{"id":31951,"date":"2022-09-22T18:23:59","date_gmt":"2022-09-22T22:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=31951"},"modified":"2022-09-22T18:24:01","modified_gmt":"2022-09-22T22:24:01","slug":"aurora-votes-2022-affordable-housing-a-top-priority-for-ward-3-candidate-macdonald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/aurora-votes-2022-affordable-housing-a-top-priority-for-ward-3-candidate-macdonald\/","title":{"rendered":"Aurora Votes 2022: Affordable housing a top priority for Ward 3 candidate MacDonald"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As a life-long resident of Aurora, Harold McDonald has seen the community grow and develop, but not as a community where his three children can afford a home to call their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MacDonald, however, is not standing on the sidelines waiting for change. Instead, he has thrown his hat into the political ring to represent Ward 3 in the 2022-2026 Aurora Council.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First running as a Council candidate more than 30 years ago when his children were young, MacDonald says he wasn\u2019t able to \u201cput enough time\u201d into it. But, now that he\u2019s older, time is on his side \u2013 as are some lessons learned along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAn important issue for me is kids wanting to stay in Town and there\u2019s no affordability, no affordable housing,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s a 12-year wait for subsidized housing. There doesn\u2019t seem to be a plan by the Town to work with other corporations to generate rental income. The rents are sky-high. It\u2019s just not affordable for most people and that was one of the reasons to create more rental space, subsidized housing, and I think it should be a strong priority from the Town.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Had the Town retained its old works yard on Scanlon Court before moving to the new Joint Operations Centre on Industrial Parkway North, this, he says, would have been a prime opportunity to partner with a builder on bringing more affordable units to Aurora.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another priority for MacDonald is enhancing the Town\u2019s trails system. As a dog owner, he and his grandchildren can often be seen on the trails leash in hand and there are further opportunities he would like to explore as a Councillor, including the Anne Bartley Smith lands in the southeast quadrant of Henderson Drive and Bathurst Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henderson itself is a further concern for MacDonald and, he says, the residents he\u2019s spoken to on the campaign trail so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[An issue] that is important to people here is speed limits on Henderson,\u201d he says. \u201cAt night, you get cars and motorcycles ripping down the road. Community safety is a big issue and the other is transportation. There seems to be a really good bus schedule in the morning and a bus schedule at night, but during the day some of the seniors are finding it hard to get around on the transit system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a very active [cycling] community here, so to have safe biking trails and walking those trails, those are some of the issues that have come up, along with taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the owner of a construction company for more than 20 years, development is a key issue to which MacDonald would like to lend his voice at the Council table. This is particularly prevalent in the areas of preserving the Town\u2019s Stable Neighbourhoods and in looking at ways to revitalize Aurora\u2019s historic downtown core.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have watched other people develop in the area; some have done it really well and some have done it poorly,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have to grow. The Regional mandate is to grow and having controlled growth is extremely important to me personally. I understand the whole process of developing and building, so I hope to bring some experience in that way to the Town and hopefully a very practical perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA lot of developers have bought up a lot of the heritage properties along Yonge Street and [it\u2019s a matter of] how to renovate and still keep the facades of the buildings there and allowing for some of the growth in the downtown core, which is going to be very challenged,\u201d he adds. \u201cConnecting the Library to Town Park seems to be very disjointed. I love going to Town Park\u2026but how do we get the flow of people so that they can go from the Town Park to the Downtown Core and still retain that heritage look that we have?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to say how I would do it, but I would definitely work with the rest of Council and the Mayor to develop some kind of strategy for the Downtown Core. There\u2019s Hillary House, there\u2019s many beautiful buildings in the Downtown Core that should be preserved \u2013 not just Hillary House, but all the storefronts and stuff. How do we allow some growth and still keep the heritage feel of the Downtown Core?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the chief projects the 2018-2022 Council has invested in to revitalize the core has been the Town Square redevelopment. This is a project MacDonald says he has mixed feelings on due to the amount of money that was invested. But, he adds, its success needs to be realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019s going to be a great facility; I would have loved to have had a whole corridor to Town Park and not just right there but I think they spent a lot of money\u2026and that\u2019s a lot of taxpayers\u2019 dollars,\u201d he says. \u201cWe just have to make sure they use it, that people have access to it. \u2018Use\u2019 of it would be the operative word. There\u2019s no sense building it if no one is going to be there. It\u2019s promoting it and making sure people are using it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a life-long resident of Aurora, Harold McDonald has seen the community grow and develop, but not as a community where his three children can afford a home to call their own. MacDonald, however, is not standing on the sidelines waiting for change. Instead, he has thrown his hat into the political ring to represent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":31952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-8jl","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-06 18:43:32","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/2022-09-22-03.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31951","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=31951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}