Quote:
Originally Posted by manny_santos
I do seriously wonder if real estate agents that sell homes even bother talking about the Official Plan as it relates to the area surrounding the homes they sell.
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You don’t need to wonder: very few do, ever. For most, it’s not on their radar, I would imagine partly because it’s not on their buyers’ radar: even if they themselves are buying a relatively new home on what was recently agricultural land, I bet many assume that everything around them will stay the same, forever. Like you say, many many people are terribly ignorant of the plans for their neighbourhood. That’s a shame because there’s a lot of opportunity to input to those plans, provided the input is made when it is sought, and not when you finally notice the plan being implemented.
I think that the problems that Snark’s identifying can largely be solved by getting more people involved
at the appropriate stages of the planning process. I don’t think we’re going to turn back the clock on “transparency” and “consultation” (although the pendulum may eventually naturally swing the other way, to continue with the metaphor). The way I see it right now is that it is a very small group of “the usual suspects” who sit on every committee that is struck to discuss and consult about every issue, and who will usually reach the same type of conclusion; and other groups who pay no attention to any kind of consultative process and waits until the sidewalk is going in to call up their friend of a friend who works at the newspaper to complain about how “no one” wants this. The trick would be to get this latter group involved earlier, if for no other reason so they can begin to understand how complicated some of these issues are, and how important it is not to waste staff and others’ time with whether or not Ms. Schmidt “wants” a sidewalk.
That, or stop fetishizing notions like “consultation” and understand that they are not the be-all-and-end-all. I have no confidence that that is going to happen: with each year, there is more lip service paid to making sure everyone is heard, whether they make an effort to be, or not. New mechanisms for getting input (from the same old people as before in my opinion, I might add) are conjured up, like “participatory budgeting,” and “charrettes.” It just gets worse, not better, and I really argue whether more people are “engaged” at stages of the process where their opinions can be incorporated.
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