02-15-2019, 02:45 PM
It's probably not fair, but my brain automatically replaces "change the character of the neighbourhood" with "keep those undesirable folks out".
I grew up (we moved in in 1985, my parents live there still) in Uptown Waterloo, on Avondale near William. At that time it was an older, mostly blue collar neighbourhood. There are smatterings of moderately dense buildings (lots of houses split into duplexes and triplexes, a couple of 2 or 3 storey buildings with 4 or 8 apartments on each floor) mixed in with quite large single-family dwellings. A lot of 1950s bungalows mixed together with 1900s homes.
When I moved out in the mid-90s there were a lot more young families and a ton of places that had been converted into student housing. In the 20 years since then, there was a period where there were relatively few young kids and my impression is that's been changing again in the past five years, although I think Lourdes (the Catholic K-8 in the area, also where I went to school) has been struggling a bit with population for a while (a former coworker's kids went there). Most of the student housing has been converted back into single-family and a lot of the buildings there have been significantly updated, and some have been replaced.
That rambling is all to demonstrate (in some fashion) how important I think changing neighbourhoods are. People coming in and out, buildings changing, growing, being replaced. There's definitely space for heritage designations (and I delivered the Chronicle and the Record to many in that area) but this notion that people put forward that anything about a neighbourhood should somehow ossify is complete garbage. Neighbourhoods should live.
I grew up (we moved in in 1985, my parents live there still) in Uptown Waterloo, on Avondale near William. At that time it was an older, mostly blue collar neighbourhood. There are smatterings of moderately dense buildings (lots of houses split into duplexes and triplexes, a couple of 2 or 3 storey buildings with 4 or 8 apartments on each floor) mixed in with quite large single-family dwellings. A lot of 1950s bungalows mixed together with 1900s homes.
When I moved out in the mid-90s there were a lot more young families and a ton of places that had been converted into student housing. In the 20 years since then, there was a period where there were relatively few young kids and my impression is that's been changing again in the past five years, although I think Lourdes (the Catholic K-8 in the area, also where I went to school) has been struggling a bit with population for a while (a former coworker's kids went there). Most of the student housing has been converted back into single-family and a lot of the buildings there have been significantly updated, and some have been replaced.
That rambling is all to demonstrate (in some fashion) how important I think changing neighbourhoods are. People coming in and out, buildings changing, growing, being replaced. There's definitely space for heritage designations (and I delivered the Chronicle and the Record to many in that area) but this notion that people put forward that anything about a neighbourhood should somehow ossify is complete garbage. Neighbourhoods should live.