30-40 Margaret Ave | 3 fl townhouses | Planned

[ijmorlan]

I don't think it's the case that "everyone would be happy"...it's just that we never listened to all the voices. We still don't, although it's not entirely a bad thing that we listen to more (although it would be nice if we were less racist and classest in who we listen to), but it's a shame that those who are being listened too aren't being more responsible with their voice that they now have.

I don’t mean literally everybody, but the general feeling was that industry was prosperity, and up to a point that was (and is) true. Now we want to be wealthy but we don’t want to see a factory. We want to live in the city and never have a building near us replaced with a bigger building (especially not if poorer people might move into it; or in other situations especially if wealthier people might move into it).

While many of these not-wants end up having little impact on what is built, a related set of not-wants is encoded as law in the zoning code, meaning that all sorts of decisions which are the business of nobody but the property owner are instead subject to mandatory public comment and may be nixed by elected or unelected officials. The example I always use is one of those zone change application signs I once saw, which went up on a gas station. The proposed zoning change? From “gas station” to “gas station with convenience store”. In other words, they had to get a zone change to sell chocolate bars out of the station office. But nobody who already has a gas station as a neighbour has any business objecting to it beginning to sell a few things on the side.

Similarly, it’s nobody’s business if I start offering music lessons in my home (OK, maybe my common-wall neighbour), or grow vegetables in the front yard, or take in a boarder (I’m looking at the City of Waterloo rental bylaw). I think these ones are pretty unarguable; but I would go further and say that it’s really nobody’s business if I want to replace my house with a short row of townhouses or open a corner grocery store. These are all just small steps in the evolution of the city.