Brampton homeowners fight to preserve Ontario’s first housing co-operative

Thestar.com
Feb. 4, 2019
Pam Douglas

They were a group of ordinary people who did an extraordinary thing -- they joined forces to build their own homes brick by brick and did it in their spare time.

It was Ontario’s first housing co-operative, located in the northwest corner of Brampton, and it has largely remained overlooked since it was first built in the early 1950s. That is, until now.

There is pressure by some current landowners to subdivide the lots, which are between one and two acres, and build larger homes to replace the original 1,200- to 1,300-square-foot houses located on a rosary-shaped street called Marysfield Dr.

There are only two original-owner families left, and they are fighting to convince Brampton city council to approve a consultant’s recommended restrictions including lot size, house size and setbacks for any new homes to be built, to preserve the historic feel and look of the Marysfield community.

“There’s no place like this in Brampton at all,” says Mary Richardson, whose parents built the house she now shares with her husband, daughter and grandchild, who, she points out, is the fourth generation to live in Marysfield. “We just don’t want to lose the character of this area.”

She and her brother Bill Grant have fond memories of growing up in Marysfield -- the neighbourly closeness, the children, the feeling of freedom and room to roam.

They want it to remain true to those roots and retain the character of a rural oasis.

“Some people are saying there is no history here, but there is,” her husband Allan says.

It was the early 1950s when 14 families embarked on this unique project.

They were childhood friends who grew up in Toronto.

Their day jobs were varied -- clerks, a tool and die maker, bookkeeper, embalmer, air traffic controller, an electrician and a bricklayer. They bought manuals for setting up a co-operative, and a set of plans from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. on how to build a house.

They settled on a multiple-acre site in the hamlet of Wildfield in the area of Mayfield Road and The Gore Road, owned by St. Patrick’s Church.

“They came out here to get out of the city,” says Sean Giblin, who still lives in the house his parents built just down the road from the Richardsons.

Families chipped in $1,000 to buy materials and the land from the Archdiocese of Toronto, in the name of the Family Home Builders Co-operative. The church provided an interest-free loan.

Construction started in the fall of 1954. They built 14 homes simultaneously after work, on weekends and days off, even digging their own wells.

“Nobody knew which house they were going to get until after they were built,” says Bill Grant. “All you did was pick the style of house, there were three, and then they drew straws.”

The rosary shape of the street was a nod to their faith.

City council passed an interim control bylaw last year, putting a freeze on development in the area while a consultant conducted a study. The freeze was prompted by a flurry of land severance applications submitted by six current landowners.

A statutory public meeting will be held Feb. 11 to present that consultant’s report on the future of Marysfield. In a preliminary review, SGL Planning and Design Ltd. recommended preserving the historic feel of the area, and suggested the neighbourhood could be designated a cultural heritage landscape.

“The Marysfield Neighbourhood has unique characteristics ... including a unique street and lot pattern of smaller lots than typical estate residential lots, as well as greenery and open space in front yards and between dwellings, contributing to the rural-like setting of the community,” SGL concluded.

The review calls for limits on new development that would dictate “scale, height, massing, setbacks, building orientation, building separation distances of dwellings and the landscape open space characteristics of lots.”

A council decision is expected sometime in the spring.

Meanwhile, the six landowners looking for severances have appealed the development freeze to the province’s Local Planning Appeal Tribunal. A hearing has not yet been set for that appeal.

Landowner Vin Mahesan says most of the existing landowners in Marysfield are aligned in wanting to sever lots and build.

He is building an 8,000-square-foot house on one of six previously approved severed lots on one of 14 parcels on the street that were not part of the co-operative. He says he plans to raise his family in Marysfield and wants the same childhood for them that the Richardsons and Giblin said they enjoyed -- safe, rural and family-oriented.

“It’s a safe area for our kids to grow up,” he says.

The land is worth more than $1 million, but the existing houses are run down, he says.

He agrees with some of the compromises suggested by the consultant, but one recommendation that a new-build home can only cover seven per cent of the lot is too low.

“Ideally, it should be 15 per cent. That’s the standard,” he says.

Mary Richardson says her own house has an addition and she doesn’t want to stop her neighbours from building new homes on property they have paid more than $1 million for.

“I understand someone not wanting to live in (an existing) house for that amount of money. I understand wanting to tear it down,” she says. “I just want (the new house) to fit in with everything.”

Dan O’Reilly, a local historian working to protect the history in the surrounding community of Wildfield, says it’s important to preserve the past.

“This is as historic an area as downtown Brampton. It should be preserved,” O’Reilly says.

“It’s been a real effort preserving the history of Wildfield,” he says.

“It’s Brampton’s only remaining hamlet. All the rest have been swallowed up by urban sprawl. Castlemore doesn’t look like what it used to. Who remembers Tullamore? And it was a distinct community.”