Tag: vineland

• Community open house for Project Bench

  

  

  

  

  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?

  2024.06.27

• Forty-one

  

  Today is my forty-first birthday.

  I had aspirations of making it a slower day, but that didn’t really happen. I did, however, start my morning “on the Bench” for one of our development projects and that was pretty spectacular, especially with the weather we had. Today has to have been the nicest day of the year.

  I very much enjoy my birthdays, but the cadence of them seems to only speed up. It feels like just last month that I turned forty. And so in many ways, birthdays are a reminder to me that it’s important to be decisive and not waste time. Life keeps moving forward whether we like it or not — usually quickly. So it’s best to optimize accordingly.

  At the same time, this is probably one of my biggest faults. I’m bad at slowing down and living in the moment. I get restless. Neat B tells me that I am at my most relaxed when we are traveling in Paris and just sitting idly in a cafe somewhere. That sounds right. But I’d like to do more of this at home.

  So that’s my birthday wish (goal) for this year.

  2024.05.02

• Niagara’s wine country is missing something

  

  Neat B and I were in the Niagara wine region over the weekend and I was reminded of a few things:

  • Winemakers in Niagara will tell you that southern Ontario isn’t the easiest of places to grow and make wine. But whatever, I think that Niagara is highly underrated. Niagara has some exceptional wineries that you really should explore if you aren’t familiar. Ontario is also the largest ice wine producer in the world, by a long shot. We produce something like 90% of the world’s supply. Ice wine can be a bit of an acquired taste — they’re sweet. But if you get a chance, try one from Stratus. They are supposedly the driest in the world.
  • I don’t know how the wine demographics have shifted in other regions, but we were told over the weekend that 10 years ago it was mostly gray hairs who were out at wineries buying wine. Today, there are tons of young people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. And we certainly saw that over the weekend. This shift has winemakers now adjusting their wines. I couldn’t tell you what a younger wine palate wants, but apparently it’s something.
  • Lastly, there is a complete lack of cool and modern boutique hotels in the area. I would imagine that part of this is because the Niagara wine region is still emerging. But I think the other reason has to do with my previous point: younger people now want to go to wineries and the hospitality sector hasn’t yet caught up. This strikes me as a massive opportunity.

  2022.10.23