8 March 2022
Do you know what you want downtown Kitchener to look like? Can you envision it in your mind’s eye? I ask because what it’s becoming is a forest of towers, the approved but not yet ratified 44 stories for 30 Francis Street now foremost among them.
Was that the goal, the vision all along? Or was it that it happened while no one was looking, no-one, that is, except the plutocrats, the ones with the money, and their enablers in government? Or was it that the enablers didn’t care because SOMETHING - all those cranes, all that “development” - was happening in Kitchener at last?
Consider this. The City’s 1985 zoning by-law (85-1) is being replaced in stages by the new 2019 one (2019-01). For some reason, the latter has not yet reached the downtown, what’s known as the Urban Growth Centre (UGC), which is still subject to 85-1. Yet this is where the forest of towers is being erected. My guess is that 2019-01 will come into effect after all the towers have been approved, if not yet built.
Consider also that Kitchener’s UGC, with a ratio of 212 residents or jobs per hectare (RJs/ha), has already exceeded the density of 200 RJs/ha mandated by the Province. Note further that the 225 RJs/ha required by the City’s Official Plan (OP) is projected to be 334 by 2031 “based on existing zoning.” There’s no need for high-rise towers to meet density targets.
So the proposal for 30 Francis Street is proceeding on the basis of zoning by-law 85-1 and the 2014 OP. The by-law stipulates for the site a floor space ratio (FSR) of 2.0. The developer wants an FSR of 18.3, a mere nine times bigger. We’re talking different planets, one the Earth, the other somewhere close to Neptune.
But wait, that’s not fair. A development project may receive “bonuses” for providing “community benefits.” In this case the benefits are said to be: building housing in the UGC, installing bike racks, using “LEED-inspired design” (something that bears an unknown relationship to certified LEED standards), capturing rainwater for “irrigation” of a green area atop the podium, installing some electric vehicle parking spots, making 19% of units “barrier-free” (a building code requirement, not what “accessible” means, according to John MacDonald) and fixing up Francis Green. The cherry on the donut is a $600,000 donation to Indwell for an affordable housing project at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church.
In short, for building housing, to minimally expectable standards, tossing in a tiny amenity and making a tax-deductible charitable donation, the developer gets an 800% increase in the size of the build. What might have been four storeys becomes forty-four.
There is, I aver, a blazing contradiction between the idea of city planning according to a vision of the city, and the idea of rewarding the developer of an individual project for meeting barely acceptable standards by allowing a building to be erected that bears no relationship with what the by-law envisages.
A former Kitchener planner explained bonusing to me. It’s a game of seduction (my words, not his). You offer the developer goodies so as to tempt them to do the right thing, thereby acknowledging that you can’t tell them what to do because the private property rights of the big owner are sacrosanct. The democratic polity must, in the end, bow to the plutocrats who hold the aces, and to those of that polity’s representatives and administrators who are the plutocrats’ happy (or unhappy) enablers.
And so it is that the housing supply is manipulated by the 25% of owners in Ontario who are investors, who, with their partners across the country, are evidently happy to keep 1.3 million homes in Canada vacant, and by other land-owning investors in Ontario who are withholding from the market 250,000 residential units in the “larger municipalities” by not building them despite being granted building permits to do so. According to local mayors the figure for Waterloo Region is 36,000 withheld units; for Kitchener it’s 20,000.
Meanwhile, the forest of inhuman-scale, unhealthy, climate-destroying, backward-looking towers is assembled, the rich and those who service them prosper, young tech professionals get 500 expensive square feet to live in, while the poor, the precariously housed and precariously employed, in short the 50% or more of residents who can’t afford current housing prices, are forced to live in inadequate housing or are pushed out into the nether regions or into homelessness and shelters.
The 44-storey tower of condos proposed for 30 Francis Street, comprising about 75% one-bedroom units, is the material embodiment and symbolic expression of a City blind to its own propensity for making itself unliveable.
Peter Eglin
Postscript: the City of Kitchener’s Planning and Strategic Initiatives committee approved the proposal on March 7. It goes before Council for ratification on March 21.
1. Liz Monteiro, “Kitchener councillors approve the tallest tower project in Waterloo Region,” Record, 9 March 2022: https://bit.ly/3MzxWjz.
2. Kitchener Growth Management Strategy: 2021 Annual Monitoring Report. October 4, 2021: Figure 9, accompanying text and section 8, A Place to Grow Implementation: Urban Growth Centre. https://bit.ly/3C4cP41.
3. Farrah Merali, “Investors now make up more than 25% of Ontario home buyers, pushing prices higher, experts warn,” CBC News, 23 November 2021: https://bit.ly/3ou6r0h.
4. “New data shows Canada still has 1.3 million vacant homes, some improvements seen,” Better Dwelling 16 February 2022: https://bit.ly/3pHYiWM.
5. Berry Vrbanovic, Dave Jaworsky, Kathryn McGarry and Jeff Lehman, “Waterloo Region mayors call for collaboration to fix housing crisis,” Waterloo Region Record, Tuesday, 18 January 2022: https://bit.ly/3MvXJZN.
6. Catherine Thompson, “Buying a home out of reach for half of Kitchener households,” Waterloo Region Record, 21 November 2019: https://bit.ly/3pOpiUK.
7. Dawn Cassandra Parker, “Larger builds lead to less-livable cities,” Waterloo Region Record, Tuesday, 22 February 2022, A9: https://bit.ly/3MvxUsM.
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