The Project Bench team spent the last several weeks capturing photos and videos of Canada's largest wine region -- the Niagara Benchlands (link is to the official tourism website). And today I'm excited to share that we've launched our own new placemaking website called On the Bench.
The purpose of the site is to help celebrate the region. There's also some very preliminary information about Project Bench. In our humble opinion, we don't feel that the Benchlands region receives the attention that it clearly deserves. More people are familiar with Niagara-on-the-Lake and Niagara Falls, especially globally.
The Bench is a distinct area, with its own unique character and with more -- and arguably better -- wineries. This v1 website is the start of us working to demonstrate this. So if you're a local business or community member that would like to collaborate with us on this overall initiative, we'd love to hear from you.
To join the Bench community and be first to learn more about Project Bench, email subscribe at the bottom of the page, and follow us on Instagram and X.
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?
Pat Hanson of gh3* is absolutely right with her comment, here, about why we are seeing more windowless bedrooms being built in Toronto:
In much the same way, some of Toronto’s development policies encourage windowless bedrooms. “I don’t think it’s driven by cost,” says architect Pat Hanson, a founding principal of gh3* and a member of Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel. “It’s driven a lot by building forms. Where you find a lot of these inboard bedrooms is in the mid-rise type.” The requirements to step back mid-rises on an angular plane, she adds, forces the developers to populate their projects with very deep units.
This condition is being driven by building forms and by overall housing affordability. Here is a post that I wrote on this exact topic back in 2017. The numbers are dated. I cited $857 per square foot as the average price of a downtown Toronto condo. But the forces at work remain the same.
And they are not entirely unique to apartments and condominiums. One of the reasons why many condominiums are becoming long and skinny -- and getting designed with windowless bedrooms -- is the same reason that many cities, like Toronto, have long and skinny single-family lots.
You can certainly find wider lots, but it'll cost you.