For over a year this question has been in the air. For a long time there were multiple boarded up houses. Then there was a police tactical unit surrounding one of the homes. Seemed kinda scary actually! Well I’m sorry to tell you there really wasn’t anything too exciting going on. The tactical unit was just practicing entry into these houses since the homes had been bought up by a developer over the years and were vacant.
As you drive by that strip of Ontario street these days, all the homes are gone. Even the trees have been ripped out. So what’s going in there?
The town rezoned that area of Ontario street for High Density development which would allow 70 homes/units per hector. Initially we thought it would be high rise condos or some variation of that. But it turns out that’s not the case after all.
The current owner of that land and the future developer is Hallawest Development out of Hamilton. They’re proposing a Medium Density development of 151 townhouses comprising of 102 stacked townhouses and 49 three story townhouses.
You might be wondering “how are they going to fit 151 townhouses along Ontario street?”. What they’re doing is building a privately maintained road in off of Ontario. While the townhomes will essentially be freehold, there will be a small maintenance fee for all the owners to pay to maintain the road since it’s not owned or maintained by the municipality or region.
Another common question is “what is a stacked townhouse?”. Click on the image below for an enlarged image of how the units will be arranged but essentially a stacked townhouse is where one unit is on top of the other. At ground level the lower unit might walk in at ground level or down a few stairs to their front door. Their unit might take up most of the ground floor and the basement. While the upper unit would walk up a few stairs to their front door and their unit would take up most of the second floor and third floor. Since they commonly each have a garage, there would be some way of accessing each garage from within each unit.
It’s important to note that while this development has been registered with the town, it has not yet been approved as of this writing. I suspect it will eventually be approved fairly close to what we have here, however there could be some changes. In fact,
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