City of Kitchener Official Plan

[clasher]

I practically live in the shadow of a newer apartment building that went up beside single family homes and here's a huge shocker: it didn't ruin the character of the neighbourhood. I'd argue that rich people that moved in and turned some of the multi-resident houses back into big SFH have changed the character of the neighbourhood more. It seems to me a lot of the most vocal people don't want any changes to their neighbourhoods. I think the city needs to do something more along of the lines of Minneapolis and rezone the entire city to allow a lot more medium density housing options. Too much focus on just building high density along the LRT and leaving the rest of the city as huge swaths of SFH isn't really gonna make the BANANA people happy since there are many neighbourhoods full of SFH that are pretty close to the LRT. I think if creative developers could buy up a few housesand convert them into tri-plexes and build smaller units above detached garages or things like that it would really help address the "missing middle" that would really help to ease transitions between those bigger towers and single-house neighbourhoods. I think a good example of how it works well can be seen on the block between Queen and David, the IHT and Schneider Avenue. There's the big tower, smaller condos, a small apartment building and a bunch of single family homes (some of which might have basement aparments, idk) Blocks like this one should be scattered throughout the city, not just along the main streets... and not everyone would have to have a bigger tower in it.