Using small town patterns to guide Grey Highlands future growth

Dave Meslin says as he drives north on Hwy. 10 towards Grey Highlands, he sees small towns now looking more and more generic, with sprawl eating up farmland.

All the new commerce coming in seems to be franchises. “They’re building the same crap everywhere,” he said at a meeting about future growth last Tuesday in Markdale.

What he loves about Grey Highlands streets by contrast is “how many stores and restaurants are named after people.”

SHAPING GROWTH

“We’re not anti-growth at all,” he said at the meeting hosted by the Grey Highlands Municipal League.

Growth, he said, will bring diversity and mean more customers for local businesses.

But people can shape the growth if they get involved – not when the bulldozers are on a property, but at the policy and planning stage.

“If the people aren’t involved, the developers get whatever they want,” he told about 75 people at the meeting at Annesley church on June 25.

Instead, the Grey Highlands Municipal League residents group hopes to raise up “an army of nerds”, who know planning terminology and process, and can take their part in shaping their community.

Mr. Meslin said later the group members “were just excited to see so many people care about what growth is going to look like in Grey Highlands.”

He also noted the presence of municipal councillors as a really positive sign.

At the meeting, Mr. Meslin praised the proposed new Grey Highlands zoning bylaw for allowing more opportunity for mixed use.

Mixed use, mixed density and mixed incomes were among the terms that he explained and endorsed.

The idea of the Strong Towns group addresses scale and having neighbourhoods where you can get what you need without driving everywhere.

Mr. Meslin took a moment to address a term used and under attack online of “the 15-minute city”, which also promotes people walking to work, shop and entertainment.

Some view the 15-minute city as a cover for a movement that will eventually lead to people being corralled and controlled in small areas.

Mr. Meslin said the “Strong Towns” approach presented at the meeting is one that respects the way small towns and rural areas have always been.

He said that the evening was not about being trapped but about having choice, including having the option to walk to a local store.

It’s a very old idea, not a new one, to have different uses in a building or a neighbourhood, he said. But a thousand acres of residential accompanied by a huge Smart Centre is a very recent development.

GREAT NEIGHBOURHOODS

Those attending the meeting brain-stormed on what makes a great neighbourhood.

A Municipal League member came up to read off some of the ideas that people shared about what makes a great neighbourhood.

Independent businesses, community gathering places, parks, trees, signage, affordable housing, bike paths, sidewalks, clean streets, public art and more were mentioned.

Ben Caesar of the Municipal League spoke about a Strong Towns video about the economics of what he called the “car-centric” style of development.

It showed graphs illustrating that single-family residential development was a financial burden on the municipality, because of the cost of extensive servicing. Those subdivisions also take up the largest physical area in a city.

Economic activity and higher municipal tax revenues, the Strong Town graphs showed, are in mixed use downtowns and new development.

One example given was Guelph, Ontario, which decided about 10 years ago to encourage in-fill mixed-use development instead of annexing land to grow. Those developments contribute to the financial health of the city.

Some questions were raised about the Beaver Valley Development Group proposal at Talisman, which Mr. Caesar characterized as sprawl, because people would have to drive 20 minutes to a grocery store, hospital or other services.

Safety of people walking on streets is also aided by the same efforts that make them more attractive, with narrower streets, meridians and bump-outs that slow traffic.

PUSHING BACK ON SET-BACK

Regulations generally don’t favour the traditional “Main Street” any more, those gathered heard. The group has two projects right now that address that.

One is being involved in the proposed new Grey Highlands zoning bylaw, to see that more opportunity is opened up by that. Municipal League member Ken Roth talked about the zoning bylaw.

Another project is challenging rules on “centre line set-back”, which push storefronts farther off the sidewalk.

For the last number of decades, the setbacks from the centre of a county road or highway have been greater, he said.

He showed pictures of the east side of Markdale on Main Street, where buildings are pushed back from the road with the parking between the sidewalk and the building.

That means that anyone on the sidewalk must be cautious of cars from either side – the street or pulling out from the lot. It also makes the storefronts less prominent than in the traditional downtown, such as on the west side of Markdale on Main Street.

Mr. Meslin said that he looked at different regulations online.

Although a larger setback from the centre of the road on county roads is common, he said that Huron County makes an exception for county roads when they’re in settlement areas.

That’s a change that can be pursued through conversation and outreach, he said.

The evening ended with a stroll through different parts of Markdale, to get a feel for what the theory is all about.

DISCUSSION PERIOD

One person attending raised the point that affordable housing could be located in the old Markdale hospital.

“It’s in the hands of Brightshores,” Grey Highlands Councillor Paul Allen said. He said that it has been suggested that the town could acquire it for a dollar. “I think those days are gone – they want income from it, I believe,” Mr. Allen said. “It’s in the process, requests have been made.”

A member of the affordable housing group said the group has found that the sale for $1 is still possible, and encouraged people to write the CEO and the Brightshores hospital board to advocate for putting the old hospital to use to help the community that built it.

Mr. Allen is the planning liaison and chairs the hearings. He observed that there needs to be a change in how the community thinks before the ideas being spoken about that night are accepted.

At a couple of different applications for creating semis, he said, “the opposition we get is tremendous – people don’t want change.”

“Maybe the new subdivisions can be mixed use - infill is very difficult.”

Shannon Iadinardi said that residents can influence the planning process, speaking of her dialogue with the planner behind the Loon Call subdivision planned for the north end of Markdale.

“You just have to get involved, and put in the hours and figure out what the plan is.”

Respect, honour and shaping the land was mentioned in the land acknowledgement by Elly Green at the outset of the meeting, and was tied to the kinds of questions about what happens now on the local land.

M.T. Fernandes, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Dundalk Herald