Growth for growth's sake?

By Shawn Lackie

The last number of years have seen the growth of many communities in leaps and bounds. In many cases not enough. There is no question there is a housing shortage and many buyers are feeling challenged to get into the market. Rightfully so, prices have inflated to silly amounts.

If you were to really take a close look at this it would be like this: What was your salary in the early to mid 80s? For the average Jane or Joe it would have been in the mid 20k range. House purchases back then would set you back 40-80K. Consequently, your monthly mortgage would have been more than manageable.

Now compare that to today’s world. Even if you are a superstar, making 150K; take a look, your house price would be five times that, in the 700-800k range.

Locally, our council seems bent on selling to whatever developer waves the biggest bid card. The latest one involves the fairgrounds in Port Perry. A sensitive topic for sure.

This land has been a mainstay for many decades and should continue to be so. It should also have heritage protection, from just this kind of potential waste. Granted, that land has been seriously underutilized for the last 30 or 40 years, maybe even longer.

Previous councils could have added other facilities, to make the property more user-friendly year round. However, they didn’t, so now the town has to look at other options. The one which they seem to be interested in would include selling to a developer, to drop more houses in there. Having a fairgrounds in the middle of town can work. Take a look to the south of us, a few miles, and see what Brooklin has done. The Vipond Arena and fairgrounds are right in the middle of everything. Developers have jammed townhouses, and the like, in every open space around the grounds, yet the main area remains intact. Need proof? Take a drive along Winchester and see for yourself. So, it has been proven, valuable land like that can be better used.

Council has been presented with one option, at no cost to taxpayers, but seems reticent to act on it. For years, the easy, really easy, way has been, just to raise property taxes every year. This is so we can add more 40klm'hr speed limit signs, and once in a while, dump some asphalt into the numerous potholes in town.

I digress. I guess the real question is, how much growth does the area need, and in what time frame?

Growth is inevitable, and well it should be but unrestrained and mismanaged growth is a bane not a boon to the economy. It places far too much stress on existing infrastructures. Health care, transit, shopping, schools. to name a few. suffer. So do the people using these.

We witnessed first-hand the mess Whitby became, in the late 90s and early 2000s, when they expanded at a rate they couldn’t keep up with. It takes years to catch up and recover from that crazy growth. Some places never do.

Barrie is a community which used to be this lovely lakeside town of 26,000 people, then it wasn’t. Take a look at it now.

Care and nurturing should be front and centre when considering the growth of an area. Not just for the people living here, but also for those who may choose to move here.