New ideas needed for Northdale

By HILDA MASON, GUEST COLUMN
Aug 26, 2009


Of the 20 original homes on Batavia Place, only six remain in their original state. The other 14 are either student occupied with absentee landlords, or converted student homes with owner occupancy. This has forever changed the dynamics of the entire street. The same is true for all the streets in the Northdale neighbourhood.
Batavia Place, developed in the 1960s, was once a vibrant neighbourhood of large, well-kept homes, built on large lots. The residents would walk to work at the University of Waterloo or Wilfrid Laurier University.
Try if you can to comprehend that within a few short years this once prestigious community has been carved up and exploited solely for monetary gain as student rental accommodation and/or lodging houses.
To even consider that a young couple raising a small family would be interested, or feel safe, moving into a neighbourhood of partying, noisy, beer-sodden university students, is incomprehensible.
City staff is preparing a new rental licencing bylaw, or standardized citywide compliance bylaw, for presentation to council in the fall.
Council must realize that any bylaw applicable in other parts of the city will be impossible to implement in the Northdale neighbourhood.
The need here is a totally different one. A completely different approach is required!
Council must demand that planning staff do “due diligence” in analyzing the specific needs and potential of this particular neighbourhood and what future developments are pending.
Putting restrictions on remaining properties now, at this late date, will negatively impact our longtime residents still living in their homes.
Scott Nevin’s callous and cavalier attitude towards reducing the value of those homes is extremely worrisome.
How could he say publicly if a new city bylaw comes (in) at the cost of current residents’ property, so be it.
Such an attitude toward the remaining residents in the Northdale neighbourhood is unjustifiable and an insult!
Council needs to be informed, to search its conscience, and to do the right and honourable thing. Current residents must have the same rights and privileges as landlords who, in the last few years, have bought up all the properties as quickly as they become available and turned them into student housing.
They deserve the same rights as Laurier University had when it converted a home into a 10-student Hope House.
For council to ignore the remaining residents is blatant discrimination against the most vulnerable.
Unlike any other neighbourhood in Waterloo, the Northdale neighbourhood has an entirely unique problem. It has become a student precinct!
When considering a new bylaw this fall, every longtime Northdale resident whose future livelihood is invested in his or her home, expects that council will demand fairness and equality Northdale.
“There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
...
Hilda Mason is a longtime resident of Batavia Place in Northdale