Challenges in Clarington - Aging in place

NRU
Aug. 19, 2015
By Edward LaRusic

Adjacent to the Wilmot Creek Adult Lifestyle Community, an isolated 960-unit bungalow development in Clarington, developer Ridge Pine Park Inc. plans to build a 560-unit residential community.

While it is intended to encompass housing options that would be attractive to the residents of the lifestyle community as they grow older, the residents are not convinced that the mix of built forms and tenures is at all appropriate.

“[Ridge Pine’s is] taking the existing community and providing a greater range of options in choice of housing, essentially for seniors or older adults,” Ridge Pine planner Bryce Jordan (GHD) told NRU.

Jordan said the original 1980s gated community-which includes a nine-hole golf course and community centre-was built and marketed for active, older adults. Now 20 years later, those adults may be finding it difficult to live in their bungalows.

“[Phase eight of the original Wilmot Creek community] includes apartment-type units that are lower maintenance of course, and will provide a retirement home and nursing home as well.”

The proposal is to expand the existing Wilmot Creek community across the rail corridor to the south by adding 73 detached and 8 semi-detached homes, 109 townhouses, six four-to-six storey condo apartment buildings with 222 units, two mixed use buildings with 48 rental apartment units and 1,900 m2 of commercial space and a five-storey 100-unit assisted living facility. A park and clubhouse are also envisioned. Located southeast of Bowmanville, the site is sandwiched between Highway 401 to the north and a rail corridor to the south, east of Bennett Road.

However, the prospect of aging in place is turning out to be a tough sell for the existing residents. Planning services director David Crome told NRU that residents voiced a variety of concerns about the proposal at last week’s public meeting.

“The main one is the relationship between the public potions of this community and the gated portions. There was a lot discussion at the meeting about the design of the gates.

The second one was of course the fact that now four-storey condominiums and rental buildings are being proposed that are different than the rest of the community. They have some concerns about higher density dwellings down there.”

As well, Crome noted that both the rental and condo units represent different forms of tenure than exists in the current Wilmot community, where residents own their homes, but lease their land.

From a staff perspective, Crome said it is a “very difficult site to work with,” given its location.

“It’s quite isolated in the sense that on the north side of the highway it’s agriculture, it doesn’t really have a connection to the east because that’s where the highway interchange is, and to the west is industrial. Both in terms of its context, being somewhat separate from the other urban lands, and the surrounding constraints, being the highway and the railway, it provides some challenges.”

Crome said staff ’s main concern is mitigating any noise impact from the adjacent highway and rail corridor on future development. As well, Detox Environmental, a waste management firm located across Bennett Road to the west, has concerns about the proximity of residential development.

At this stage only an official plan amendment has been proposed to bring the 28 ha. site into the urban area and permit residential uses. While Clarington designates the site for prime agriculture, Durham Region has designated it for urban expansion.

A final report on Ridge Pine’s OPA is expected to be considered by council in the fall.