{"id":3149,"date":"2013-07-17T16:07:27","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T20:07:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=3149"},"modified":"2013-07-24T16:40:18","modified_gmt":"2013-07-24T20:40:18","slug":"second-heritage-district-plans-get-public-roll-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/second-heritage-district-plans-get-public-roll-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Second Heritage District plans get public roll-out"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

People want to see the communities they bought into and love evolve, yet still retain the same character.
\nThat is the message being heard by consultants looking into establishing Aurora\u2019s second \u201cheritage conservation district\u201d in southeast Aurora.
\nIf brought to fruition, the new designated community would build upon the success of the Town\u2019s first Heritage Conservation District formed nearly 10 years ago in Downtown Aurora and stretching northeast from the corner of Yonge and Wellington.
\nThe proposed boundaries for the new heritage district is roughly bordered by Yonge Street in the west, the north side of Wellington Street East in the North, Centre Crescent at its most easterly point, and Kennedy Street East in the south. The area includes such landmarks as Town Park, the Aurora Cultural Centre, multiple churches, and, of course, several historic homes.
\n\u201cIt is a chance to enhance their lives, improve quality of place, to either stabilize or increase their property values, to encourage economic development in this fair burgh, and just keep what they like and manage the change they might not like,\u201d says consultant Carl Bray, whose company Bray Heritage, is overseeing the project.
\nMr. Bray recently spent the morning at the Aurora Farmers\u2019 Market with other municipal staff, including Heritage Planner Vanessa Hicks, to begin to engage \u2013 and gauge \u2013 the public\u2019s interest in the plan.
\nChange people might not like, adds Mr. Bray, include \u201cmonster homes\u201d and other buildings which might not be in keeping with the surrounding architecture.
\n\u201cThat has been one of the main things,\u201d agrees Ms. Hicks. \u201cThey want to see a lot of the mature trees that are here kept. They want to make sure houses fit in and are complementing the area. They really like that all of the houses are unique and it is not like looking into those new subdivisions and just about every home is the same.\u201d
\nThat, adds Mr. Bray, is representative of the feedback they have received so far.
\n\u201cIf you\u2019ve invested in a property that is kind of like a little bit of insurance that something crazy is not going to happen here or across the street,\u201d adds Mr. Bray of a historical designation.
\nWhile their initial inroads in engaging the community were deemed to be a success, there is still a lot of work to do, they agreed. \u201cPush back\u201d will be inevitable, concludes Mr. Bray, but that is par for the course. Likely concerns include possible restrictions on what a property owner can or cannot do with their homes, and red tape. Then there is the challenge of keeping everyone happy in an area, such as Town Park, which has so many historical and emotional connections to so many longstanding residents of Aurora.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not that someone is going to buy the park and build condos here, but the notion that we would like to keep what works,\u201d he says. \u201cPart of our job in this phase is to find out what works. If it is a small town atmosphere, what can we define that as? What are the components of that? If those components can be written down, then you have some chance to discuss them in a rational way and you can put some policy and guidelines around that.
\n\u201cIf change is coming along at Town Hall and they have some notion of how they can control it, you can have the same notion about it and it is not seen as being subjective or a NIMBY reaction.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People want to see the communities they bought into and love evolve, yet still retain the same character.
\nThat is the message being heard by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/2013-07-17-02.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-ON","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-10 13:14:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}