ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[eizenstriet]

mpd618
We could learn ... how not to consider single-family detached houses to be a viable building style right next to the central part of the city.

Lots of those houses you’re speaking of have been “viable” right next to the central part of the city for a century or so. The successive owners have built admirable communities, and aren’t about to surrender their investments, their roots, and their faculties of critical thinking just because you in your own interests would like to label them “unviable”.


We could learn ... to... not care about NIMBYs concerned with spillover parking.

You seem now to be acknowledging that there will be “spillover parking”. So can we now lighten up on the warranty that high density near transit will not have parking demand? I mean, you know that a single-family detached house behind The Red has had its “BY” become a parking lot for that building. You know that people may contend with 144 Park or the Kaufman Lofts because there is not provision for their second cars. You know that residents of The Bauer Lofts complain of inadequate visitor parking. So let’s grant that “NIMBYs” are not always just paranoid, and that they may dare to suggest that development be prepared to sustain its own attachment to the automobile.


Building medium-density buildings, and doing so in a broad area, requires the kind of community buy-in that the neighbourhoods adjacent to the downtowns would make extremely hard to obtain.

Within my own immediate area, I do not recall any notable opposition to The Red, The 42, 133 Park, 144 Park, the Cortes on King, The Bauer Lofts, The Seagram Lofts, BPR Lofts, Princess Condominiums, the Silver Thread Lofts, Cripple Creek, the St. Louis School Lofts, The Barrelyards, or The Grand. These honour to an arguable extent the transition zone principle with – dare I say it – viable single-family detached neighbourhoods. Even 133 Caroline had as much opposition from dispersed users of the Iron Horse Trail as from “NIMBYs”.


And while we’re at it, can we acknowledge the reflexive “NIMBY” appellation for what it is – like all derogatory epithets, a device to short-circuit discussion - ? People quite naturally try to protect what they deem valuable, what they have saved for, what they have risked for, what they have raised their children in, what they have created which is satisfying. Are they really any less worthy of engagement than those who oppose re-aligning The Iron Horse Trail?