Terry Kirkpatrick's Musings: Old Business

NIMBY and Group Homes

I was going through some old material (NOT THAT OLD!!!) and found our copy of the Group Home Study we did for Mississippi Mills, an amalgamated community comprised of what used to be Almonte, Pakenham and Ramsay Township. Population of about 11,000, and a geography of about 500 square km., north and east of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

The Group Home Study was commissioned by the Town of Mississippi Mills when a privately operated group home for adolescent girls was opened in a section of Almonte, causing a neighbourhood backlash. Complete with media attention, there was considerable outcry from concerned citizens in that neighbourhood.

At the time, I was Executive Director of Mills Community Support Corporation, and the Chairperson of the Board, Kieran Broadbent, encouraged us to bid on the contract to do the study. We won the bid and over the course of about six months, completed the study, which included interviews with as many neighbours as agreed to be interviewed, town staff, and the operators of the home. We offered to meet with a group of the girls, or with individuals living in the group home, who wished to have a say in our study, but this was (politely) declined. The issue had been quite high profile in Town for many months before we began our study.

We concluded at the end of our study that we were dealing with a phenomenon called "NIMBY" (for Not in My Back Yard) which fueled heated discussion and pointed it towards fear and at times exaggeration of concerns. We made a number of recommendations for how this should be dealt with in future by Mississippi Mills, and other communities, since we also discovered it was anything BUT an isolated incident.

We also discovered that Municipalities across Ontario stumble upon this issue quite regularly, and make more or less the same mistakes over and over again. Generally, group homes for seniors, children, people with disabilities, children and adult with mental health problems, homeless shelters, shelters for women fleeing domestic violence, and other supportive or assistive housing options of similar nature, make "easy victims" of discriminatory behaviour both from citizens and, from time to time, municipal staff. We should add that this was not the case in Mississippi Mills, where the planner in particular was supportive and courageous from the start. In return for this, he was threatened with loss of his employment (but thankfully, not by Town management), and subject to personal attack.Meanwhile, in a community not far away, municipal staff held up the opening of a group home for four ex-residents of Rideau Regional Centre for somewhat inflated building code and/or other by-law or town ordinance reasons.

We discovered that there exists, in municipal bylaws all across Ontario, wordings and "rules", enforceable by these municipalities (but in many cases, not enforced), that are "illegal", and where cases of similar bylaw or ordinance rulings have been struck down, not only by the Ontario Munipal Board on appeal, but some which have traveled all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, and there, struck down as "unconstitutional". Yet they are still "on the books" and still, often, force small, non-profit and charitable organizations, to hire lawyers, suffer unreasonable delays, get driven to hurdle barriers, jump through hoops and take verbal abuse in meetings and in the media, as well as having to try to protect their vulnerable "clients" from this abuse and scorn. And except for those many cases where the organization "gives up" and relocates, or cancels the project, which don't seem to be tracked by government or the media, THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A CASE GO BEFORE THE OMB, on such an appeal, THAT HASN'T BEEN SUPPORTED TO PROCEED. Sadly, the lesson seems to be: prevail, and persist, and you will (eventually) be cleared to proceed to open your group home, if you have sited it properly for human habitation, even if you are "too close" to another group home according to municipal bylaws, even if your municipality has a bylaw that restricts the number of people with disabilities (expressed in a specific number, or as a proportion of the population) who can live in the community (I KID YOU NOT), or directs them to industrial zones (who wants children to grow up in the manufacturing district?). But not until you have exhausted and discouraged your volunteers, subjected your clients to taunts, verbal abuse and disparaging character references in the local media, and used up taxpayer dollars in delays, appeals, staffing costs to attend public meetings, and so on. Worst of all, this repeats annually, despite absolute support by the highest court in the land, that a group home can be sited in ANY location zoned for residential living, in ANY municipality in the Province.

You can read our Group Home Study (published February 2003) on my website at https://sites.google.com/site/mterrykirkpatrick/clients/resources and scroll down the resources to "Group Home Study Final with Disclaimer.pdf".

I suspect the Town asked us to include the Disclaimer because, of course, our study ruffled quite a few feathers in the Town. Normally it goes without saying that a Town does not have to accept ANY, let alone ALL, recommendations from a study of this nature. WE probably today wouldn't be persuaded to recommend some of the actions to be taken (instead, I would probably recommend that all restrictive bylaws governing the placement of group homes in a properly zoned section of a municipality be stricken, and that NO special process be undertaken or ordered through municipal ordinance, for a group home or sponsoring organization, provided they are meeting the same requirements expected of any other private citizen in locating their housing.

After the study was published, the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association (ONPHA) began work on lobbying government to take a leadership role in eliminating the phenomenon of NIMBY through some form of affirmative action or legislation. I'll have to find out what, if anything, has happened with that initiative.