As for your suggestion about community groups banding together to buy and develop properties, it’s a nice thought, but a bit Utopian. My wife and I were part of such a collective – a co-housing group – where a number of really brilliant community and smart-growth oriented folks attempted to build our own housing development.

But in order to live in the core – which all of us wanted to do – we had to compete with developers for any property we wanted. It was no contest, in addition to easy financing, the developers could rapidly deploy legal troops, political and construction industry connections, and a swarm of architects, engineers, and project managers who were eager to work with them (but took a lot of convincing to even speak with us).

The hard truth: we need developers, for the simple reason that they are good at this stuff. The idea of SIMBY is to apply positive pressure from the other three parties to ensure developers use their massive powers for good not evil.

We need more dialogue on the way it should be done, and then apply it consistently.

I live near Uptown Rideau, where new, larger pipes are about to be put in, unleashing the redevelopment genie (several sites are ready to go).

Suggestion: get all the smart people in a neighbourhood to buy potential sites, plan them in detail, and then sell them to the builder who agreed to complete them. Lower profit for them, but lower risk, too. But the potential for neighbourhood profits will be a bracing feeling, too.