BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected] or via the website. Please include your full name, daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a story titled 'Some residents worried they'll lose their 'voice' under new zoning bylaw,' published Nov. 14.
I attended and spoke at the public meeting Thursday night on ‘affordable housing’ and the upcoming bylaw changes in Barrie.
There were a couple of surprising incidents.
First and foremost is the name of the meeting — ‘affordable housing’ and not ‘bylaw proposals.’
Why is this surprising? Well, because what ‘affordable’ is has never been defined. Affordable by whom? Developers? Speculators? Hard-working families? Students? The top one per cent of millionaires in the country?
Until ‘affordable housing’ is replaced with a hard definition, it has no meaning, and only serves to antagonize the public giving changes a ‘sense of urgency.’
Folks, ‘it has no urgency until patently defined.’
Second, there were several people that spoke for groups. In two cases, they were ‘granted’ 10 minutes to speak instead of the five minutes that residents were granted. Apparently, they were granted this time because they were speaking on behalf of multiple ‘owners’ and/or groups.
In the first case, one consultant got up to speak on behalf of two groups and ‘dozens’ of owners. At the end of his first five minutes, Coun. Amy Courser challenged him, stating that he was taking 10 minutes on a single topic, not two five minutes representing the two different groups.
Regardless that she spoke ‘out of turn’ or didn’t ‘follow procedure’ in chambers, I congratulate her on voicing what I know every other person in attendance was thinking. This wasn’t fair.
He claimed that he was saving the audience the time it would take for the other to take the podium. A whopping 15 seconds, if that. Less if they were prepared.
Thanks, I’ll wait, and frankly, if the others couldn’t even be bothered to attend, their voices should not be heard.
In fact, by that same logic, I was speaking on behalf of my wife and myself. I should have been given 10 minutes. Another speaker spoke on behalf of six or seven other people she actually listed. She should have been granted 30 minutes or more.
In the second case, a man representing an architectural firm actually did get up to speak twice about two different topics. He went on at length about how his firm had built an "award-winning" building in Brampton and then proceeded to complain about the window-to-wall ratio and how it would drive up the costs.
Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I like windows. I went to a ‘state-of-the-art’ high school that looked and felt like a prison. All concrete with little slits for windows at the ends of corridors. It won an award, too. It still felt like a prison and I hated it.
One of the first things I did to my home was to install two skylights, and two more windows on the south, sunny side. Windows heat passively ... well, if the building is properly designed and positioned on the property to start with. Add a Trombe wall and you cut heating and cooling significantly.
I’d also like to address the issue that speakers had to state their name and where they lived. Why didn’t the consultants and the owners they represented? I want to know where the speakers live. Not where their office is located.
We all know why, but it needs to be stated. The ‘owners’ don’t live in Barrie and couldn’t be bothered to make the trek. They’re land speculators helping to drive up the costs and don’t care about the look of Barrie neighbourhoods.
They are the driving force behind driving up the prices of ‘affordable housing’ and, frankly, their opinions shouldn’t count.
Residents of Barrie, we are slowly and surely being manipulated down a path of renters, not homeowners, under the guise of ‘affordable housing’ and it will be a disaster.
Hasn’t anyone watched Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life? Remember the line George Bailey says, “(doesn’t owning their own home) make them better citizens, doesn’t it make them better customers?”
Yes. It does!
The revised bylaws will make a very few, non-Barrie people very rich, and a lot of people very, very poor.
Barrie is becoming the ‘wild west’ of developments as developers greedily look upon what they can buy and get away with.
This is not the Barrie that I want and I’m pretty sure that this is not the Barrie that the council wants.
Seaghan Hancocks
Barrie
