Dear Editor:
RE: Headaches for Estill as residents oppose zoning change proposal, Nov. 27.
I’ve been involved in six of these development project community meetings. What got my attention here was a resident commenting that the proposal hasn’t changed much since it was introduced. I take that as no real effort by Danby/Estill to make it more suited to the area.
I assure you the following experiences I have had are closer to what is likely to happen than most people will admit.
I would speculate, based on many experiences, the gym and day care are loss-leaders, meant to be “community friendly.” What person working a physical job is going to workout at an on-site gym? The day care will be expensive or under-attended and eventually close. Under-attended day care is the perfect escape, because the “community” is to blame. Those spaces would then become profitable general commercial leases. Developer wins again.
I would speculate this property was much lower cost than land already zoned and deemed appropriate with proper infrastructure. As the consultant points out, there are more appropriate and properly zoned locations. Why is this being ignored? Simple: money.
As a younger person, I attended “community meetings” on various development projects. In summary, the meetings are actually telling the people “how it’s going to go down.” The community “vents,” gets exhausted during the lengthy process and the developer wins almost all the time, with little to no concessions and will likely receive more than the original proposal. Case in point: a condo next door to my property was proposed as nine storeys. After many meetings with many people objecting to the height, the number of units and city infrastructure burden, the developer proposed 15 storeys. Another year and two meetings passed, the proposal was lowered to 12 stories and construction was completed the following year.
I overheard a city planner and developer after a different meeting describing how they could make changes to “marketing strategies” rather than address the actual objections. The meeting was actually a fact finding mission to plan how to squeeze the project through.
An acquaintance and real estate lawyer for commercial and residential development was well known for their ability to see difficult projects through the system and get approvals despite community objections. Sure, people sometimes resist any change at all, but reasonable and perfectly logical objections are ignored.
I have seen this too many times to not recognize the M.O.
Tom Szuba,
Puslinch