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?
I was reading about a proposed development earlier today (it doesn't really matter which one for this story) and I immediately thought to myself, "wow, this is a beautiful development. I like what they've done here." The project happens to be by one of my favorite architects in the city. Sadly though, we have yet to work with them on any of our projects.
I then decided to read the comment section of the article. There were dozens and dozens of comments and virtually all of them were negative and against the development. What is, of course, clear is that we all have different beliefs. We all see things differently. And that's part of the reason why creating any sort of change is usually so difficult.
But if you think about it, so much of our world resolves around change. If we want to address climate change, we are going to need to make changes. If we want to improve housing affordability, we are going to need to make changes. If we want to build more inclusive and economically prosperous cities, we are going to need to make changes.
The challenge with all of this change is that we have inertia working against us. Case in point: I'm sure that most of us have been in a meeting at one point or another when a decision was made purely based on what was done the last time around. We did X. So let's do X again. Why change? Probably a safe bet.
Seth Godin once said that, "if you do anything that matters, it means you're trying to change something." He was talking about the world of marketing. But I believe that there's a universal truth to this. Change unlocks potential.
I attended the above talk last night over Zoom. (Shoutout to Michael Mortensen for inviting Slate's development team and for helping to moderate the Q&A.) The talk was a conversation between Larry Beasley (former Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver) and Theresa O'Donnell (the newly appointed Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver). Prior to this, Theresa was the director of planning for cities such as Las Vegas, Nevada, and Arlington, Texas.
I'd like to point out two comments that she made last night that I found interesting.
The first is that community meetings over Zoom actually aren't all that bad. And the reason that they're not all that bad is that they tend to draw out larger crowds (they are easier to attend), and so the feedback on development applications tends to be a bit more inclusive / representative. I agree with this overall view and I've been arguing for years (here on the blog) that the typical approach to community engagement is pretty much broken. The opinions become lopsided when you erect too many barriers to participation.
The second point has to do with the amount of land in Vancouver (and other North American cities) that is dedicated to low-rise housing. It's too much and it's going to need to be addressed in order to increase overall housing supply and to chip away at the housing affordability problem. This won't be news to this audience, but it's interesting to see how widespread this belief has become. Of course, the big questions remain: How gentle should gentle density be? How much intensification should these neighborhoods see?
I also appreciated her comment that it's pure lunacy (my words, not hers) to have higher order transit lines running through mostly low-rise neighborhoods. We need much higher densities to sustainably support these kinds of investments in infrastructure. For us Torontonians, a good example would be (most of) the underdeveloped Bloor-Danforth subway line, though there are other culprits.
Welcome Theresa.