This afternoon, the team, including the Town of Lincoln, hosted a community open house for Project Bench. This is our upcoming development project in the Niagara Benchlands.

This was a follow-up to the pre-application community meeting that we held last November, and it is a precursor to the statutory public meeting that will be held in two weeks on July 8th at 6 PM.

If any of you would like to attend, this upcoming meeting will be held in the Council Chambers of the Town of Lincoln at 4800 South Service Road in Beamsville, Ontario.

Overall, the team feels that today went very well. We’re looking forward to continuing the dialogue with the community and further refining our development application.

Community meetings are a critical part of the development process and, over the years, I have come to learn the following:

• Open houses, like the one that was held today, are a good format for encouraging dialogue. The typical setup includes presentation boards, representatives walking the floor, and some sort of mechanism for people to provide feedback (post-it notes on a site plan can work well).
• Part of why this is a good format (compared to a straight presentation followed by a Q&A) is that it humanizes the team and it gives the community an opportunity to ask all of their questions. A lot of concerns can be addressed through clear explanations.
• The most common concerns are usually (1) height, (2) density, and (3) traffic. There are obviously others, but this is a good high-level list.
• Many/most people tend to conflate height and density. But as we have talked about many times before on this blog, they are not one and the same. Density tends to be harder to grasp, which is why you’ll often hear people criticize tall buildings, but not cities like Paris and Barcelona, despite being two of the densest cities in the world.
• A developer’s job is to be creative. You have to manage a myriad of competing interests and then thread the needle as best you can. Community meetings are about listening, learning, and then trying to figure out where the needle might go.
• The objective should be to make as many people as possible excited about the development. In other words, do great work.

What else would you add to this list?