I’ve been watching, and enjoying, the PBS documentary series New York, which is a thorough examination of the history of the city from the moment Henry Hudson first sailed into the area in the 17th century to the end of the second millennium.
One of the lessons you learn from the series is the complete lack of preciousness that New Yorkers have had about their city as its evolved over the centuries. It’s one of the most iconic places in the world, but its icon status was secondary to answering the demands of accommodating a rapidly growing population due to the rapid pace of immigration.
Now Guelph is not New York, I want to make that clear. Having said that we’re presently caught in the crushing demand of a rapidly increasing population and we’re trying to figure out where to put them all. The difference here is that we have a community that seems completely unwilling to change, even if it means helping the people already here have a shot at finding an affordable place to live.
I hoped that the last few weeks might have cooled my proverbial jets about some of the things I heard at this month’s planning meeting about fourplexes, or rather all the reasons not to build fourplexes. So am I cool?
Not really.
First, our town full of NIMBYs need to accept who they are. You can’t couch your NIMBYism in the insistence that you’re a fan of intensification and then eliminate your own neighbourhood from the places in Guelph that can be intensified. As mentioned before in this space, if in every neighbourhood there’s a group of people who believe no intensification can happen there, then, effectively, no intensification can happen anywhere in Guelph.
One of the biggest offenders of NIMBYism here, and the erroneous “there, not here” argument, is the Old University Neighbourhood Residents Association. NIMBYs par excellence, they had a letter in the council materials for the fourplex meeting where they declared that they were in favour of density, even in their area, but I’ve got to tell you I’ve never seen this group support any kind of density at either a planning meeting or Committee of Adjustment.
The OUNRA’s letter was effectively a two-page screed about how four units as of right will turn row-after-row of precious single-family homes into student slums that will house 24 students in each house. It’s kind of a weird reaction from people who want to live in proximity to the university but fundamentally hate the reason that the university exists there to begin with, the young people it educates.
But lest you think this is the only area of the city with issues, let’s consider The Ward. A few days after the planning meeting this month, there was a nearly four-hour Committee of Adjustment meeting, whose length was entirely driven by NIMBYs fighting for the third time to prevent Canada’s smallest bar from getting Canada’s smallest patio.
Again, this is The Ward, which one century ago was the model for what we claim we want to get back to, 15-minute communities. You could live, work, shop, play and send your kids to school in the same area of the city, but in the year 2024 one out of five ain’t bad, I guess. And this is to say nothing of the fact that The Ward, like New York, has been refreshed over the decades by an influx of new people coming to town and enhancing the culture. It’s why the Italian Canadian Club’s tucked away on Ferguson Street.
I wonder if seven decades ago, when the Italian Canadian Club was built, if people thought that it was going to ruin the “neighbourhood character” of The Ward, because this has been the most offensive type of NIMBYism I’ve heard on this issue of fourplexes. “We’re not NIMBY, we’re just protecting what makes our neighbourhood special.”
Balderdash.
You know who gets to care about neighbourhood character? People for whom price is not an obstacle. For the rest of us, we’re not looking at where the unit is, we’re looking at how much it costs. That’s why evicting everyone from 90 Carden was such a housing gut punch, because some of the last really affordable housing in Guelph went away. They weren’t crammed into 90 Carden like some old tenement house for the ambiance.
The alleged assault on neighbour character also supposes that a) the developer and landowner doesn’t care about building something that looks good, and b) any change has a cascade effect on a whole area, like taking the wrong block out of a Jenga tower except every block is the wrong block.
The inherent message to people in our community who are having trouble finding an affordable place to live is that there’s no sympathy for them. Social housing is so far behind it will never catch up, private developers need to have their arms twisted or given a bribe to build something cheap, and the loudest residents, the ones appearing at city council meetings, are saying that they don’t want more people in their area because they will ruin it.
Guelph, the caring community.
Do we not understand the cruelty of this? Do we not understand the mixed message of puffing out our chest to talk about the greatness of Guelph and then saying, “No, you can’t live here. Not if you can’t buy one of our million-dollar houses.”
And that brings us to council, and though you can’t see their knees under the council table, you could still hear them wabbling at this month’s planning meeting. If there was a commitment this time last year to address the housing crisis by making it simpler to build more housing, it appears to be waning. Council had the appearance of a person sobering up the morning after getting black out drunk and being told some of the stuff they did at the pub the night before.
As for the NIMBYS, you may have fooled yourselves, but you do not fool me. And if you’re willing to do a little self examination, I wonder if there are conditions where you would except the construction of a fourplex on that corner. You have that privilege, you have that choice, so many people in Guelph do not. Essentially, we only get to live where you decide we can, as you’ve always done, NIMBY.
