Claims a towering development on Winona’s former LIUNA Gardens property will be compatible with the neighbourhood’s single-family homes are “nonsense,” the Ontario Land Tribunal heard on the final day of hearings on the plan.
“You don’t have to be a rocket scientist,” Wendakee Drive resident Charles Puma told adjudicator Shannon Braun in his closing arguments at the Dec. 15 online session.
“If I put a picture of a house and a picture of a skyscraper, and I say to a child, ‘Are these the same?’ they’re going to say no.”
Fengate LIUNA Gardens Holdings LP is seeking zoning changes to construct towers of 22 and 26 storeys that would be bookended by 12-storey buildings on a 3.4-hectare lakeshore lot between Winona Road and East Street.
The proposed 1,160 housing units also include 25 three-storey townhouses closer to the lake and 64 stacked townhouses by the property’s southern boundary, as well as a two-storey amenity building. All parking would be in a two-level underground garage.
Fengate appealed to the Ontario Land Tribunal in June 2022, arguing it needed help “to ensure a timely approval” of the development, which the city had yet to review and has subsequently opposed.
Puma said he couldn’t afford a lawyer but felt forced to be a party to the eight-day hearing because of concerns about the impacts on the neighbourhood’s rustic character, traffic, parking, privacy and pedestrian safety — especially for children.
The retired police officer said the development’s residents will add to traffic gridlock at the QEW interchange at Fifty Road because the nearest bus stop is at the Winona Crossing plaza across the highway, which is too far for most people to walk.
“We’re at the outskirts. We’re at the farthest end of Hamilton,” Puma said. “There are no sidewalks. The infrastructure’s not there,” he said.
“You’ve got to fix the highway first. We heard nonsense — ‘if they build it, they will come.’ That’s fantasy.”
But Fengate lawyer David Bronskill said the vacant LIUNA property is the largest in the area and on the periphery of the neighbourhood, making it an ideal spot for housing intensification encouraged by provincial and city planning policies.
He said the development doesn’t need to replicate surrounding homes to be compatible, a test it meets by having the 12-storey buildings rise in steps, starting with a three-storey “street wall” of units with porches that are of comparable scale to homes across the road.
The taller interior buildings are oriented north to south to maximize views of lake and minimize shadows, while sidewalks and a public promenade by the lakeshore make it pedestrian oriented, he said.
“Residential intensification is contemplating something that is different than the existing character,” Bronskill said. “It can be different, it can be bigger, it can be larger, but that’s because it’s residential intensification,” he said.
“The neighbourhood is busy today. It forms part of the city as people access the area for various reasons and leave the neighbourhood to conduct daily business. It’s not an outlier.”
But city lawyer Brian Duxbury said the tall buildings are “fundamentally different” than the established neighbourhood’s low-profile character, exceeding the nine-storey and intensification limits in the city’s secondary plan for the area.
The proposal more than quadruples the existing maximum of 99 housing units per hectare, he said, rejecting that the lakeshore location is on the periphery and suitable for a “highly urbanized” development.
“To any observer, informed or otherwise, this development would appear as a very different community within some other community, signalling a very different lived experience and an insular mode of living,” Duxbury said.
“This is the antithesis of how this neighbourhood currently functions. Cars will go underground. The majority of the people will go up into a high-rising structure. That’s not a bad thing but it has no nexus to how this community functions.”
Jessica De Marinis, lawyer for Winona Road resident Robert Morash, said the development will be stark, intrusive and invasive on neighbours, including years of construction.
She said failings include a Fengate traffic study that didn’t consider the impact of an extra thousand housing units on the intersection of Winona Road and Lido Drive, where children gather for school buses.
“There’s no evidence about how far back cars will queue or how long it will take for cars to funnel through this intersection during peak hours,” she said.
Braun said she will need time to consider the parties’ representations and more than 4,000 pages of evidence before making a written decision “in due course,” acknowledging the experience has been emotional for residents.
“Despite that emotion, I think that everybody has tried to conduct themselves as respectfully and co-operatively as possible and I want to thank everybody for all of that throughout the hearing,” she said.
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