One-time chance to build density with diversity

This summer my family and I moved from the Netherlands to Waterloo Region and I started teaching at the University of Waterloo’s School of Planning. Just as we have gone through a tremendous transition in our own lives, I get the feeling that the Region is about to embark on one of the biggest moments of change in its history.

October is barely a week old some big pieces of news have set the table for a massive shift in how the city looks, how citizens get around, and who benefits from a oncein-a-generation reordering of how we live.

All along the path of the almost completed light rail transit line (LRT), development is already charging ahead. With $1.8 billion of investment pouring into our regional transit corridor, new plans are being hatched for the massive, now-sold Schneider’s plant, as well as the hopscotch of restricted above-ground parking lots and medical facilities known as Midtown.

LRT skeptics like to say that the Region is wasting its money building a train between two malls. But what they’re actually doing is quite radical. Instead of building neighbourhoods and servicing them with transit, they’re building transit and servicing it with neighbourhoods.

This represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get things right. The promise for all of these new developments is that they’ll be mixed use, with residential, and commercial, blended seamlessly into one long live/work corridor. That’s great, but the question of who is able to live there should be a major consideration for our local leaders.

Time is running out for residents of the Region, and our civic leaders, to think about what type of development we want to take place along the central spine of our region; new development fees set to kick-in in 2019, and our cities are processing applications at a record pace.

But with so much pressure to hit an economic home-run with every new condo tower and apartment building, it’s often the most affordable housing that’s knocked down and replaced with smaller and more expensive units.

This is great for affluent young people working in the tech sector, or downsizing baby-boomers flush with cash from homes they sold for triple the price they paid. But it’s not as good for those on more modest incomes who want — or need — to take transit to work, or working-class families who need two or three-bedroom units, or for those who need the flexibility of reasonable rent.

Yes, density is needed, and I applaud the Region’s efforts, but it has to be density with diversity. Lining a street with coffee shops sounds great, but not if you have to displace the baristas and their families to build it. Not everyone is a tech worker (though many are) and not every job along the LRT corridor is in the tech sector. We also need homes along the LRT for people who prepare meals, dispense drugs and stock groceries; this transit system was built with them in mind, too.

Access to denser neighbourhoods isn’t just an economic issue. Getting people out of cars helps the environment, and the ability to walk places makes people much healthier. We should all have access to these opportunities.

I grew up at Young and Eglinton, and I’ve seen real estate prices along Toronto’s subway corridor explode. In Toronto, living within walking distance of a subway station is a luxury fewer and fewer in the GTA can afford; Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge is a long way off, but we have the chance to learn from those mistakes.

We need mechanisms to ensure people living along the LRT corridor today are able to remain in their communities as they undergo this period of change, and that new construction features different prices, tenures and unit sizes so that there is a mix of incomes, classes, lifestyles and ages living along, and benefiting from this new infrastructure. Unfortunately, this will not come from developers alone. But if our civic leaders make this a priority, we have a tremendous opportunity to create sustainable and successful neighbourhoods for everyone, and the region could even become an international leader in how to use mass transit to build inclusive and fair cities.