How Will Kingston’s Housing Dramas Play Out?skeletonparkartsfest.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/TheSkeletonPress-1.pdf · Neighbourhood focused, pulp-based journalism Last fall another

Neighbourhood focused, pulp-based journalism

Last fall another act in a long-standing drama played out here-abouts. It was familiar to anyone who has watched local politics unfold over the years. Controver-sies over whether the Big Rink downtown (now the “Leon’s Cen-tre”) would lose money. Whether the Third Crossing (the Span to Sprawl) was needed and will pro-duce huge cost overruns. Wheth-er high-rises should be built on the Block D waterfront. Most re-cently, whether a proposed Prin-cess Street highrise was too high. ACT I

Act One, just before the mu-nicipal election, got a bit heat-ed. Property developer Ben Pilon (owner of several prop-erties in the Skeleton Park area) strode the stage, having apparently worked himself into a lather about mayoralty candidate Vicki Schmolka.

She was, he claimed, “waging a war against developers.” Every drama relies on conflict, and Mr. Pilon served it up. The may-oralty candidate was, he sug-gested, painting him as an “evil developer” and “the enemy.”

It sounded like the script for an old-fashioned swashbuck-ler. Apparently Ms. Schmolka had asked at a public meeting whether Kingston Mayor Bry-an Paterson had received cam-paign contributions from Mr. Pilon and other developers.

“It is fair to ask who is paying campaign contributions,” she shrugged.

Then, on the eve of the election, a dozen businesses purchased a full-page ad in the Whig Stan-dard. Introducing themselves as “your” local developers, they claimed that “some can-didates” were focusing on the idea that “developers” (they did indeed insert quotation marks around the word) are “bad for Kingston.” Far from it, argued heavy-weights like Homestead, Mr. Pi-lon, John Armitage and Brae-bury Homes. They build the sewers and sidewalks, create jobs and boost land values. They even “build parks” while preserving “wetlands, flood plains, natural habitat and the waterfront.”

The preening self-regard aside, what was the point of a clear-ly political ad that carefully avoided mentioning any can-didate names?

Because of a related drama, Ms. Schmolka was part of a group one wag dubbed the “four fabulous, feisty females” who have been energetically opposing de-

How Will Kingston’s Housing Dramas Play Out?

By Jamie swift

Time will tell. As will politics.

veloper plans to build what was initially to be a 21-sto-rey condo town on downtown Princess Street. Calling them-selves “Vision for Kingston,” they had raised some $75,000 to appeal the high rise plans of Waterloo developer IN8 to the Local Planning and Ap-peal Tribunal (formerly the Ontario Municipal Board).

By the time of the 2018 mu-nicipal election, the group had published and sold Dogs of Kingston calendars, held bake sales and garage sales, or-ganized trivia nights and pub-lished a 2017 graphic booklet “Fighting Tower Power.”

Samantha King, a Skeleton Park area resident, has been one of Ms. Schmolka’s partners in offering what the group claims is a vision that does not equate downtown density with high- rise towers. She is proud of her

group’s success in mobilizing support for the pricey appeal, noting that their biggest dona-tion was $1,000 and that they had mobilized hundreds of people in the campaign to ar-gue that the tower proposal vi-olated both Kingston’s Official Plan and its zoning by-laws.

“We showed very clearly in our evidence that high rises do little to boost the economy of down-town and in fact might detract from it,” said Ms. King. “The thing that makes downtown at-tractive to tourists and residents alike is its human scale. This is about speculative capitalism. It’s not about building housing.”

As it turned out, Kingston was saved from Ms. Schmolka when Bryan Paterson was returned to office. But a first glance at the new council shows that it may have tilted away from those who would surely nod

“We showed very clearly in our evidence that high-rises do little to boost the economy of downtown and in fact might detract from it ”

Skeleton Park area resident Samantha King was one of the “four fabulous feisty females” who successfully challenged the Princess Street high-rise at the Local Planning and Appeal Tribunal. Phot0 by Chris Miner

Jamie Swift is a Kingston writer who has lived in the Skeleton Park area

for 30 years

Neighbourhood focused, pulp-based journalism

tion. Council unanimously voted to add some voices with first hand understanding of the longstanding crisis. City hall hurriedly started to cast about for some tenants.

“Without political will, city council`s placing affordable housing on its Annual Prior-ity List does little to solve the affordable housing crisis in Kingston,” says Alice Gazeley, veteran affordable housing advocate and board member of Town Homes Kingston…until the city took over that NGO and got rid of its board. “Paying lip service to a crisis affecting a significant per-centage of the city highlights a lack of leadership and an indifference to those citizens who temporarily or for longer periods struggle to provide a home for themselves and their families.”

approvingly at Premier Doug Ford’s current open-for-busi-ness offensive. Four politi-cians who supported IN8 are no longer on council. Time will tell.

Two newbies are former Green Party candidates who might not entirely agree that construction companies and property developers really are in the vanguard of preserving “wetlands, flood plains, natu-ral habitat and the waterfront.”

It’s also uncertain whether the new council will alter things at city hall, where the IN8 melodrama featured a councillor whose realtor day job offered IN8 units for sale on his website. And where im-portant desks have long fea-tured In-Trays, Out-Trays and Defer-to-Developer-Trays.

ACT II

This part of the drama began a few short weeks after the municipal election. On No-vember 9, the report of the Local Planning and Appeal Tribunal landed on those desks. (It’s worth keeping in mind that the city had chosen to play no role in defending its own Official Plan at the tribunal hearings, leaving the task up to the citizens who or-ganized the trivia night fund-raisers.) Tribunal adjudicator David Lanthier’s ruling sided squarely with those who had argued that a 16-storey con-do high-rise had no place in downtown Kingston. (A Queen’s History and Law graduate, Mr. Lanthier is fa-miliar with Kingston.)

The IN8 scheme “fails to con-form to the policies requiring [that] new development, revi-talization and intensification must be balanced with, com-patible with, and preserve, the cultural heritage resources and unique historic character of the Downtown.”

High-rise opponents had become accustomed to being denounced as selfish NIMBYists who insist on painting property devel-opers as evil enemies. So they were pleased by one particu-lar conclusion: “It is the Tri-bunal’s view that within the expressed concerns of those Participants who might be identified as being ‘opposed’

“These days it ’s hard to get private sector builders to admit they have no interest in affordability.”

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to development in the Down-town area, there can be found a real alignment with the City’s guiding policies and principles which do pro-mote development, intensifi-cation and vitality within the Downtown area of Kingston but which impose… checks and balances.”

Whether the decision affects other downtown high-rise plans (including Homestead’s pro-posed mega-towers near Queen and Wellington) is uncertain. Mayor Paterson was quick to insist to a Whig reporter that it was merely “a decision about a specific development proposal at a specific location. There are still lots of other op-portunities to explore taller buildings in other locations, in the right locations.”

How the new council responds to such schemes will speak volumes about its political priorities.

No sooner had conversations about implications of the LPAT decision started than IN8 filed an appeal against it in an Ottawa court.

Ms. King immediately denounced the gambit as “punitive.”

“They want to bleed us dry,” she argued, citing the thou-sands of dollars that will be needed should a judge grant leave to appeal. Why, she won-dered, would a Waterloo de-veloper file in Ottawa? The Vision for Kingston lawyers are based in Toronto. Travel to Ottawa over the course of what might turn into a two-year appeal would boost V4K costs substantially.

What will the city and the new council do?

It could sit on the sidelines, as it did at the LPAT hearings. It could side with Vision for Kingston, defending its own Of-ficial Plan. Or it could side with IN8. Time will tell.

Aside from the particulars of this ongoing development fight, another issue looms: affordable housing.

Kingston’s record in promot-ing rent-geared-to income has been woeful. The wait list for affordable housing in 2017

was 1,303 according to the United Way. Since 2006, 431 affordable units have been built. At that rate it will take 30 years for people on the waiting list to find afford-able shelter. And that doesn’t count those in need who ar-en’t on the list. As well as peo-ple, struggling with a split-lev-el labour market, who may be desperate by 2044.

Kingston’s vacancy rate is the second lowest in Cana-da. Yet city hall’s approach to affordable housing has been to pay developers to include some non-market units in new buildings and to then use provincial funds to sub-sidize rents. But after 15 years the units can be converted to market rents.

“The result is no risk to the landlord,” argues councillor Jim Neill. “It may benefit devel-opers’ business plans, but this is not a long-term solution.”

Here’s the problem. Market solutions just don’t work for people struggling to pay the rent. Market solutions mean market failure when it comes to housing people with mod-est incomes.

But, according to “your lo-cal developers” and their pre-election ad, “Our indus-try…satisfies the need for all types of housing” (emphasis added).

So canard is not just French for a duck. It’s a false or fabri-cated story. These days it’s hard to get private sector builders to admit they have no interest in affordability. IN8 boasts it’s “at the forefront of the indus-try in creating highly prof-itable, durable and trendy designs proven to be continu-ally favoured among the local target groups.”

Over 80 years ago, the indus-try was less concerned about burnishing its image. A De-pression-era brief by Cana-da’s construction industry to the Parliamentary Commit-tee on Housing stated a bald fact that still matters 80-plus years later. “Our investiga-tions of housing for low in-come groups show that pro-vision of this class of housing cannot ultimately be profit-able for private enterprise. The responsibility of housing these groups is, in the final analysis, the responsibility of the state.”

Clearly, it’s up to the city to take a more proactive, cre-ative approach to non-market housing, in partnership with senior levels of government and non-profits. Will the may-or’s sudden prioritization of affordable housing and the city’s recently announced housing task force generate such an approach? Or is the latter the time-tested strategy of punting an issue into the future in the hopes it will go away? Time will tell.

An early hint came in late February when the city an-nounced the composition of a 10-member task force. It ini-tially included two develop-ers and a commercial realtor. Seems the mayor and the civ-il servants somehow figured their knowledge of the hous-ing market gives them insight into rent-geared-to-income housing. Tellingly, the initial composition included no tenant with lived experience of struggling with unafford-able rents.

Bryan Paterson was forced into an embarrassing climb-down when local activist Ivan Stoiljkovic immediately addressed council, pointing out the glaring contradic-

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