General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[danbrotherston]

A private high school coming to downtown:

• Building permit 20-104761 MS
  
• 137 QUEEN ST S
  
• Non-Residential Alteration
  
• Permit is for change of use for existing St. Paul's Lutheran Church to be partial converted to Stanford Academy private high school
  

https://www.stanfordacademy.ca/

You know, it's pretty amazing. This is literally across the street from my home, yet I haven't heard anything about it, except here. This is the kind of BS I'm sick of in our laws. I wouldn't neccesarily oppose this (I don't like private schools, but I don't think they should be banned, they just shouldn't receive any public money at all), but the impact on our street/neighbourhood is at least as large as many of the other changes of use that we see that receive vastly more press and process around doing it. E.g., if they wanted to build an apartment building there instead, this would be front page news 2-3 times before it was approved.

Personally, I believe this impact on traffic would be larger than even a mid sized apartment building, because school start is syncronized, and, I'm going to guess a lot of private school pupils are from families more spread out in the region than a public school, who are quite likely to drive their children. Have they been forced to do traffic studies? I don't even know, because nobody even bothered to tell people who live across the street from this.

Now maybe, this is the right thing, maybe neighbours shouldn't have much say in this kind of thing, but if that's the case, then they should equally have little say when the new proposed use is housing.