Thorold Abbeyfield Public Meeting

A Thorold councillor wondered if this were a cult when it went before council for rezoning. Good grief! Abbeyfield homes are one of the great successes world wide in creating affordable congregate living for seniors. Volunteers, families, and seniors themselves create family like settings with a housekeeper and cook.
Grace Community Church, on St. David's Rd. is conducting a public information meeting on Wednesday, March 12th, 7:30 p.m. to discuss concerns raised at council. Hopefully more intelligent questions about the nature of this project can be answered. For more information about this Abbeyfield project call 905-680-4092.

Courtyard Houses

Portland is widely recognized as an urban planning and design leader. In 1974, the city council killed plans for a highway and instead used the federal funding to create the first modern day light rail system. Six years later, the city became the first in the nation to create an urban growth boundary to contain sprawl. Nevertheless, in the 21st century, Portland faces many of the crises common to the contemporary American metropolis: lack of affordable housing, declining numbers of families with children, and rapid growth at the suburban-rural fringe.

Enter the Portland Courtyard Housing Design Competition, whose winning entries were announced in late November. Sponsored by the city, the competition promotes courtyard housing as an affordable way of increasing neighborhood densities without sacrificing public space and environmental sustainability. The courtyard model also extends Portland's tradition of street oriented urbanism. "Suburban houses avoid the street," said Mark Gillem, a competition director and a professor of architecture at the University of Oregon. "The courtyard can engage it."

Suburbia – Slums of the Future

It is difficult to think of suburban communities being the slums of tomorrow, but demographics, fuel prices, the end of easy oil, and global warming will have an impact that will force people to live closer together and, oddly enough, be glad of it. This is from Atlantic Monthly:

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that's roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the
suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and '70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.