Call some place Paradise....

Our little town of Niagara-on-the Lake (NOTL) is just 25 miles from Toronto as the crow flies, but for all the attention we get in the Toronto media, apart from a couple of theatre reviews each summer, we might as well be on the moon.  Big surprise, then, to pick up the Toronto Star from my doorstep this morning and find this article dominating the front page.

The story, which concerns a Toronto-area property developer who recently set up his daughters as proprietors of a winery on the edge of the old town of NOTL, has been well covered in the two local newspapers.  There are growing suspicions that the developer,  Benny Marotta, has set his sights on corralling portions of the local "Green Belt" for housing development.  He has already built a very large subdivision in one of the outlying villages here, but his recent actions suggest he wants to do something much closer to the (increasingly fragile) historic centre of town.

It's impossible to be certain about what Marotta intends to do, although his actions as described in the linked article certainly make one suspicious.  He has made a lot of enemies in the town, including some local politicians, in remarkably short order.  However, he's just one of the developers and investors trying to change the face of the town for their own profit, so let's try to look at the bigger picture.

Both Marotta and some of the other folk quoted by the Star suggest that NOTL is hostile to developers.  This is absurd.  First, as noted above, Marotta himself has developed a subdivision of well over 200 homes in the past couple of years.  Second, the population of the town has grown by about 13 percent in the past five years alone, to stand at 17,500 currently.  In other words, we have added something close to 2,000 residents in just half a decade, and all of those people have found homes.  The truth is that developers have been extremely busy here, in the heritage area itself and,  even moreso,  in the four other villages that go to make up the town.

Housing development, however, is just one of the pressures on the town, and arguably not the biggest one.  As the article notes, the town receives about three million tourist visits per year, the bulk of those in the fair weather months from April to October.  Let's put that into perspective.

With a population of just 17,500, NOTL welcomes 171 tourists per resident each year.  Now take a look at London, England, one of the world's biggest tourist destinations.  It has a population of 8.63 million.  If it were to receive as many tourists per resident as NOTL does, it would have to accommodate 1.48 BILLION visitors per year, which is almost exactly 20 percent of the entire population of the earth! London can certainly seem overrun with visitors at times, but the actual number of tourists travelling there was just 31 million in 2015.

This swarm of visitors is putting the old town of NOTL under enormous pressure.  The main streets are lined with hotels, restaurants and tourist-oriented stores. Aside from the liquor store and a tiny supermarket, there's almost nothing for the locals, who have to go elsewhere for their shopping.  Needless to say, when the tourists beat a hasty retreat at the onset of cold weather, the place can resemble a ghost town, and those businesses that stay open struggle to make ends meet.  It's an  unbalanced and unhealthy situation.

Given these facts, it's no surprise that out-of-town developers like Benny Marotta encounter strong pushback from the locals, especially when they seem willing to try an end-run around the local planning bylaws. Now, it's true that the NIMBY spirit is alive and well in NOTL: you can find people whose families have lived here for generations and who are quite open about their preference that newcomers from Toronto (like me) should hightail it back whence we came.

That makes no sense: without newcomers and their money, NOTL would long ago have sunk into a slightly more genteel version of the stagnation and poverty that afflicts most of the Niagara region. However, the town has reached and maybe even passed a tipping point: the press of numbers, whether new residents or tourists, is destroying the attractions that bring people here in the first place.

Benny Marotta says he sees Niagara as a Paradise, and he just wants to make it better.  I don't know if Benny is a fan of the Eagles, but he might want to ponder these lines from their great lament for the fate of their home state of California, "The last resort":

"They called it Paradise.
I don't know why.
You call some place Paradise --
Kiss it goodbye".