Everywhere I look, it seems that housing, or the lack of it, has become a major crisis. This is true across Canada, as well as in many European countries, as house and rental costs have skyrocketed, leaving so many individuals and families unable to afford homes. In this issue of the Times, we report on a new and creative initiative to provide affordable and stable housing for over 55’s in North Grenville. It’s a good news story that may be duplicated in other municipalities in the future.
But it is just one part of the housing crisis that faces us, and similar creative solutions need to be found to deal with other sectors of the housing market. A recent story in the Ottawa Citizen reported on the spread of tent cities in many major Canadian cities, and the efforts being made to regulate them, and to provide heat and power to the residents of what should have been temporary refuges.
Other cities have taken a very different approach and forcibly removed the tents and shelters that had been set up in local parks and vacant lots. The same story is told in other countries, this is not unique to Canada. It may seem to some that there is no homeless problem in North Grenville. We don’t see tents springing up in Riverside Park, for example. But the real situation is hidden here: so many people are couch surfing, staying with friends of relations, sleeping on floors and couches because they have no homes of their own.
We have heard of too many people who are working in this municipality, but having to commute from outside because they can’t afford homes in North Grenville. The creation of the Mayor’s Task Force on Affordable Housing is an indication of the true situation in our community, and there have been a few projects undertaken to help ease the pressure on housing, including the Habitat for Humanity Kemptville Korners project and the United Counties’ Courthouse Apartments project in Kemptville.
But the underlying cause of the crisis, at least here in North Grenville, goes back to previous councils and decisions on zoning, development, and density. I can remember, more than 15 years ago, a local resident applied to the Municipality for permission to put a trailer in his garden to house an elderly relative. He committed to it being a temporary thing, and even offered a financial guarantee that the trailer would be removed in time. Municipal staff approved the application, but Council rejected it, because they didn’t want to have infill housing and other unorthodox measures to become acceptable.
Today, the Municipality and United Counties are advertising an “Affordable Housing Information Session” which will discuss the matter of Secondary Suites or Garden Suites of the kind that resident asked for years ago. If only previous council had the vision and intelligence to think outside the box, instead of just approving so many applications for more and more housing developments. Their legacy is the current situation where we have a housing market that is out of the price range of so many local residents. Land prices increased enormously as the word got out that North Grenville, and Kemptville in particular, was “open for business”, as they put it. No application was unwelcome, all requests were granted. Infrastructure didn’t (and doesn’t) exist to cope with the huge and relatively sudden increase in population, traffic, and demands for services.
The word then from previous mayors and councils was “Grow or Die”, which was almost as ridiculous and laughable as their great motto: Green and Growing. We are still paying the price, literally, for their irresponsible and incompetent stewardship of our community. All recent and future councils can do is try to cope with the fallout from their decisions. Think, for example, of what we face because development in the Kemptville urban area was allowed to expand so quickly long before County Road 43 was able to cope with the increased traffic. Think of how difficult it has been for downtown businesses to survive after Colonnade Mall was approved without any rational plan for the downtown core’s economic future.
In some ways, we’ve been fortunate. One plan promoted by a previous mayor and council was to make CR 43 the new Merivale Road, cutting into the Ferguson Forest Centre lands. When asked how we would replace the green space of the FFC for walking, etc., we were told to go to Limerick Forest instead. The late Councillor Terry Butler was an honourable exception to that way of thinking. Those other politicians surely deserved their current place in the political wilderness.
We are where we are, and we have to deal with the fact. The imaginative and generous vision of those behind the housing projects mentioned above, Shalom Small Homes, Habitat and Humanity and the Courthouse Apartments, are making serious moves to make things better. Thanks are owed to them and those supporting them, and let’s hope for many more equally creative ways to provide stable and affordable housing to those who need it, those who want to live in this community.
