Ken Gray: NIMBY watch
 

Slowly but surely, Ken Gray has turned his one-note blog into a sounding board for NIMBYism across the city.
Now that he's tickled himself pink by creating the word 'extremification' to apply to all housing styles that aren't single detached (and surrounded by grass), the guy has really gone off the deep end, publishing letters from old women who don't like the size of their neighbour's house or landscaping.

It seems like arguing with him would be an exercise in futility - I know this well from an exchange about his views on intensification during a live blog session. He refused to respond to my questions about how we would avoid sprawl by adopting his 'don't build anywhere where there's people' planning direction. He wouldn't respond - he just said something to the tune that 'sprawl is bad, but so is building things that are out of character of the community', etc, etc.

If you complain ad nauseum about an issue but aren't willing to give a solution to a problem I believe it's because you don't have one, which makes your complaining (in his case, 'visionary planning') not worth the time it takes to speak it.

His monster homes post attracts the usual two rampant NIMBYS; the last one delivers this golden nugget on property rights (keep in mind we're talking about single detached homes):

sportsForKids
8:52 PM on August 23, 2011
"intensification should respect the neighbourhood. so yes you shouldn't get to (a) break rules (b) change your neighbour's quality of life. for example would you allow your neighbour to build a 10 story on their lot ? new buildings should be in character and currently developers build any garbage on existing streets and that's just wrong"

In other words, don't think you can buy a lot with your own money and build a family home (within zoning of 10 metres of height, being the norm) that looks any different than the house next to it, nor should there be any windows on the side of the home that might impact an old couple's privacy. You can have a house, but on my rules, not the city's,

Essentially, give your property-owning neighbour complete control of the design and building of the home they don't own nor are they paying for. This is the type of society Ken and his cronies are cheering for, and it is this demented mindset that we should all be able to tell everyone else what to do that is the problem with this city - a problem discussed a lot in the last week.

Gray has lost all respect except for the NIMBYs who write him regarding his "brilliant" (gag) postings, probably his neighbours, and shouldn't even have a sounding board. He's just encouraging the attitude/planning that's making the city unsustainable and unliveable.

I couldn't agree more. I find his blog almost unreadable now that he has seized on the "extremification" label.

It all started with his post on the insanity of building over the transitway trench, which was entirely a fear-mongering piece which raised the spectre of 35-storey buildings across the street from established homes. No matter that no one is actually proposing to do that, off he went with his argument and he hasn't stopped since.

The low point was when he published a rant from a downtown neighbourhood watch captain that railed against the condos being built on a vacant lot at Gladstone and Bank (with no neighbours of note), and those at Kent and Gladstone (all of 4 storeys tall). She went on to describe the homeless people searching blue bins for bottles as "miscreants" who were responsible for a wave of crime downtown.

Responsible journalism it is not. But I agree that there is no point arguing with him. He is intent on using his bully pulpit to rally the NIMBY's, and rationale rebuttals are not going to stop him.

You mis-spelled DOUCHEBAG. It's not N-I-M-B-Y.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

If housing is near housing children will die. If housing is near a school, children will die.

It's a miracle there's anyone left.

Yes, well, what's being lost in all this overheated rhetoric is the main problem people have with the intensification they experience on a day-to-day basis in places like Westboro: the proliferation of 2500+ sq.ft. semi-detached infills with dominating garages, the destruction of any trees that had the misfortune of being on the lot or on the public right-of-way in front of the lot, and paving over of entire frontages so that everyone in the infill can have their own car and not be blocked by anyone else's parked cars. It's basically like trying to shove exurban houses into urban lots. If I really wanted to I could go on to describe the new residents, but suffice to say they don't fit into the community any better than do their houses.

There are 'real' effects to all this, not just aesthetic and social ones. In some places there are flash floods in the streets when a slightly intensive rain event comes along from all the extra water that these houses and their driveways are shedding into the streets without any mitigation from the trees and gardens that were removed and paved over (rain barrels? storm water management? what's that?). At least condo and subdivision developers have to respect a few fairly basic planning rules with respect to things like run-off; not so the builders of single-lot residential infill.

Small-scale intensification (or in the case of the McMansions, redevelopment) is where both some of the best and some of the worst development is going on, and certainly does alot to foment the bad sentiment that the larger developments then attract as lightning rods.

I currently live in Kitchissippi (moving to Centretown in October!) and have been taking pictures of both the good and bad examples (and there are many of both) of small scale intensification & single-lot redevelopments for a while now (my dog has learned to become patient of the stop-start pace). When I have time I'll post some of them in a thread here.

Tearing down an older home on an urban lot and replacing it with a monster home is not intensification in the sense that term is commonly used, and is not being promoted by anyone. Complaints about those houses seem to be confusing this debate.

Ah, grasshopper. Thou dost not understand.

If Ken Gray doesn't like it, it's EXTREMIFICATION!

Yes - if four people tear down their 2,000 square foot house and replace it with one twice the size, no new people are living on that lot, so there is no intensification going on.
Intensification, as we all know, refers to human density, not home size. Maybe Ken should bone up on his terminology.
That said, he supports intensification in theory, just not in practice, which is what actually counts. He can't quite comprehend that intensification is trying to solve an actual, real, physical problem - the placement of people, density - and that supporting it in theory but opposing all examples of it being implemented doesn't solve or even help the problem.
Ken Grey is like the hypocrite environmentalist driving to a tree-cutting protest in an SUV, which he leaves idling with the AC on.

Quite right. I've edited my original post to better reflect what I was intending to say.

You have to love some nimby's they claim they want nice looking buildings and sub par buildings should npt be allowed so devlopers come along with nice buildigns plans and guess what they say no to that its to tall its to big its blocking the sun.

If it were possible to make a clean break between the two, I would tend to agree, but as a practical matter that's not possible.

What we tend to see a lot of is not the knocking down of an old house to replace it with a single monster house (i.e. your first sentence), but rather the knocking down of an old house (in some cases less than 1000 sq. ft.) to replace it with a monster semi-detached house.

So you're getting both "McMansionization" (i.e. replacing a small house with an enormous one) and intensification (i.e. replacing a single house with a semi-detached house) at the same time.

Then you add to that the fact that often these houses clear off any trees and landscaping from one end of the property to the other (including, at times, gardens that had literally decades of work put into them), have prominent garages, extensive paved frontage*, high-level entrances and then their new residents are as aloof to existing residents as the façades their houses present to the street and you have a slow-boiling seething dislike of "intensification" on your hands.

As Ottawan notes above, the major projects become the lightening rod for this dislike, perhaps because of their wider visibility and the fact that "consultations" and various community meetings are sometimes part of the process that they go through. It probably doesn't help matters that the larger developments are often pushed through with the same kind of aloofness and even arrogance exhibited by the developers of the smaller ones - developers declaring from the outset that they'll go to the OMB if they don't get their way really isn't conducive to a serious discussion.

"Extremification", is, somewhat ironically, a pretty apt description for this kind of redevelopment.

Somehow, I doubt this can go on forever. Sooner or later, the best friend of the developers and the planners at City Hall, the OMB, is going to come under increasing attention at Queen's Park. The OMB exists as a non-democratic institution within a democracy that routinely overrides the public or democratic will and is generally not seen to be acting in the public interest. The OMB's defenders like to compare it to the courts, and in the sense that the courts are also a non-democratic institution within a democracy they're correct. But the courts are also widely seen to act in the public interest, whereas the same cannot be said of the OMB. Sooner or later the OMB will be abolished or heavily reformed such that all or most Council planning decisions can no longer be overturned.

The danger is that the planning and development industry will have so poisoned the public's mood by then - my guess is that the OMB will carry out one outrage too many, or possibly a few of them in short succession across the province in the run-up to an election - that the pendulum will swing far too far in the opposite direction once power is finally returned to the public and their municipal representatives.


*These infills get away with a degree of paving over that you couldn't actually do in new suburbs. Most of the streets in Westboro don't have sidewalks and most don't have curbs either. In some sense, they're sort of like woonerfs and there are many advantages to it, not least is that there is a far more gentle transition from property to street. But it is also being taken advantage of by developers to create pairs of 25' wide driveways that would be impossible ion a street with curbs requiring curb cuts.

So, what are you going to do about it?

But on the bright side he has suspended his one-man crusade against light rail, and the double A ball crusade isn't bad either.

Or about this all-true (new?) word : "extremisprawlification" (sure the spelling might be awful) in reference to Barrhaven, Kanata, Carleton Place, Orleans, Rockland, etc.) Something Ken must like. Euh, I'm probably just crazy now. Sorry.

sprawlmageddon!

I like it! Now we know that David Reevely reads this forum on occasion, because he's posted here a half dozen times. I get the feeling that he's more pro-intensification (or at least sensible planning); maybe he'll pick up "Sprawlmageddon" and we can have a War of the Words in the Citizen blogosphere.

Small-scale infill and "extremification" are separate issues I think. Monster homes and large semis don't really go through the planning process, unless they go for a variance. But you can usually build a large, ugly out of scale building with or without a variance. Things like trees, garages, entrances, driveways, etc are a by-law issue or are permitted by existing rules.

There is an upcoming city meeting on this issue actually on Sept 14th, with proposed solutions to address some of these issues
http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co.../index_en.html
http://ottawa.ca/residents/public_co...utions_en.html

A lot of this comes down to plain, old opinion. If a house is within zoning (three stories or less, with certain distance to lot lines), then a neighbour's 'problem' with the house and, by association, Kenification, it's just bitching. I don't like my neighbour's rusty van, it's out of character with the SUV's on the street. I don't like my neighbour's paint colour, it hurts the eyes.
Once upon a tme houses were built in many styles and colours and heights, all on the same street!
These people with the rapidly appreciating homes and rapidly degrading quality of life in Ken's neighbourhood basically want to live in Barrhaven, but still be close to things. Nothing amiss, nothing different, no noise, no traffic. To hell with the countryside and our taxes, just leave me alone.

Again, if it's within zoning that has existed for decades, and the neighbour wants to do it, well, sorry - too bad. You still have your own yard and house and life that no one will touch. That's as far as your property rights go.

Nothing like miserly neighbourhood battles to welcome people to the great, bitchy city of Ottawa, where your neighbour demands their privacy while demanding to know everything you're doing on your own property.