes owned by good families whose names you knew and had long histories in the area. It was a time when kids could walk to school safely, which is a pointed way of saying that traffic in the area has increased and is threatening to increase again with the addition of more homes.
I’m sympathetic to traffic concerns, but Guelph’s been a Mad Max-style Hellscape for pedestrians and cyclists for years now, but if increased traffic is your issue then you should know that there already exists a remedy.
Just kidding! No one in Guelph is going to suggest you take the bus. (We might have to actually invest some time, effort and energy into improving transit if that were the case).
Of course, our transit system is the ultimate victim of the generational friction in Guelph, a throwback to a time when Guelph had less than 80,000 people and Kortright Road was considered the southern most edge of the city.
Dealing with generational change was also on the agenda Monday night with the final ratification of the Cultural Heritage Action Plan. The debate at council and at Heritage Guelph revealed a big fissure between city staff and the community that will need to be rectified, but I want to play Devil’s advocate for a moment.
Delegate Susan Watson, no stranger to public engagement herself, told council that there’s a feeling in the community that there’s no point taking part when the city asks for feedback because it looks like that feedback’s just ignored.
I would like to present an alternative theory. Perhaps staff isn’t following public feedback verbatim because they’re not hearing anything new. Or perhaps from any one new.
My theory may be of a piece with Richard Nixon’s “great silent majority”, his belief that Vietnam protestors were a small but vocal minority among a mass that generally approved of the war effort, but I’d like to take this mental exercise for a moment.
In recent years, I’ve seen the need to modernize the City get stonewalled by an unwillingness to accept change.
City buses still roll through neighbourhoods because they always have and a few people get mad when Transit tries to move a route so that it runs down a main artery just a few streets over.
The recent debate about council composition has seen the insistence that we need two councillors for every ward even though this will assuredly mean that Guelph will remain a six-ward city because no one wants a council bigger than 12.
And even though housing prices are through the roof right now, and even though we have a chronic lack of vacancy and we’re expected to add 70,000 more people in the next 29 years, no one wants their neighbourhood to change. The thing is when no one wants to change, change never happens, and that’s how you get a perpetual housing crisis, or archaic systems of transit or local governance.
Perhaps we should combine our scientific and technological efforts to build one of those turnstiles from Tenet that reverse the flow of time. It seems to me that we’re all looking backwards anyway so we might as well start moving in that direction.
