Almost two years after proposing their controversial first plan for a potential development project for St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Knowlton, Reed Bousada, promoter and developer of the project and his team recently presented a new plan to citizens with the goal of better addressing their concerns.  

At a time where a number of churches across the province are closing their doors, St.Paul’s has been evaluating its assets over the last couple of years to see what it can do to ensure that it has a financially viable future. The church looked into several possible projects that it could develop on its piece of land - about 4 acres in total - to generate income, including affordable housing. It eventually signed a sales and purchase agreement with Bousada to sell the land at $1 million. 

The original proposal developed by Bousada and his team of architects was an 18-20 unit condominium reserved for residents looking to downsize and stay in their community. The project was eventually scaled down to 12-15 condos due to concerns about the its size. In order to re-zone the land from institutional to residential, Bousada was asked by the Town of Brome Lake to demonstrate support for the project by garnering signatures from local citizens, but he did not meet the requirement and he was sent back to the drawing board. 

Presented at an information session on Monday night, the new plan sees a variety of changes to the project. Rather than condominiums, the new plan is made up of three townhouse-styles homes with two units each. The square footage of each home has been reduced by almost 50%, and the project has been moved further up the hill behind the church to reduce its environmental impact on the nearby wetlands and pond.

Despite the changes to the plan, a number of citizens continued to voice their concerns, which extend from questioning the need for another high-end housing development in Knowlton to the potential environmental impact. Moving forward, Bousada said that he and his team plan to hold smaller information sessions with residents for more feedback on the project with the hopes of finally bringing it to fruition. 

“You look all around the province and in all of these little towns the churches are being abandoned. Either the town is taking them over or they are being auctioned off. Once they are auctioned off, the town is a little bit more motivated to then figure out some way to develop that piece of property. (…) It’s a reality, we know this,” explained Bousada. “There’s numbers out there on how many churches are going to be closing across the country in the coming years. The reason why I got involved in this project at the beginning was Reverend Wiebe and Mr. Eamond (Treasurer for St. Paul’s Board of Management) talking to me about the project, keeping the church going, and how involved they are in the community.”

“There was an under-utilized asset that we wanted to turn into revenue, as anybody would. I mean that’s a business decision. We are an active church, we do a lot of things. We have have struggles just like every church, finances are one of them, and so this was a way to address that need. I think one of the things that I believe in is that your vision should always be greater than your resources. We have great vision, we have great ideas, but it’s always a little bit more than our resources,” noted Tim Wiebe, Minister of St. Paul’s Anglican Church. “(…) We need to be thinking ahead to the future.”

Recognizing that there is resistance from residents for another high-end development project in the village, Bousada and Wiebe both mentioned that the piece of property is not the right fit for an affordable housing project. Wiebe also took the opportunity to clarify to the community that the church is not involved in developing the project and that what happens to the land is left up to Bousada after signing the sales and purchase agreement. 

“The difficulty with affordable housing, for example, behind the church is that there is a height restriction and the amount of actual land that is buildable is pretty small. Most of the property, it’s 4 acres, you can’t build on it. Nobody could make any money, a developer wouldn’t want to pursue that project, and we didn’t want to be landlords. We didn’t want that responsibility,” explained Wiebe. “(…) Really, by accident, a conversation with Reed and Skip (Eamond) happened and we were able to move ahead with that.”

With various other development projects taking off in Knowlton over the last few months, citizens at Monday night’s information session questioned the need for another project when there is already little green space left in Knowlton and whether or not it would open up the doors for Bousada to continuing developing behind the church in the future. According to Bousada however, when you are submitting a project that asks for a zoning change it is a strict and lengthy process that requires the developer to stick to the exact plan that they submit, a process that he said he "will never go through again.” 

“The fact that we are having a zoning change, it changes everything. We have to do something that is going to be acceptable for the community and those people inside that zone or zones, which makes total sense. One of the concerns was is this going to be a snowball effect — it can’t really be a snowball effect. It’s project by project if there’s a zoning change,” he explained.

Despite the concerns around development, Wiebe said that he see’s the project filling in a need not only for the church, but for people looking to downsize and wanting to stay in the community they have grown to become a part of. 

“I do think it’s important to mention what Reed said about the families who have been coming here for years. This was a place for families to come and they had lives here. They came in the summer and they used to come in the winter to go skiing on Glen Mountain. I was talking to a family whose father just died and he was in London. They said, ‘wherever we go, Knowlton is always home.’ There are a lot of people that don’t live here that consider Knowlton home,” he explained. “Through no fault of their own, they have means and they would benefit from a place like this, a project like this. I think that it would be sad to see some of those families and people have to move somewhere else. That’s what we’re thinking for low-income housing, it sounds odd but it’s true for high income people as well.”

Following Monday night’s information session, Bousada said that he and his team will be holding other meetings with citizens in the near future to continue modifying the plan and trying to meet their needs to the best of their ability. 

“We’re here, we want to listen to people, but within reason. We went from 20 units and everybody said ‘if you did 12 units that will be amazing and we can make it work.’ We got to 12 units and now it’s too much. We’re at six units, we can’t really do one unit obviously, but this idea if six units seems to work. Is everything else perfect? Maybe not. We will get some sort of feedback and we will go from there,” he mentioned. 

CIDI had the opportunity to speak with a couple of local residents that highlighted their concerns around the project. 

Listen to the full interview below to hear more: