Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(February 24) - Libraries are destinations. Places where people go so they can say they went there. This used to be the stuff of museums and art galleries. You would get on the bus, go into the city and make a day of it. The museum, the gallery, the library are magnets. They draw you in and, if they are properly situated and designed, they keep bringing you back. They are people places and there is nothing quite like them for livening up a downtown.

We came another big step closer to completing the puzzle of downtown revitalization last week. Council approved the specific location and general design of the new central library building. With two “destination” buildings anchoring the northern and southern edges of the downtown, there is great promise for the prosperity of the shops between them.

A friend sent me a link to a very interesting website that explains all this very well. It is the Project for Public Places . It describes itself as a “non-profit organization dedicated to creating and sustaining public places that build communities.” Just wandering through the website will give you an education in the intelligent design of community spaces. The common element in all the designs is people. If a downtown does not attract people, it will never thrive.

Despite my serious misgivings about where the planning priorities were lining up in the centre of Guelph, it is making sense now. There will be a transportation hub, parking, green space and healthy businesses. The ingredients are lining up well.

The timing is even right. There will be a chorus of people saying the library is too expensive for the hard economic times we are in. I disagree. The sooner we can get the shovels in the ground, the sooner we can start getting more Guelphites working. The post office building was built as a public works project in the dirty thirties. Now we can’t imagine downtown without it.

Approval of the project ran into some turbulence because of its potential impact on the Family Thrift Store. This business has a lot of street support. Friends of the store mounted a fast Facebook campaign and rallied to its defence. Council wisely decided that the fate of the public library can’t depend on the survival of a used goods shop. If its services are really needed it will find a home somewhere else.

The question of building ownership is still up in the air. There are at least three choices available. The poorest alternative would be to turn the project over to a private developer and lease back the space. The former design options showed a building complex housing the library, a parking garage, and commercial and residential space. An argument could have been made for a type of co-operative ownership model. Now that the library will be in its own building at the north end of Baker Street, there is no good reason for ownership to be anything other than public.

The Public Library Board, of which I am a member, has owned the building and its contents for more than 100 years. This is a fine tradition that should not stop just because we are entering a recession.

It is generally acknowledged that the cause of this economic meltdown was a drive to more and more uncontrolled globalization. The way out will be through regulated regionalization. The people who brought us to the brink of financial disaster dismiss this scornfully as protectionism. It is a mystery why anybody would continue listening to them. There is nothing wrong with protecting the communities in which we live, work and raise our families. It is the sensible thing to do.

As they say on the Public Spaces website, “libraries are now being included in downtown revitalization projects and other urban and suburban development plans.” It’s been going on across North America for the past 10 years or so. Library spending has a healthy return on investment. The return is partially economic, but it has a much wider impact.

Healthy libraries make healthy communities. Last week city council moved Guelph towards the right side of the curve. Let’s stay there.

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(February 17) - People in Guelph sure do like their old buildings. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Loretto Convent. Some people stopped me on the street wanting to know how I could even consider demolishing it. I should make it clear that I am all in favour of keeping the old building in an upright position. The debate over what use is made of it is over. Money has been acquired, plans for its conversion are afoot and work has begun.

We are now in Heritage Week, as good an opportunity as we can get for taking stock of what we have and what we want to keep. Yesterday used to be called Heritage Day. That was because February 15 is the anniversary of the adoption of the Canadian flag. When Ontario declared the third Monday of February as a statutory holiday last year, the Liberals chose to call it Family Day instead. It’s not surprising they turned their backs on Heritage Day. They don’t like being reminded of their dismal record of protecting historic buildings like the Mitchell farm house.

That never to be forgotten old building became a symbol and a rallying cry. Whenever a stone structure is about to be turned into a pile of rubble, the call goes out. We reach for our placards and mill about, chanting “Remember the Mitchell!” And so we should. It’s worth being careful when deciding the future of our past. Once it is torn down, it doesn’t come back. That’s another lesson we learned from the Mitchell house. Be very, very skeptical when a developer promises to number and store all the stones so a building can be reassembled somewhere else. In fact, be more than skeptical. Don’t believe it. It isn’t going to happen.

Which gets us back to the convent. It has been saved, and it will become the new civic museum. The diocese wanted to demolish it. The upkeep was too expensive. The public wanted to save it. We saw the beauty of the shell, but not the asbestos, lead, mould and other toxic material inside. The museum needed a bigger home, and the convent needed an occupant. A host of needs converged and the convent building became a suitable answer for all of them.

It wasn’t a win-win. What we have up on Catholic Hill is far from a marriage made in heaven. The museum was never the best possible use for the convent building, but it quickly became the only possible use.

There is another aspect of preservation to which we need to pay equal attention. Our natural heritage. The rivers and forests and wetlands. The hills and valleys. The rivers. All these features define our geography and our culture. Whether we deal with a physical building or an open landscape, we have to balance what we have with what we want. We want our city to be a healthy place for our children. It also has to be a welcoming place for the new families who will move here.

The city is developing an environmental inventory. It will map the significant, and the sensitive, environmental features within the city. It should, and will, be used as a guide for future development of areas such as Hanlon Creek. The business park had a long gestation period. It has been studied, and studied again. The city needs it. It might help preserve another part of Guelph’s disappearing heritage –having a job to go to. The buildings will go on top of land that once gave life to trees and other vegetation and animals. There is wetland down there that needs preserving just as much as the finest farmhouse or the classiest convent.

An understanding of the ecological features of our urban landscape is essential to measuring the impact of growth. Development isn’t always bad. Uncontrolled development is. Guelph isn’t breaking new ground. We are moving back to reclaim the Smart Guelph commitment to social, environmental and economic health.

As we move through Heritage Week, give a lot of thought to our limestone buildings and our farmhouses. Also think about our landscape. Any city that can get excited about an unheated cobbler’s shed ought to get downright passionate about the fish in Hanlon Creek.

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(February 10) - It’s a squeaky, creaking old world out there. You don’t notice it until you start hearing it properly. I am now. I am into my second week as a hearing aid wearer. I’m a long way from deaf, but I was a long way from blind when I started wearing glasses. Now it’s not just the sights that are in focus. The noise is, too.

What noise there is! I didn’t realize how creaky a hardwood floor can be. Or what a racket is made folding a sheet of paper. The other day I was coming out of Planet Bean’s Grange Plaza store and nearly jumped out of my skin. A snow plow sounded like it was bearing down on me. It was halfway across the parking lot. Then there was the Farmers’ Market. It used to be that hundreds of people could shop there in relative peace and quiet. Now they bellow at each other. All at the same time.

On the second day I had the things in my ear, I was in a library board committee meeting. I thought I should apologize for speaking so loudly, that I was trying to adjust to them. The other people said no, I was actually talking more quietly than usual. I thought I was shouting. That’s what it’s like walking around with a microphone and speaker stuffed in each ear.

When hearing starts to go, it is usually the higher frequency sounds that become inaudible first. It seems to happen so gradually that you fail to notice it. When vision starts to go, you do notice. The world starts getting a little bit blurry. Then a lot. You’d have to be blind not to see it.

With hearing loss, you don’t think it’s you at first. It is other people who start mumbling. Many men don’t hear their wives. Some of them can’t.

We learn to compensate and get on with it. Then we have a life altering experience. Like cataract surgery. I have been there as well. With mine, the world became so cloudy it was like looking through a glass coated with Vaseline. With a plastic lens I could see more clearly than I had since I was a child. It was great. Like most people, I wished I could have done it sooner.

Now with a pair of souped-up, computer-driven gizmos in my ears I hear better than I could in years. I could always hear something. Now I hear everything. Life is better with plastic eyes and ears.

With music, you start losing the high notes. It’s so gradual you don’t notice, but when you miss them, you miss a lot. Think about Jimi Hendrix. Even though he’s almost 40 years dead, he’s sounding the way he should all over again. He’s the man who showed the world how a guitar should sound. Listen to him again for the first time. Do it without those little bud-type ear phones. They’re not that good to begin with, and totally incompatible with hearing aids. Get proper ones and Jimi will come back to life for you.

Most of us wear glasses these days. Some just for reading, some just for driving. Some for everything. We don’t think of ourselves as visually impaired. We don’t worry that by putting on a pair of glasses we make a spectacle of ourselves.

A lot of people who should wear hearing aids don’t. There is a stigma to hearing impairment. Shouldn’t be, but there it is. It’s considered a disability, and who wants one of them?

Glasses have become so socially acceptable that they are fashion statements. Not so with hearing aids. They’re not cool. You’ll never hear someone open a conversation by saying, “Wow, I love your hearing aids. They suit your hair and put a creak in your ear.” They’re more likely to pretend they don’t notice. Or look pityingly at you and ask when did you have to start wearing them.

Glasses and hearing aids do the same thing. They bring the world into focus. They help you to sort out what you want to see and hear. One prevents you from walking into brick walls, the other from sound walls. There is no shame in wearing either.

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(February 03) - Like a band of Detroit auto executives going to Washington, the Guelph land developers went to Carden St. last week. They sang from the same karaoke disc. It was a hurting song, the kind that used to bring tears to the eyes of hardened politicians. The fiddles were crying, the pedal steels were wailing. Sadly, for them at least, everyone on the dance floor had heard the song once too often. Enough tears didn’t flow from enough eyes. The boys had their hands out, but all they went home with was a fistful of Kleenex.

What got them excited enough to show up at city hall? The very thing that would ordinarily put the rest of us to sleep. Development charges. The city wanted to increase them. The home builders wanted to freeze them. As it turned out, council had the good sense to tell them no. A freeze would have cost all of us money. Possibly as much as $20 million over five years.

This is roughly how it works. Developers buy land as cheaply as they can get it and sit on it for a while, until there are enough people coming to live here that more homes need to be built. The developers build the houses, sell them at a tidy profit, and move on to wherever they have more empty land to speculate with. Everyone is happy. Families have homes, developers have profits, and the city has an expanded tax base. Life is good.

The fly in the ointment, though, is that the city has to run storm water drains, waste water drains, clean water pipes, and other mundane things to the places where people want to live. That costs money. Under the routine rules of city life, it is paid for through development charges. It’s a cost recovery arrangement. The home builders pay and pass the cost over to the home buyers. Everyone is still happy. Life is still good.

The other fly in the ointment is that developers are never content with being happy. They always want to be happier, which is what they would be if they didn’t have to pay higher development charges. They would prefer to have the city eat the cost and spit it out into the bottomless property tax bucket. The cost could have been as high as $4 million a year if development keeps going like gangbusters. It could have been as low as $1 million a year if everything slows to a crawl. Either way, there would have been a cost. Nine of the 11 councillors and one mayor in attendance had the gumption to say no. Life is still good. Everyone is still happy except for a few home builders.

There was some freezing in the air. Industrial development charges were frozen for two years. Increases will be phased in over the following three. At the high end, this could run us up a bill of a little over one and a half million per year. Or it could be as low as $400,000. The councilors did some arithmetic and looked at all the jobs going south. They don’t want them going any further south than the emerging Hanlon Business Park. Without industrial development, there will never be a need for new housing. Council made a compromise, but it seems to have been a wise one.

It didn’t happen without some peculiar political positioning. The motion to freeze the industrial charges was made by Maggie Laidlaw. She has often been stereotyped as an anti-business maverick. Her motion passed unanimously. Then Karl Wettstein moved to freeze residential development rates. He likes us to see him as a friend of the hard done by tax payer. Yet there he was leading the charge for the option that would have cost us the most money. It didn’t pass. Then Bob Bell went over the top by moving a motion to freeze everything on the table. Take the full $4 million a year and hand it off to the home builders. It didn’t pass either, but isn’t he the one who recently had his knickers in a knot because the province pulled a $1.5 million grant out of the city’s budget?

Life is always good. Sometimes it’s also fun.

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