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?
Many years ago I was in a community meeting talking about a proposal we had to add retail uses adjacent to a park. Residential was the highest and best use, but we were excited by what retail could do for the project and area. We were imagining something like a Parisian cafe where everyone would sit facing outward toward the park.
Much to our surprise, the community was vehemently opposed. And when we eventually asked who had been to Europe and sat outside in a nice cafe, the response we generally got was, "yeah, we have, and it's obviously nice there, when on vacation. But that's Europe. It won't work here and it's not appropriate for the area."
Hmm. This raises all sorts of interesting questions. But for today, let's ask this one here: Why is it that some people choose to live in places that are so different than the ones they visit when on vacation?
Is it because we, as humans, want fundamentally different experiences when we travel? i.e. We want to escape from our current reality. "Oh look how novel this is." In this case, I guess you could say that our markets are fairly efficient and people are getting the kind of lifestyles that they truly want, both at home and abroad.
Or, is it because, for a variety of reasons, we've created rules and obstacles that force certain built form outcomes? We think the other ways won't work. I often find myself in this latter camp, meaning that when I travel, I at some point end up thinking: "This is a good idea. I want to both move here immediately, and steal this idea and bring it back to Toronto."
How about you?
This fall Slate acquired a retail center in Hamilton called Corktown Plaza. It is the block bounded by John Street South, Young Street, Catharine Street South, and Forest Avenue. It is just south of the Hamilton GO Centre in downtown.
It is currently a much used single storey retail plaza with a large surface parking lot facing John Street South. It’s still early days, but the long-term plan is to redevelop it into a mixed-use retail and residential complex.
Before putting pen to paper, the team is hosting a “pre-design community meeting” this Tuesday, December 12, 2017 at 7pm at the Church of Ascension down the street. Address is 64 Forest Avenue (accessible entrance at 258 John Street South).
Here is the invite (embedded tweet):
Kudos @SlateAssetMgmt for hosting a “pre-design” community meeting before “putting pen to paper” … a best practise in meaningful public engagement pic.twitter.com/w07paBeoyp
— Jason Thorne (@JasonThorne_RPP)
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The purpose of the meeting is to gather feedback from the community before beginning design. We want to know what’s working today, what’s not working today, and what would be ideal for the future.
CORE Architects and GSP Group (planning) will be in attendance along with the Slate team. The format will be brief presentations followed by interactive breakout sessions. There will be trace paper on hand so that we can all put pen to paper.
If you live and/or work in the area or are simply interested in the future of Hamilton, please feel free to join us on Tuesday evening. If you can, send a quick email to rsvp@kga-inc.com letting us know you’ll be coming. But just showing up is also perfectly fine.