There seems to be serious…

There seems to be serious lack of understanding behind the purpose and current practice of heritage conservation in Ontario. The conservation of a cultural heritage resources is a provincial interest and a significant part of creating livable, healthy and sustainable communities. It is not a barrier to housing, but a way of making housing projects better, more interesting and more successful. Bi-passing the tools of the Ontario Heritage Act in order to allow fast new development will irrevocably harm our history, sense of place and our identity. This Bill would benefit from having the input of a CAHP member on its working group.

There is also a serious miss-understanding and dependence of new construction to solve the housing crisis. What is wrong with the millions of square metres of underused existing building stock? Why not make renovating existing buildings easier and cheaper? This will minimize the amount of waste going in our landfills and avoiding using up our depleting land supply to build new. There are plenty of examples of successful adaptive reuse projects across the province and the country, such as former schools, churches and even larger industrial and institutional buildings that have been repurposed for housing.

Introducing incentives and training around adaptive reuse of existing building stock would be a more efficient and simpler way to provide additional housing in Ontario. If quick new builds are the answer, they should not be at the expense of our shared heritage character, identity and history.