Townsend: The failed metropolis in Haldimand

Part 3 of series

A proposal by Empire Communities to turn sleepy Nanticoke into the biggest town in Haldimand is not the first try at creating a large community within the rural county’s borders.

Worried about chaotic urban development in the Greater Toronto Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the province originally envisioned a planned city of more than 250,000 northwest of Jarvis, off Highway 6.

The city of Townsend was to be a hub for the workers at Nanticoke about 15 kilometers away, replete with shops and trails, a library, art gallery and movie theatre, nine schools, an indoor athletic centre, and a train station.

Large swaths of farmland were turned into wide parkways, residential neighborhoods and municipal offices in anticipation of a population boom.

But no one came.

Workers at Stelco, Texaco and Ontario Power Generation moved into Haldimand’s existing towns, while other industries eschewed Nanticoke for places closer to the highway.

Townsend has become a ghost town.

Only 161 hectares of the planned 34,595 hectares were ever developed. Today, social service agencies inhabit the former municipal offices, and a park and artificial pond are all the amenities available for the fewer than 2,000 people who call the village home.

“The province had already spent millions, hundreds of millions in today’s currency,” said retired provincial planner Ted Visser, who worked on the Townsend project in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at which point population projections for the would-be mini-metropolis had already been scaled down, before the province ultimately abandoned the scheme in 1986.

“Developers, who were the only land purchasers, gave up on luring clients with their incentives, so it was a dud,” Visser told The Sachem.

“We all knew that Townsend, at that point, had been an expensive miscalculation.”

The crucial difference — aside from the scale — between the failure of Townsend and Empire’s current proposal for Nanticoke is back then, it was the provincial government driving the planned expansion, while today, developers approached the county with the idea to build 15,000 homes down the road from Stelco’s Lake Erie steelworks.

Former Haldimand-Norfolk MPP Toby Barrett has asked the current council why Empire could not be encouraged to build in Townsend rather than Nanticoke, making use of existing infrastructure while avoiding potential conflicts between the new homeowners and their industrial neighbours.

Visser said Empire’s proposed mixed-use community may have worked when the province was selling Townsend land to developers in the early 1980s, but he thought it unlikely the province would sell any of its remaining land holdings in the area.

Confronting the future

Underpinning concerns about traffic flow and potential job loss should 40,000 people move into Nanticoke and scare off major industrial employers like Stelco is a debate over whether a development of this size would permanently change Haldimand’s rural character.

“Most people in Haldimand County want to live in a rural setting. They want to maintain their rural way of life,” Mayor Shelley Ann Bentley told The Spectator.

Turning Nanticoke into a small city would fly in the face of Haldimand’s promise of rural charm and a “calm, traffic-free drive to work through the countryside,” she said.

Haldimand’s mayor would rather not see development “hopscotch” from one area to the next, marooning communities without adequate services. Instead, Bentley would prefer to have the population grow by adding housing to existing urban centers — such as by converting empty commercial buildings into apartments — rather than building on farmland near industrial sites.

“There are a lot of ways we could infill elsewhere. Let’s be creative with it,” she said.

For decades, municipalities could count on development charges to pay for growth. But new provincial legislation such as Bill 23 cuts into that formerly lucrative income source, meaning Empire’s proposal is not the windfall it would have been in past years.

Bentley worries the financial benefits of enlarging the tax base will be wiped out by the need for more services, since the 40,000 new arrivals — whether they be urban retirees, new immigrants, or young families — will have to get groceries, go to school, visit doctors and hospitals, and have places to shop and play.

That means expanding fire and ambulance services, building more schools, and adding health-care staff to a county already starved for doctors and nurses.

Approving the Empire project “would put a spotlight on” those areas of need and hopefully prompt change in the form of more provincial funding, said Coun. Stewart Patterson, whose ward includes Nanticoke.

“Wouldn’t that be nice?” Bentley said. “Better planning? That’d be great. Would the province support our infrastructure before the growth? I’ve yet to see it.”

More development is not always the answer, the mayor said. She would prefer to stick to the county’s own growth strategy, which anticipates a population of approximately 77,000 by 2051, up from roughly 49,000 today.

“I’m not against development. But let’s have responsible growth,” Bentley said. “We don’t have the infrastructure to support growth at a rapid rate.”

To Patterson’s mind, the debate that has gripped some corners of the county over Empire’s Nanticoke proposal has been overblown.

“I’ll be the first to admit that we, as a council and staff, we dropped the ball. We didn’t get enough information out to the residents,” he said.

In that vacuum, he said, residents formed inaccurate opinions about the project based on the biased perspectives of the various stakeholders.

In his ward, Patterson has heard from people “on both sides of the fence.”

Some residents fear growth will spoil the county’s tranquil way of life, while others see development as inevitable and hope it might “help clean things up” in an area best known for industrial pollution.

“I don’t think it’s going to change the rural aspect of life for folks who live in Selkirk or Nanticoke or Jarvis. It’s still going to be the same,” Patterson said.

“But we can’t have blinders on, either. If this comes to fruition and they build X amount of houses and we increase that population, it’s going to cause congestion on the roads. There will be inconveniences. But to me, that’s something that can be worked out.”

A traffic study is one of the many steps that would take place between the province granting the county’s request for a minister’s zoning order — which would allow the industrial lands to be rezoned as residential so county staff could begin to formally consider Empire’s proposal — and council giving the development the green light, Patterson noted.

And even then, it would likely be decades before all 15,000 homes were built.

Despite voting against the MZO request, Bentley is resigned to having the county’s fate in the hands of the province and said she wants Haldimand to be part of the conversation.

“Unfortunately, Empire was the company that purchased the 4,200 acres. So we do need to work with Empire and the province going forward, absolutely,” she said.

“We live in a world right now where development is key, I suppose, and our province is really pushing development and growth.”

The mayor hopes for “good conversations” with the developer and the ministry.

“But are we really going to have a voice? Are rural people going to have a voice?” Bentley said.

“Or are we just going to be told, ‘This is what’s happening, whether you like it or not.’”

—With files from Tamara Botting and Tara Lindemann

JP Antonacci is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based at The Hamilton Spectator. The initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.