Newmarket council went ahead with designating 48 homes with heritage protections despite the passionate objections of several homeowners.
Council finalized the move with bylaws passed Feb. 10, after months of work leading up to it. The flurry of heritage protection came in response to the province urging municipalities to designate heritage properties waiting on lists or else lose the opportunity to do so at all for five years.
While most property owners accepted the designations, several objected to the move and what it could mean for their properties. Roya Rezaee said she bought her property at 471 Eagle St., believing she could demolish the building, and pleaded for council to allow it, noting it was the site of a murder in the 1800s.
“I purchased the property with the intention of demolishing the existing house and put up a new house, with an accessible home for me" Rezaee, who uses a wheelchair, said. “Nobody can live in it. There is water damage."
The province said municipalities must designate properties on their heritage list by Jan. 1, 2025, or those lists would be clear and the properties open for development. While the province relented last year to extend that deadline to 2027 instead, the municipality had already started work to designate properties and opted to go ahead with it.
Town staff had resolved five of 12 formal objections and four of five informal concerns, which still left at least eight property owners upset with the outcome. Five of them made delegations to town council, pleading to avoid the heritage designation.
George MacPherson said he had spent hundreds of thousands to make heritage-conscious renovations to his home of his own volition and that this move from the town would be an overreach.
“It’s an unnecessary intrusion into our rights as property owners,” he said. “The designation will reduce the value of our home … It is unnecessary to place a designation on our home. We have no intention of developing our property. The Heritage Act gives you the discretion not to designate.”
Matthew Vittigiglio owns 458-460 Timothy St. and said the property is deteriorating rapidly and said the bylaw would prove costly to him.
“It creates an undue financial burden,” he said. “I love these (heritage) properties. I think they look awesome and it’s nice to have them around. But the reality is, a building has a useful life.”
Newmarket Mayor John Taylor said the town is relying on the work of qualified professional planners to decide which properties are most worthy of heritage designation, in this case, a report from Archeological Research Associates, which found that all the properties in question met heritage designation criteria.
“It’s incredibly important to treat everybody fairly. The only fair way I can find forward is to rely on ARA and our expert planning staff,” Taylor said, adding that property owners have the right to go to the Ontario Land Tribunal if they believe the town is making an error concerning their property. “It’s not a rubber-stamp process; it’s a process that looks at it thoroughly again.”
Taylor noted that the non-designate heritage register, which all these properties were on, also already protected the properties from demolition unless they came to council. He said the designation also does not stop landowners from making alterations but adds a process to make sure that alterations are keeping within the heritage designation.
Staff said the designation does not mean improvements cannot be made, including for accessibility purposes.
Councillor Christina Bisanz said what drove the heritage committee was the danger of losing these properties if they did not act due to the provincial deadline.
“Our biggest concern was that we would have developers or whatever coming in and looking at some of these properties as teardowns, and we’d lose the ability to preserve that part of our history,” she said. “We recognize that not every home is necessarily in the historical district, but the locations of those homes or properties are of historical significance for other reasons.”