Dear Mayor Boddy, Members of Council, and Planning Staff,

I am writing to submit my opposition to ZBA No. 58 for 1201 15th Avenue East, the proposed eight-storey, 128-unit apartment building.

Housing is much more than a storage problem for human bodies. A home should help people raise families, stay mentally well, grow their own food, know their neighbours, and become more resilient over time. This proposal moves in the opposite direction: more height, more mechanical dependency, more landlessness, more debt-backed construction, and less household resilience.

The City’s own notice describes the application as an eight-storey residential apartment building containing 128 dwelling units. That is a major change in scale for this area, and Council should treat it as a serious long-term decision, rather than simply a unit-count exercise.

In a systematic review of high-rise housing, 11 out of 13 statistically significant findings, about 85 percent, linked high-rise housing with worse mental health outcomes than other housing types. One study cited in that review found that residents on the fifth floor or higher had twice the ratio of mental health symptoms compared with residents on lower floors. This eight-storey proposal uses a building form already associated with social disconnection and worse mental health.

The food-security evidence also points away from landless rental housing. Statistics Canada found that among families below the poverty line, food insecurity was 22 percent for mortgage-free homeowners, 37 percent for non-subsidized renters, and 62 percent for subsidized renters. Apartment living gives people very limited access to land, gardens, food storage, and productive household space. As grocery prices rise and supply chains become less reliable, cutting people off from land is reckless housing policy.

An eight-storey building also creates a long-term maintenance and demolition liability. Ontario’s elevator study found residential and institutional elevators unavailable about 3 percent of the year, around 10 days annually, and Ontario now requires long elevator outages to be reported because availability remains a serious concern. Owen Sound has already seen a demolition wall hit the 10th Street bridge. If that can happen now, how much harder will it be to remove an eight-storey behemoth decades from now, under tighter fuel, equipment, labour, and material constraints? This is how buildings become civic liabilities: systems age, costs rise, maintenance gets deferred, and the burden falls on everyone around them.

The affordability argument also fails the construction math. Canadian construction cost data shows concrete apartment buildings commonly costing around 40 to 60 percent more per square metre than low-rise wood-frame apartments, with costs generally rising as buildings get taller. That cost has to appear somewhere: higher rents, public subsidy, smaller units, lower quality, or deferred maintenance. More units on paper can still leave people with expensive, fragile, landless housing.

Owen Sound needs housing, but we need to stop pretending that housing means forcing everyone into half-million-dollar construction, debt, rent, and landlessness. The real alternative is community land trusts: land where families and vulnerable people can grow food, produce firewood, raise children, operate small businesses, and build lives worth staying sober and responsible for.

Council should open lawful paths for yurt and cabin hamlets, garden homes, and land-based village development, instead of approving expensive vertical warehouses for human bodies. Homes should reconnect people to land, food, work, family, and neighbourly responsibility.

I ask Council to reject this eight-storey proposal and direct growth toward land-based housing that serves the long-term survival and wellbeing of the people of Owen Sound.

Sincerely,

Andrii Zvorygin Owen Sound

Sources and notes

  1. City of Owen Sound, ZBA No. 58, 1201 15th Avenue East. The City’s notice says the purpose of the application is to facilitate an eight-storey residential apartment building containing 128 dwelling units. https://www.owensound.ca/news-and-public-notices/posts/zba-no-58-notice-of-complete-application-and-public-meeting/

  2. Barros et al., “Social consequences and mental health outcomes of living in high-rise residential buildings and the influence of planning, urban design and architectural decisions: a systematic review.” This is the source for the 11 out of 13 statistically significant mental health findings and the fifth-floor mental-health comparison. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10076456/1/Cities_v3_Accepted.pdf

  3. Larcombe et al., “High-Rise Apartments and Urban Mental Health.” This review discusses evidence linking higher floor levels and high-rise living with poorer mental health outcomes, including that six out of eight studies reported poorer mental health for residents of higher floor levels. https://www.mdpi.com/2078-1547/10/2/34

  4. Statistics Canada, “Food insecurity among Canadian families.” Statistics Canada reports that among families below the poverty line, food insecurity was 22 percent for mortgage-free homeowners, 37 percent for renters of non-subsidized housing, and 62 percent for families in subsidized rental housing. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article/00013-eng.htm

  5. Technical Standards and Safety Authority, Elevator Availability. Owners and licensees of elevators in residential buildings and long-term care homes must report elevator outages lasting more than 48 hours to TSSA. https://www.tssa.org/elevator-availability

  6. Government of Ontario, “Ontario’s Action Plan on Elevator Availability.” Ontario requested an independent TSSA-commissioned report to define and assess elevator availability and key drivers of non-availability. https://news.ontario.ca/mgs/en/2018/01/ontarios-action-plan-on-elevator-availability.html

  7. Altus Group, Canadian Cost Guide. Provides Canadian construction-cost ranges by building type and market. https://www.altusgroup.com/featured-insights/canadian-cost-guide/

  8. Altus Group, 2025 Canadian Cost Guide commentary. Notes cost ranges for apartments and condominiums up to 12 storeys and broader cost pressures. https://www.altusgroup.com/insights/canadian-cost-guide-2025-costs-are-stabilizing-despite-looming-threats/