Our answers to the questions:
Belleville has small town charm and big city amenities. Highlights include the parks, trails and waterfront as well as proximity to PEC, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal.
7. What is most important to you as the City of Belleville grows over the next 20 years? Please select all that apply.
- Supporting different housing types
- Building affordable housing
- Enhancing public transit and options to walk or bike
- Other: Prioritize attracting **diversified** employment opportunities. Reduce focus on retaining and expanding low wage manufacturing and warehouse employers.
8. The City is focused on increasing the supply of housing in different forms. What types of housing would you like to see more of? Please select all that apply.
- High-rise Apartment-type housing (9 storeys or greater)
- Mid-rise Apartment-type housing (5 to 8 storeys)
- Medium Density housing, such as two-unit dwelling, three-unit dwelling, four-unit dwelling, townhouses, back-to-back townhouses, stack.
- Cooperative (coop) housing which is a non-profit housing structure that is owned and operated by the people who live in it
9. The City is planning for new and denser forms of housing in the downtown area, such as medium and high-density buildings that may change the feel of downtown overtime. What do you appreciate the most about the downtown area now?
The wording of this question is a bit leading. It assumes that “new and denser forms of housing” will harm the “feel” of downtown, which leads the respondent to focus on things that might be lost.
What I appreciate most about the downtown area now is its potential and its capacity to become a vibrant, lived-in neighbourhood if we finally embrace that density.
Downtown already has the bones of a great 15-minute city: a walkable street grid, a historic main street, the farmer’s market, the Moira River running through the centre, nearby parks, connected trails, and the Bay of Quinte waterfront. All the structural ingredients are there, what’s missing is enough people living close by to bring it fully to life. This will only happen with the “new and denser forms of housing” this question seems wary of. The “feel” I want is one of a bustling main street, where a wide variety of local shops and cafes are supported by thousands of new residents of all walks of life who live a 5-minute walk away.
Some recent projects show how this can work. Memorial Marketplace is a good example of creating something new while nodding to history. The library is one of the nicest, most welcoming civic buildings in the city, and the churches along Church Street add real architectural character. These are places that feel like anchors for a denser, more urban downtown.
There are already medium density mid-rise buildings (McNabb Towers) and buildings that don’t add to the “feel” (Bridgefront Tower Corp, Century Place).
Fresh, well-designed new developments – whether or not they preserve a historic façade – are far better than old, decrepit buildings lying empty. More housing density and more relaxed zoning in the core are how we actually get the vibrant downtown community Belleville has been talking about for decades, instead of just hoping it appears without the people needed to sustain it.
10. When new buildings and new development are proposed in historic neighbourhoods, what should be protected and maintained to keep the look and feel of these historic areas?
The question is a bit loaded, assuming the goal is to “protect and maintain” the existing feel, which may not be every respondent’s priority.
“Historic character” is often used as a vague concept to block new homes. In Belleville, zoning and planning policies add phrases like “neighbourhood character” and “sympathetic development” on top of base zoning. In practice, those extra filters are regularly used to stop exactly the missing-middle and multi-unit housing we need.
Belleville’s new comprehensive Zoning By-law 2024-100 explicitly says it regulates the “height, bulk, location, size, floor area, spacing, character, and use of buildings.” The Official Plan adds requirements that intensification near mature neighbourhoods be “sympathetic to neighbourhood character,” that high-rise development not be “significantly taller than adjacent buildings,” that upper storeys step back, and that redevelopment in areas like the Harbour be “sympathetic” to existing residential communities. These are all highly subjective standards. In many cities, similar language has become a backdoor way to maintain low density, push up prices, benefit existing homeowners, and keep out newcomers. See: The Problem of “Neighborhood Character”
The most important thing to “protect” is our ability to actually house people affordably. The priority must be people, not aesthetics. We should be far more concerned with protecting our neighbours from rent-gouging, displacement, and homelessness than with protecting a streetscape from a new duplex, triplex, or small apartment building—especially when there are already long-standing, precedent-setting examples of multi-unit buildings scattered throughout the city that nobody thinks about day to day.
That said, there are elements worth maintaining in historic neighbourhoods:
- Walkable street pattern – a connected grid, short blocks, and sidewalks.
- Trees and greenery – mature canopy and front-yard planting that soften and cool the street.
- Fine-grain variety – a mix of building types and lot widths, not huge super-blocks or blank frontages.
If new buildings respect those basics, they should be allowed to add more homes, even if they are taller or contain more units than neighbouring houses. What should not be frozen is density.
When “historic character” is used to block new homes, we are choosing to treat our neighbourhoods as museums, freezing them in time for a wealthy few, at the direct expense of a new generation, newcomers, and those struggling to find a home.
An old building is not automatically worth protecting just because it is old. Heritage designation should be reserved for truly significant places (for example, sites of real historic events or outstanding examples of a particular style), not handed out so loosely that it becomes an excuse to leave buildings in terrible condition until they’re unsafe and have to be demolished anyway. That outcome helps no one: not the streetscape, not the heritage, and certainly not the people who need housing.
11. The City wants to encourage new forms of housing that fit in with existing communities. Can you share examples where different housing types fit well into existing communities in Belleville? Please share a street name or intersection if possible.
Many areas of Belleville contain a collage of designs, sizes and ages of housing. Belleville’s neighbourhoods already contain different housing types that fit in, don’t stand out (nobody notices them day-to-day), or at least set a precedent. The best examples are in older neighbourhoods, which were built before restrictive, post-war zoning made them illegal.
Go for a walk through the Old East Hill along streets like Bridge Street East, Bridge Victoria Avenue, or Macdonald Avenue, or Bridge Street West, and you will see a beautiful, organic, and desirable mix of housing. You’ll find large single-family homes, duplexes, triplexes, and small, low-rise walk-up apartment buildings all co-existing on the same block.
and apartments/condos like:
This is the very “gentle density” and “missing middle” housing that already “fits in.” It’s one of the most sought-after areas in the city because of this mix.
12. What are the most important issues and challenges that the City needs to address over the next 20 years?
Belleville is facing the same challenges as many cities across North America:
Housing shortage and affordability
Belleville is already feeling pressure from regional growth, an aging population and migration. Without a massive increase in housing supply, especially apartments and missing-middle housing (duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, walk-ups), we will see:
- higher rents and home prices
- workers and young families pushed out
- increased homelessness and housing precarity
The current pattern of mostly low-density, car-oriented development cannot accommodate growth without deepening the affordability crisis.
Ending fiscally and environmentally unsustainable sprawl
Sprawling, low-density, single-family development is expensive to service: the maintenance and replacement of roads, pipes, transit, emergency services cost more per resident than the tax revenues they generate. This is referred to as a “growth Ponzi scheme,” which uses taxes generated by new growth to pay for the maintenance of old infrastructure.
Over time, that creates:
- higher property taxes and user fees
- infrastructure deficits and deferred maintenance
- pressure to cut services
- increased carbon footprint and car dependency
Planning for the next 20 years must prioritize intensification and infill, especially downtown and along key corridors, so that the city’s tax base can actually support its infrastructure.
Belleville also needs to plan for more housing and everyday services together, so that every neighbourhood has walkable access to a grocery store and fresh food options (see: food desert in the west end).
Solutions
- End exclusionary zoning
- Build up, not out by incentivizing infill and density
- Promote mixed-use zones where residential, commercial, and community spaces coexist to allow essential services (grocery stores, hardware stores, pharmacies, medical offices) to be within a short walk from residents.
- Integrate local commerce (e.g., cafes, shops, community centres) into neighbourhoods.
- Focus new development near existing or upgraded amenities (parks, grocery stores, schools, employment centres) so that residents can easily access services and daily necessities without relying on cars.
- Increase transit frequency, coverage, operating hours.
- Expand and connecting trails, sidewalks and bike lanes. Absence of sidewalks, poor lighting, and unsafe streets that favour cars over pedestrians or cyclists.
- Use Restrictive Covenants on the sale of municipally-owned commercial and residential properties to ensure what is needed, is built and ensure property isn’t banked by land owners as is done for industrial properties.
13. List three words that describe your vision of the ideal City of Belleville 20 years from now:
- Affordable
- Walkable (“complete communities” where you can access housing, groceries, transit, and healthcare without needing a car)
- Inclusive (public engagement of, and benefits for, all community members – not just those who vote, own property, have a house, make the profit, or are in a social circle)
Open Council analysis
This survey has a clear goal, but suffers from several significant flaws that will impact the quality of the data collected. We recommend passing survey questions through AI, asking it to review the question wording and answer options compared to survey best practices, providing Harvard University’s Questionnaire Design Tip Sheet for reference.
Q1 and Q2 are good – neutral, clear, simple, and specific.
Q3 – Answers are not exhaustive. It’s missing a category “Neither live nor work in the City.” for former residents and business owners – “visitor” is too specific and doesn’t cover these “other” non-resident, non-worker stakeholders.
Q4 – Question is clear, but using a text box will make the data difficult to analyze as people provide hundreds of different answers like “nurse”, “healthcare”, “at the hospital”. This question should have used a pre-defined dropdown list or checklist, which are available online.
Q5 – Answers overlap. If a respondent has lived there for exactly 5 years, do they choose “1 to 5 years” or “5 to 10 years”?
Q6 – Good. Answers don’t overlap and are exhaustive.
Q7 – Good, though letting the user rank the options would provide more information.
Q8 – Very poor. The options are a jumble of categories, mixing building form (“High-rise Apartment”), tenure (“Rental units”), financial model (“Cooperative (coop) housing”), and location (“New housing on vacant lots”), making the resulting data almost meaningless.
Q9 – Question is biased (leading). The intro, “may change the feel of downtown overtime,” frames density as a potential threat, which leads the respondent to focus on things that might be lost.
Q10 – Question is biased (loaded). It assumes the goal is to “protect and maintain” the existing feel, which may not be every respondent’s priority.
Q11 – Good, but places a high burden on the respondent.
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