A tight vote Tuesday night on a land swap that’s divided city council – and many Londoners – paves the way for a new subdivision on the edge of the city.
The 8-6 vote came despite warnings of a “dangerous precedent” from one city councilor, and in light of pleas from another to “fix this problem today” by making space for a badly needed new school in northwest London.
Council voted to allow Auburn Developments to build 550 houses and townhomes on the northeast corner of Sunningdale and Hyde Park roads, once slated for a cemetery, and the veteran developer will instead offer up land for a school on property it owns farther south.
“What is going to stop any councilor now saying, ‘We did it up in the north, now we can do it somewhere else.’ This sets a dangerous previous,” Ward 9 Coun. Anna Hopkins told her colleagues, urging them to vote against the controversial deal.
Hopkins and councilors Mo Salih, Jesse Helmer, Maureen Cassidy, Stephen Turner and Elizabeth Peloza voted against the rezoning. Mayor Ed Holder was absent, recovering at home after a surgery, and all others voted in favour.
The new subdivision, which butts up against the city’s urban growth boundary, lands approved for development, will proceed despite a lack of neighborhood and community planning that typically precedes such growth.
Auburn’s land at 1521 Sunningdale and 2631 Hyde Park is already within that urban growth boundary, but only because a provincial tribunal ordered it inside the dividing line, back when it was slated to become a cemetery. It has since been sold to the developer and became the focus of the deal brokered by deputy mayor Josh Morgan, whose ward takes in the area.
His goal was to ease pressure on an overcrowded elementary school. Sir Arthur Currie has more than double the student population it was intended to hold, with many pupils in portables and even using portapotties instead of proper washroom facilities.
“We are stuck in the middle of a challenging situation in my ward,” Morgan said Tuesday.
“I have parents and kids that I also represent in this community,” he added, saying it’s not the “ideal” solution, but one option to help relieve the overcrowding.
The Thames Valley District school board has said its options for locating a new school – for which funding already is available – are limited, and many parents have supported the proposal.
“I can’t express strongly enough how we need to fix this problem today, and we need to move ahead with this,” Ward 2 Coun. Shawn Lewis said.
“At the end of the day, it’s for those families and students that we need to make this decision tonight.”
But the move also raises questions about fairness for neighboring land owners or other developers wanting to bring their lands within the urban growth boundary, opponents said. That’s already a common flashpoint at city hall, as the demand for housing continues to grow and developers seek permission to build in areas not already zoned for residential development.
Low-density housing, such as single-family homes on the outskirts of town, flies in the face of London’s blueprint for growth that focuses on inward and upward growth to curb costly urban sprawl.
Auburn plans to build both low and medium-density housing in the new subdivision. It wasn’t intended for residential development yet, so municipal servicing isn’t set up on the site. Auburn will cover the cost for any temporary set ups, and city hall will add some permanent servicing, staff told politicians last week.
“If we want to accelerate residential development, we should do it in other areas of the city, (like) surface parking lots,” Helmer said.
He urged council to reject the deal and force the school board to expropriate the land it needs for a new school in the area, which it has the power to do, saying the new subdivision will just exacerbate the problem as more families move in with their own children and add to school populations.
Several politicians pointed to broader problems with the format for school board funding and planning, saying change is needed at the provincial level to avoid repeating the same crunch now affecting London’s northwest.