Tuesday night Jason Thorne, Hamilton’s General Manager of Planning and Economic Development, and Steve Robichaud, its Chief Planner, shared the stage at Mills Hardware on King Street East with Raise the Hammer editor Ryan McGreal to talk about the City’s new Downtown Secondary Plan (DTSP), which will go to Council’s Planning Committee next week for approval. The well attended event, organized by the Useful Knowledge Society, was intended to give interested members of the public an opportunity to better understand, not so much the fine details of the new DTSP, but the vision and thinking behind it. In my first post in this series, I discussed how the draft of Hamilton’s new Downtown Secondary Plan (DTSP) released on March 19 responds to current development pressures, and, in particular, a recent wave of proposals for tall buildings, which the City defines as buildings 12 storeys or higher. A report issued by the Ryerson City Building Institute (RCBI) last fall noted, “As development across the GTA shifts from sprawl to intensification as required by the province’s Growth Plan, most of the new homes being built in the GTA are in buildings greater than five storeys.” Intensification promises to repair the built fabric of our core and renew its infrastructure, but thinking about who will be able to live, work, and play in Downtown Hamilton is also important. Robichaud and Thorne touched on this in their responses to questions and tried to convey how land-use planning tools can be used for place-making and to achieve what the Provincial Growth Plan and Hamilton’s Urban Official Plan (UHOP) terms “complete communities”. They also noted that a plan can’t prescribe who will live downtown or what businesses will locate in its storefronts and office space. Perhaps, the most insightful moments revolved around questions related to affordability and ensuring a diverse mix of people and activities continue to enliven our downtown core—i.e. that it not become simply a theme-park for young urban professionals to paraphrase Ryan McGreal. YIMBY (or Yes-In-My-BackYard) advocates for abundant housing see reducing impediments to increased supply as key to making housing more affordable in cities. Clearly adding new supply is part of the puzzle, but alone it won’t get where we need to go. For starters, as the RCBI report notes, we need to determine if we are building the right supply: As millennials get older and seek larger spaces, and baby boomers downsize from detached houses, we will need housing units that meet the needs and economic realities of these important demographic cohorts. Given the current housing affordability context and projected population increases, the GTA will require more family-oriented housing units in mid-rise and low-rise buildings in comparison to the stock built during the past several years. Using data for the GTA from Urbanation (co-author of the report) they looked at condo units expected to be delivered in the next 5 years and found the following: Alarming—for urbanists who favour intensification as a way to curtail sprawl, repair damaged urban fabric, and reduce automobility—the authors conclude that if current development trends continue “the proportion of family-appropriate housing available in location-efficient neighbourhoods (close to transit, employment, schools and services) will decrease, and affordability will further erode” and they argue this “means that young families will have to ‘drive to qualify’ for any type of unit, not just detached housing.” Intensification as a policy will be seriously undermined if multi-unit family-friendly housing is not built in sufficient quantities.