Kitchener Zoning Bylaws are Thought to be Discriminatory

The City of Kitchener is being taken to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal by a group that says zoning bylaws here discriminate against people with disabilities.

KITCHENER — The City of Kitchener is being taken to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal by a group that says zoning bylaws here discriminate against people with disabilities.

Kitchener and three other municipalities — Toronto, Sarnia and Smith Falls — are named in the legal challenge that will be handled by the Human Rights Legal Support Centre in Toronto.

At issue are requirements that supportive housing for people with disabilities must be at least 400 metres apart. Most municipalities have similar bylaws.

The legal support centre selected four cities with the aim of effecting changes in zoning bylaws for all Ontario municipalities.

When the chief administrative officer in Smith Falls heard about the challenge Tuesday he immediately said changes will be made to the zoning bylaws. The City of Sarnia also said it will change its bylaws. The City of Toronto is now creating a single zoning bylaw and the legal support centre said this is a perfect opportunity to drop the requirements for minimum-distance separations.

Kitchener has yet to be served with papers and it is way too early for an official response
But the city’s approach for the past 18 years has seen the number of group homes nearly double, Mayor Carl Zehr said.

“We actually had opened it up quite some time ago,” Zehr said. “To the specific issue of distance separations and the allegations being made by this group, I really can’t comment at this point in time.”

The city’s zoning bylaw that has the human rights group upset also covers group homes for young offenders.

Jeff Willmer, the city’s interim-director of development and technical services, said most of the concerns the city hears about group homes are not related to people with disabilities but rather to clusters of group homes for young people with legal troubles.
If the zoning bylaws are struck down, Willmer said the city may have to ban group homes from some neighbourhoods altogether to prevent concentrations.

“We thought the separation had a positive outcome in that we no longer had a concentration of any type of group home, but that we have distribution of them,” Willmer said.

“A group home is a group home, regardless of the type of it, we have chosen not to take a discriminatory approach, we are describing a land use,” he said.

Regarding the legal challenge involving supportive housing for people with disabilities, John Gladki, an urban planner with GHK International, said in an interview “the separation distances are based on the characteristics of the people who live in that kind of housing,”

Gladki will appear as an expert witness in support of the legal challenge.

“What they are doing is imposing constraints on where these people could live in supportive housing based on the characteristics of those people,” Gladki said.

“You don’t have the same kind of constraints for other residential uses,” Gladki said.

People with physical and mental challenges often live in houses where a support worker helps them with medication, meals and daily living. This is known as supportive housing and, zoning bylaw 85-1 in Kitchener says such housing must be at least 400 metres apart.

“It does in effect limit where people can live and it limits the opportunities for providing housing for people with mental and physical disabilities who need some kind of support,” Gladki said.

Planners have not thought about the implications of having these restrictions, which are deeply embedded in this province’s culture of urban planning, he said.

“There is a dimension that is discriminatory, quite frankly,” Gladki said.

Under the Ontario Human Rights system a mediator will be appointed to oversee negotiations among the municipalities, the Human Rights Legal Support Centre and eight individuals with disabilities who are claiming discrimination.

If those negotiations fail to effect changes in the bylaws then a hearing will be held, probably in about a year or so.

“The minimum-separation distances will sometimes mean that parts of the city become off limits to more supportive housing,” Kathy Laird, executive director of the legal support centre, said in an interview.

A municipality would not even think about putting minimum-distance separations in place for immigrants, seniors or other groups of people, but that is exactly what is done for people with disabilities, Laird said.

“We don’t generally people-zone, we don’t put extra restrictions on the location of housing based on characteristics of the people who live in the housing — that is the human-rights lens that we want to bring to bear on these restrictions,” Laird said.

Published by the Record.com