I suppose it started as a…

I suppose it started as a partnership of trust. The building of a community with many stakeholders including a municipality, current and aspiring Burlington residents looking to settle in a new development and a concession for private ownership and management of a recreational green space intricately woven within to provide integration to a largely natural environ as well as provide flood management along natural water ways while also serving to entice home buyers to consider the integrated community.

A responsible and sensible integration of private and public sector to provide an idyllic environment in which development could occur while maintaining the integrity of what is essentially a watershed to Lake Ontario both for the proximal lands as well as those downstream who by virtue of gravity's flows, rely on all those upstream to make responsible development decisions. A trusted partnership that seemed to have been successfully established to the credit of all those planners involved from the start. A community that when viewed upon 50 years from now would still endure as a symbol of innovation and creative land use with appropriate zoning set in place to retain the special nature of this land use for generations to come.

Although this seems to have been a fragile trust vulnerable to stealthy private developers who saw the prospect of private land ownership alongside a provincial government autocratically focused on land development at all costs to enter as a perfect storm of disruption. A patient rubbing of hands crafting to overturn previous well-intentioned zoning restrictions and a province willing to look the other way. Yet there remains no clear benefactor beyond the private interest looking to develop these greenspace lands. There doesn't seem to be an insatiable desire among the public to buy highly expensive single family dwellings while chewing up underreprepresented greenspace lands within a municipality that already is on track to meet the province's housing growth targets. To anyone looking at the arrangement from an objective lens, it defies logic.

And the envious view of those 50 years from now that would admire the innovation and creativity of those that designed such an integrated community of trust and partnership stands at risk of being buried under the greed of concrete pavings that undermines the interests of those in that very community.

Who is this serving?