My Vision for Kitchener
Fiscal responsibility
The cost of living is skyrocketing. It’s becoming harder to stretch your funds. We need to keep property taxes low and ensure we aren’t spending recklessly. The city of Kitchener is already in too much debt with no clear answers on how to pay for all of it.
Affordable Housing
Affordable Housing Strategy is to make housing more affordable and accessible to everyone that also include a human rights-based approach to housing, helping to end homelessness, and creating a working group of community members with lived experience of homelessness and housing challenges to advise staff in implementing the strategy and need more Inclusionary Zoning.
Community safety
Almost every day we are hearing of carjackings, break ins, kids violance and swarmings happening in the community. We need to keep our neighbourhoods safe for our children and young families. I aim to work with Kitchener Police to ensure Kitchener is adequately served by on the ground response, and will fight for a return of community policing in Kitchener.
Youth engagement
With so many teenagers and young adults calling Kitchener home, we need to ensure the ward is full of activities for them to take part in. Kitchener is no longer a sleepy suburb; it’s a city within a city. I will fight for more youth programming along with community space for hocky, basketball, soccer, skateboarding, cricket and other recreational activities.
1.
Affordable Transit
The patterns of transit riders are changing. We need to reimagine bus routes to get you where you need to go in a quick, reliable, and affordable fashion.
2.
Community Safety
Almost every day we are hearing of carjackings, break ins, kids violance racism and swarmings happening in the community. We need to keep our neighbourhoods safe for our children and young families. I aim to work with Kitchener Police to ensure Kitchener is adequately served by on the ground response, and will fight for a return of community policing in Kitchener.
3.
Infrastructure
While our community continues to grow, infrastructure has not kept up with the pace. Roads need to be widened or repaved, more sidewalks are needed, traffic calming measures need to be enhanced, and other aging infrastructure needs to be replaced. Kitchener needs a strong representative at the council table who will fight for funding to get these projects done.
4.
Development
Kitchener continues to expand and will continue to see growth and development. But we must ensure we are doing it right. We cannot continue to build without ensuring our infrastructure is upgraded to meet the needs. We must also ensure any development we approve doesn’t have any possible downsides for other residents.
5.
Traffic & Speeding
Traffic in Kitchener is start increasing. That is not to be unexpected. We are a growing suburban community which relies heavily on cars. Speeding in our schools and residentail area getting an on going issue. Need speed breakers!
Norwegian Cohousing Project Is Designed Around ‘Gaining by Sharing’
Early community engagement in the planning and development phases sets this cohousing project apart.
Alternative housing models like cohousing are gaining popularity, and no wonder: the North American obsession with single-family housing is not only expensive and ecologically damaging, it’s also incredibly alienating. The way that our cities and suburbs are structured are not particularly amenable to building strong local communities; everyone has their own single-family house or isolated apartment and very little in terms of shared communal space or daily crossing of paths that might help foster these much-needed deeper social connections.
“Today’s residents might be modern families with ‘my, your and our kids’, a generation of elderly who are healthy and want to live at home longer, people who live alone and suffers from loneliness, or people who simply wish to live more sustainably. By sharing resources, whether it is time, space, or assets, the result is a more sustainable way of living: environmentally, but also socially, economically, and architecturally.”
Dont Hesitate
To Ask a Question
Air Traffic Noise Pollution Petition (Please click on photo to continue..)
Petition Initiated by Asher Shahzad from Kitchener, ON Whereas: • Air traffic from Waterloo airport operations flies over densely populated residential areas; • Quality of life (noise pollution and public safety) is greatly affected by the high frequency of daytime and night flights of small private planes and flight schools, helicopters and heavy aircraft; • The excessive noise that aircraft generate does serious damage to human health; • Air pollution contributes to climate change; and • There is a lack of cooperation on the part of the airport and the City of Kitchener