Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
Today I went for a bike ride on the Niagara Peninsula.
We started at Project Bench, went to the Jordan Village (where the street was having its grand re-opening), stopped in at RPM Bakehouse for an obligatory apple sticky bun (the line was out the door and we got the last one), and then did a big loop that took us along the Welland Canal and through Port Dalhousie.
Here’s the map:
It was a great ride, and it might be one of my last long rides for the season. It’s just about time to pull out the snowboard. But for now, I’m going to put tiger balm on my knees and go to bed early. See you tomorrow.
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.
A big congratulations to Veronica and Pearce Jarvis on their wedding this weekend in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Thank you for including us in your special day.
Photos taken in the Niagara Benchlands (The Bench) on June 1, 2024 with a Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm).
