Here at the Gazette we like old stuff. We like old Gazettes, and we like old heritage buildings. We like old cobblestone streets, and historic towns and villages. We are, therefore, following the myriad new communities proposed for the County with no small degree of interest.

In the past few weeks, Council has considered master planned “villages” proposed by Cork and Vine in Wellington, Base31 in Picton, and Pinecrest Housing in Bloomfield, as well as plans for the redevelopment of the HJ McFarland Memorial Home, an important long term care home in Picton.

According to our manager of planning, Michael Michaud, the County is busy approving 11,000 new residences for households that average 2.4 people each. That means enough housing will be built over the next 20 years to double the current population, to 52,000 people.

We would do well to be wary. Spread is the order of the day in Ontario. Almost half of Canada, 40 per cent of the population, lives here, in southern Ontario, and 80 per cent of the new development built to house it is called, quite rightly, sprawl. Single-family, detached or semi-detached, big lawns, two or more cars. On almost every level it’s wrong. It eats up what’s left of our precious farmland, it’s unaffordable, and largely unwalkable. It demands fossil fuels be burnt on a grand scale. It’s isolating. It is, at the most basic level, unliveable. If families tend to like this kind of development for the extra space, it’s terrible for seniors, who may not be able to drive. Solutions need to address both sets of needs.

The concepts affordable, livable, sustainable, and walkable are inter-related. Smaller houses lead to more compact footprints, and these in turn lead to more walkable, more livable communities. More walkable communities, it turns out, will keep you out of the long-term care home for longer. Longstanding research links sprawl, unwalkability, and the two-car household, to isolation, which leads to depression, and illness, even less walking, and long-term care. Long term care, it turns out, is not so long. The average stay at such places is 12-24 months.

The solution? You know what I am about to say already. But what you may not know is that the designers of the latest proposals for Base31, for Cork and Vine, and for Pinecrest Housing, seem to have seen the green light. Perhaps the market has finally pointed them in the right direction. Sprawl is out. Instead, we are seeing plans that feature stacked townhouses, and even linked rowhouses, as of the days of old. Mid-rise apartment buildings, with units for rent or purchase, tiny homes, and shared or co-op housing, like that of a university campus, next to single-family homes on larger lots. Plans are high density — required for things to be “vibrant” and “bustling.” Not just the new marketing keywords, these words also feature prominently in the county’s Official Plan. The new communities are designed for everyone, from seasonal labourers to students to seniors. And a touchstone in all of them is the idea of a marketplace. Call it what you will — a town square, or a Revitalization District. It’s very simple. It allows people to meet, to cross paths, perhaps have some fun.

All these new plans, in other words, map the old onto the new, which is what Picton did when it designated its historic centre a heritage conservation district, as Wellington is doing now with its beautiful, and compact, village. They feature mixed-use, meaning, a mix of residential and commercial and in-between, creative kinds of uses, like allowing a home-based business, or what is being called, rather quaintly, an “artist’s studio.”

In other places and times this was called a garret. I encourage Base31 to adopt such terminology. After all, Cork and Vine is calling its offering of a small room over a garage a “carriage house.” Very nice. There’s no carriage, and it’s not a house, but the term recalls the olden days in a way I cannot help but approve. Let’s go back there, in small ways and large. Or to put it another way, let’s keep, or find again, those things that work in every possible way.

—Karen Valihora

Only in Europe? The latest in masterplanned communities is only what has stood the test of time

Longniddry is a master planned village on the East Lothian coast of Scotland. 450 new homes (including 25 per cent affordable homes) on the southern edge of the existing village are centred around a restored farm, which forms a new commercial hub with small business units available for rent. There are allotments and a public garden. It’s within a short walk of the train station with a quick and direct rail link to the centre of Edinburgh. It’s all two-storey row houses, designed to reflect the local East Lothian vernacular. Although it’s all new, it looks like it’s been there forever. There is a large long-term care home with a garden courtyard. The streets are lined with trees, and nearly all the houses have front as well as rear gardens. The project was built by Cruden Homes and Places for People, both huge home builders. The landowner, Weymss and March Estate, and developer, Socially Conscious Capital, set the design standard that they wanted everyone to meet and build to.