From Town to City: Milton's Infill and Intensification Plan

Last Wednesday I had the opportunity to participate in the second of two public meetings discussing plans to increase development and population density in central Milton - otherwise known as 'Infill and Intensification'.

The Province has mandated that, in order to accommodate increasing populations and to avoid sprawl into agricultural areas, that certain towns increase the population density of their built-up areas to reach (in the case of Milton) a minimum of 200 people + jobs per hectare by 2031.

In practical terms, this means allowing for taller buildings, and developing 'brownfields' and underutilized spaces. The plan has resulted in predictable resistance from some members of the community who are envisioning crops of high-rise condo towers springing up in the downtown core, but the reality, thankfully, is much less terrifying.



To start with, the area where they are talking about doing most of this development could definitely use a facelift. I remember when we first came to Milton 15 years ago to look for a house, the first impression we had driving west along Main Street was of a dingy, haphazard collection of industrial units, strip malls, vacant lots - even an abandoned paint factory. The paint factory was torn down a few years later, but the sizeable lot it sat on remains an empty eyesore.

When the Loblaw's Supercentre and the attendant retail complex was built a few years ago at the corner of Main and Thompson, it was literally in the middle of nowhere. But with the residential developments now fully established to the east and southeast of town, the continued existence of this industrial wasteland between 'old' and 'new' Milton has become even more detrimental to the integrity of the town.

Filling that gap with high density housing and retail will (hopefully) create a larger, continuous downtown centre that will be accessible, walkable, and integrated with the older and newer parts of Milton. Additionally, increasing population densities in an area which, fortuitously, includes the GO Station will make in-town, commuter and intra-regional transit far more efficient and cost effective.




Concerns were raised about the loss of parking space at the GO station, but apparently there are several plans in the works that should make that less of a problem. In addition to making it easier to walk or bike to the station, there are plans to add two new stations at Trafalgar and at Tremaine which should ease the pressure on the downtown Milton station considerably. Also, at some point the line is going to be extended west. This should help a lot because a significant percentage of people using the Milton GO station are actually from Guelph, Cambridge and Kitchener.

Other interesting plans in the works include:

- moving the GO parking lot to south of the tracks, leaving the Main St. frontage for retail and apartments / condominiums.

- extending Main St. to Trafalgar, giving access to the 401 and the future GO station there, thus relieving traffic congestion downtown.

- incorporating a park / trail corridor parallelling Main Street to the north, thus allowing an alternate east-west route for pedestrians and cyclists.

- additional intensification to the west of the historic downtown core to create a western 'gateway' into both the old and new downtown areas.

I'm personally pretty excited by all this. Short of stuffing the whole town into a time machine and sending it back 20 years, I see this approach as being the best way of counteracting the sprawling, uncontrolled, unbalanced residential development that has been going on for the past decade, and transitioning Milton from a medium-sized town to a small city.

It's a shame they couldn't have done the infill first, but it is what it is.

(There's lots more information about the Town's plan on their website.)

My Two Cents on the Boyne Survey: Part 1

After explaining why I never go to those public consultation meetings in my last post, I decided to go to one of those public consultation meetings tonight. Just to check it out.

The project in question was the Boyne Survey / Education Village development, which is to extend across the south of town from James Snow Parkway to the far side of Tremaine, and all the way down to Brittania Road. The area involved is larger than the entire town of Milton was when I first moved here fifteen years ago.



This was the second public consultation meeting, so we are well enough along in the process that the issues discussed were more a matter of how rather than whether the subdivision was to be built. Still, it was an interesting exercise, and the folks running the show did indeed seem interested in what we had to say.

Before going to the meeting, I took a drive around some of the new developments to check out the good, the bad and the ugly. In this way, I had a better idea of what some of the features being discussed actually looked like in a new development setting.


This is what they call 'Mixed Use Retail'. These are made to be similar to traditional storefronts with apartments above and parking in the back, and are a welcome change from the now ubiquitous 'big box' retail development. The problem with this particular one on Holly Ave. is that it's only on one side of the street. Maybe they just haven't gotten to the other side.



This is a bad retail / residential design. This retail complex includes the only grocery store in the area, and yet it's about as unwelcoming to the surrounding houses as it can get because all the stores have their backs to the street. You could walk into the complex between the buildings, but it really doesn't look like they want you to. They want you to drive in off of Thompson like a good little commuter.



This is what they call a 'community park'. It's a nice idea - a central gathering place with a roundabout and houses facing onto it. I went to a Christmas tree lighting there once. Only two problems: it's huge (almost as big as the Milton Fairgrounds), and there's pretty much nothing in it but grass, saplings, and a couple of wooden structures at either end for the mayor to stand on and flip a switch.



This is one of the two buildings that comprise New Life Church. They sit on a huge lot which is, as you can see in the background, completely cut off from the surrounding houses by a fence.



This is an interesting and different approach to townhouse design, again emulating older urban plans with garages in the back facing onto an alley. But the scale is wrong. It doesn't look like an alley - it looks like a street.


The issue of scale is something that came up more than once in our discussions, and I think it may hold the key to the fundamental difference between new developments and older ones. Driving through Hawthorne Village and (worse) the Sherwood Survey, I noticed that almost everything is bigger than where I live. The houses are bigger, of course. The streets are wider. The parks are bigger. The stores and parking lots are bigger. About the only things that are smaller are the house lots and the trees.

The result is a certain... wrongness... that is difficult to quantify or even really complain about. After all, if a park is good, a really really big park is better, right? Except that it'll take you ten shadeless, featureless minutes to get from one side to the other, so screw it - let's drive.

I'll tell you more about what we talked about at the meeting tomorrow.

Mattamy Quality?

Every once in a while, I check in at the Hawthorne Villager, a forum for residents of the big Mattamy development to the southeast of old Milton. Most of what gets posted there is fairly mundane - people looking for babysitters, trying to sell their snowblower, etc. - and most people who express an opinion seem fairly positive about their houses and their neighbourhood. But once in a while you run across a post by somebody who has issues that provides some interesting insights into life in the heart of Sprawlville.

Like this one, entitled "Mattamy lied to my wife":

I'm not sure where to go with this, but I'm seriously fed up with the BS Mattamy's been giving us since we moved in. I'm in HVE Phase I (closed end of May) and have had nothing but problems with the speed at which our 100+ list of PDI/30-day issues is being completed.

Our master ensuite bathroom is unusable due to the fact that we don't have a counter top or sink yet, as well as Mattamy installing the shower head on the wrong wall (I pointed this out to them at the frame walk and they did nothing about it) so that every time you turn on the shower tons of water is sprayed on the floor, not to mention getting drenched in cold water. A guy has come twice to install the sink but couldn't because of a lack of counter top. Is Mattamy really this disorganized? Furthermore, the entire counter needs to be replaced because whoever tried to install it completely ripped up a bunch of the boards trying to screw it all together.

The bedroom above our garage is at least 5 degrees warmer than the rest of the house, which will end up being 5 degrees colder than the rest of the house in the winter. An obvious insulation issue. How it passed Mattamy's "rigorous" energy-efficient test to obtain the certificate is a really good question.

Parts of our basement floor are bulging and has burst through at one location allowing one to see that it's only 1/4" thick. Minimum code states it needs to be at least 3" thick.

The engineered beams for the main floor have holes cut out of them larger than what is allowed, as well as some of the squash blocks completely removed to run wiring. This is a serious structural problem.

The rest of the post continues in the same vein, but what I found most surprising is the number of people chiming in with their own horror stories. As I said, most people on this forum seem pretty content with their houses aside from a few minor cosmetic glitches. But with this, we're talking serious structural and building code issues - and not just in this one guy's house.

One wonders just how common such problems really are.

_____________________

BTW, I know I haven't been posting much here lately. I've been very involved with the Liberal campaign, so that and my political blogging are likely to continue to consume my attention for the next, oh, twenty days or so.

So, barring anything really fascinating happening on the Milton municipal beat, I'll see you October 15th.

Garth on Sprawl

Our much maligned, beleaguered and beset MP Garth Turner managed to sum up many of the issues of urban sprawl on his blog today, with particular focus on the situation here in Milton. He even led with this shot of Mattamy's assembly line house factory:



I'm sorry, that just creeps me out.

Turner covers most of the bases, although he doesn't go so far as to present any concrete solutions. I suspect that there aren't many from a federal perspective. My response was as follows:

I got my first up-close look at where my new neighbours are living while (coincidentally) distributing Garth Turner fliers over the past few weeks.

Several things struck me:

1) In the two and a half or so hours I spent pounding the pavement, I saw exactly two other people using the sidewalks - one walking a dog, and another handing out newspapers.

2) The reason for this may be the fact that there is absolutely no shade to be found. Anywhere.

3) The second development I walked through wasn't bad, but the houses in first one (which was only a year old) all had peeling paint, heaved up paving and crumbling concrete on their steps and porches.

There are many, many things wrong with suburbia, particularly in its current, "insta-house" incarnation. Garth has covered most of them, but one thing we all have to remember is that the people living there aren't the enemy.

Too often in Milton I've heard disparaging, marginally racist comments made about "those people" who have suddenly invaded our town, as if somehow they are to blame for the mess. In fact, not only are they the victims in all this, they are actually responsible for the only upside in this whole fiasco: added racial and cultural diversity in Milton.

Hell, I can actually buy some decent East Indian junk food now!

By all means, blame the developers, although they are only doing what corporations do - maximizing profits. Even better, blame the municipal politicians who, seduced by the siren song of millions in added property taxes and development fees, have rubber stamped every single development application that has crossed their desks with the sole caveat that there be at least one Big Box complex for every eight square kilometres of McHouses.

The fact that they have suddenly realized that all the development fees they've been charging don't begin to cover the costs of servicing these developments, and in fact come too late to help anyone for years after they move in, elicits exactly zero sympathy from me.

And yet, they keep handing out those permits like candy and continue to leave all the fussy business of urban planning to corporations whose sole purpose is to squeeze as many high-priced, low-cost houses as they can into hundreds of undervalued acres of former farmland that we may never, ever get back.

They should all be run out of town on a rail.

A Chat with Peter Haight

There are few people in Milton more knowlegeable or passionate on the subject of Milton's sprawl problem than gallery owner and ex-council candidate Peter Haight. What he knows hasn't made him any happier, but it does make him fascinating to talk to. If a bit... discouraging.



For those of you who don't live here, Sargent Farms is a chicken processing plant located right beside Sixteen Mile Creek in the middle of downtown Milton. Next door to a pub. Every day, large trucks full of live chickens drive into town and truck loads of dead chickens drive out - all through the heart of our historic downtown.



By all accounts they are good corporate citizens and a fairly major employer, although most of their employees are from out of town. And I'm sure it was perfectly reasonable for them to be where they are when they first set up shop - back in the 1940s! Today, I'm sure even they would agree that it's ridiculous.

Trouble is, solving the problem would require two things that are in pitifully short supply with our town council:

1) money, and
2) the willingness to admit that there is a problem

Town of Milton Pats Itself on the Back

From Friday's Champion:

Town doing 'outstanding job': CAO

While things may not be perfect when it comes to the timing of development and infrastructure in Milton, Town staff says that overall it's doing a good job in managing growth.

...CAO Mario Belvedere told council he feels that generally the Town has done an outstanding job in managing growth.

He acknowledged there might be "hiccups" when it comes to things like the timing of road construction.

"But other than that we've done a pretty darn good job," he said.

Town Director of Planning and Development Mel Iovio shared similar sentiments.

He said the planning, development phasing and financial agreements the Town has struck with developers have generally resulted in a controlled and logical growth pattern.

BTW, that would be this pattern:


But I digress...

Town Director of Engineering Services Paul Cripps pointed out that some roads projects are being fast-tracked through the Accelerated Transportation Capital Program, such as the widening of Derry Road from Tremaine Road to Bronte Street.

The `Accelerated Transportation Capital Program` was brought in after the Town clued into the fact that the development fees they were charging wouldn`t be enough to cover the required arterial road improvements to service the new developments, and that the fees they would be receiving wouldn`t reach the Town`s coffers until long after the work needed to be done. So they worked out a deal where Mattamy and other developers would supply the capital needed to fast-track the road improvements, and the Town would pay them back without interest at a future date.

In other words, our town is currently tens of millions of dollars in debt to the very same housing developers who are asking them to approve still more housing developments.

I`m no expert, but that seems to me to be the very definition of a conflict of interest. But hey, kudos to the Town of Milton for doing such an exceptional job of letting the developers do their job for them.

Video Post #1: My House

Since this blog is all about local everything, I thought I'd start with the most local locale I could think of: my own house.

My house is something of a rarity these days - a small (about 1,200 sq.ft.), older detached home with a big yard and lots of trees in a mixed neighbourhood. We have no central air. We have no dishwasher. We have no granite countertops. It's messy and the lawn's a wreck, but in the grand scheme of things it's a very comfortable and relatively sustainable place to live.

For someone who grew up in suburbia, this is paradise.



(Just so you know, today's video blog was brought to you from my swanky new laptop while eating lunch at Coffee Culture at Main & Commercial in Milton. Free WiFi and the best grilled panini in town. Sweet.)