Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ontario

WHI TCHURCH-STOUFFV I LLE , ONTAR IO Street as a Major Transit Area and changed the density targets from 50 to 150 persons, or jobs, per hectare. So there’s a huge opportunity to redevelop mid-rise buildings around the GO Station and look at creating a complete community down there, where you can work, live, and shop. We need density brought into the downtown to support the businesses and make it really attractive for new investment. “Geranium Homes built a beautiful condominium building, architecturally designed to fit the downtown, and demonstrated that this kind of a vision can work for our community. Now, people are interested in buying up blocks of buildings down there to knock down and rebuild. My approach to them is to keep the 19th century facades and build new buildings behind them.” BVM: What are Whitchurch-Stouffville’s objectives for the future? Lovatt: “From an environmental standpoint, we want to protect the majority of our greenspace on the Oak Ridges Moraine. We’re not looking at becoming a sprawling city; we’re going through visioning exercises that will speak to planned, appropriate growth, so we can hit our provincial targets that have been set. But we need to take a proactive approach in looking at complete communities. We have the ability – a council with a vision, a brilliant staff to execute it, and a development community that actually wants to deliver on it. So the conditions are really exciting for the future of what has been a sleepy community.”