Some residents in the neighbourhood surrounding the proposed permanent supportive housing project at the Parkview Motel say their voices haven’t been considered as a vote to change zoning at the site looms.
Last week the Welcome In Drop-In Centre announced its $3.8 million purchase of the Parkview Motel has been finalized March 29 and that the project will become known as Grace Gardens.
On Monday, councillors will vote on a zoning change that will allow for permanent supportive housing at the site. City staff is recommending approval of the zoning change.
Eric Hafemann is a retired lawyer who lives in the area and is speaking on behalf of some of his neighbours who say their concerns about the project are not being considered and that their questions are not being answered.
Hafemann said most of his work was done in private practice but for a time in the 1980s he acted as counsel for the Crown on some cases involving drugs, which GuelphToday confirmed through a search of historical court documents.
“I have dealt with thousands of people with narcotics problems and even back then we weren’t interested in the users, they were really sad cases and we would see them over and over again,” said Hafemann. “They really have a tough go of it and I am really sympathetic to them.
“My work was mainly concentrating on the dealers and organized crime and the wiretaps for that kind of things,” said Hafemann. “I know how the system works and the dealers are predators. They are the ones we were concentrating on all along. Even back in those days.”
Hafemann said the project that will see the motel converted to supportive housing will make people living with addictions at the site easy prey for dealers.
“We are going to have the unfortunate drug addicts in here in a building that cannot be controlled. It is set up for the dealers. Every room has a door right to the outside, there is no fencing even, not that it would matter much anyway,” he said.
Hafemann said when residents have been given the opportunity to speak about their concerns about the project they have either been accused of having a ‘not-in-my backyard’ (NIMBY) mindset or told they are only interested in maintaining their own property values.
“I think this is the wrong building,” he said of the proposed site.
Hafemann said he and other area residents spoke to experts and made visits to other permanent supportive housing projects in neighbouring cities.
“We actually did our homework and went to jurisdictions like Kitchener-Waterloo, Barrie and others and put before them what other places were doing and why they were doing it and why this won’t work. There is some substance to it,” said Hafemann.
He said a petition signed by 219 of the residents in the area and handed in to the city clerks office has been ignored.
Although there has been a virtual public meeting held by the city, as well as some community meetings, Hafemann said concerned residents were not given the opportunity to ask all of their questions about the project and to make their concerns heard by the people making the decisions.
“Not only should you have public consultation, but we would have been able to bring in experts who actually deal with these particular types of structures and this particular kind of demographic,” said Hafemann.
Neighbours were not given the same opportunity to ask questions and raise concerns in person as the residents living near Margaret Greene Park did last summer when Metrolinx proposed building a traction power substation at that site, said Hafemann. After public pressure mounted against that project Metrolinx announced it would look for different site.
Krista Walkey, general manager of Planning and Building services for the city of Guelph said in an interview on Friday that the city did go though the proper public consultation process and, besides having to hold a public meeting virtually, that COVID-19 did not have an effect on the process.
That public meeting was held in February.
“At the public meeting we also paused in the middle of it and allowed people to call in and put the call-in number on and we do that with all applications right now, so if they were logging in and hadn’t preregistered they still had an opportunity to call in and say what they would like to say,” said Walkey. “Notice was given in accordance to the city and Planning Act requirements. It was in accordance to how we do all of our notifications and I definitely know we met all of the requirements.”
Hafemann’s wife Jane said at 76 she is probably one of the younger senior citizens living in the immediate area.
“The seniors love to go down to the senior’s centre on Woolwich Street so we’re walking back and forth here all of the time, many of them are using walkers,” she said. “This is a really vulnerable population that is living in this area and we are scared stiff. People are going to be afraid to step outside their doors, honestly."
Jane said leaders of the project have not been forthcoming when it comes to addressing concerns of the neighbourhood.
“We have a genuine right to be frightened because there has been no communication from the people who plan to run this thing about what they are going to do to protect our security. They don’t respond to us at all. They don’t talk to us, so for all we know they don’t have security,” she said.
When learning about other supportive housing projects in the province, Jane said none that she has seen have been located so close to a residential neighbourhood with so many seniors.
“Nobody else does it like this. They don’t put facilities like this in residential neighbourhoods and there is a reason for that,” she said.
