We are engaging the support and services of selected professionals to help manage the challenges of the development process: securing a site, negotiating with regulatory authorities for development approvals, securing the financing, designing our community, and the actual construction.
Project Consultant
Ed Starr, Principal, SHS Consulting Inc.
www.shs-inc.ca
Planning + Design Consultant
Charles Simon, Principal, Charles Simon Architect + Planner
www.simon-archplan.com
All About Our Planning Team
Edward Starr
In August 2008, GreenSong engaged the services of Ed Starr, who is one of the two founding Partners of SHS Consulting, Ed has completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Urban Studies at York University, a Master of Environmental Studies Degree (specializing in Housing Policy and Community Planning) at York and a Masters of Business Administration (specializing in Marketing and Economics), also at York. He is a full member of the Canadian Institute of Planners and the Ontario Professional Planners Institute.
Ed possesses 30 years of consulting experience in all aspects of the firm’s consulting work, as well as five years of direct public sector planning and housing experience at the local and regional municipal level. While on staff at the City of Toronto Planning Department, he assisted in the development of the housing policy component of the City’s innovative Core Area Plan, which helped stabilize inner city neighbourhoods and also conducted much of the background work leading to the formation of City Home, the City’s municipal non-profit housing corporation. While at the Region of Peel, he managed a staff team that developed the first Regional Housing Policy in Ontario and prepared the report recommending the formation of Peel Living, the Region’s non-profit housing corporation. This corporation has gone on to become one of Ontario’s largest producers and operators of affordable housing.
A highly accomplished communicator, Ed has directed a host of consulting studies and affordable housing development projects and spoken at major conferences in every corner of Ontario. Also a frequent policy advisor to senior levels of government, Ed has been consulted by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the Canadian Forces Housing Agency (Department of National Defence), the National Homelessness Secretariat, the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, the Ontario Ministry of Education, the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association, the Cooperative Housing Federation, and more than three dozen community-based non-profit housing corporations.
Charles Simon
Charles Simon is the total package: a practising architect and planner in Canada since 1967. He is also the only practising architect/planner to have been granted an honorary membership in the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects. Charles is a pioneer in energy-efficient building and environmentally sensitive site planning. His achievements include Canada's first engineered passive solar house and Canada's largest passive solar housing project.
Charles’s interdisciplinary training and experience has led to a range of community and urban design projects. These include master plans for new towns, universities, resorts, residential communities, and rural villages. The design of housing environments remains an abiding interest, whether large or small, high or low budget, new construction or renovation.
His work has been featured in a variety of publications in Canada, the United States, Japan, Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, Poland, and Belgium. Charles has won numerous design awards, including several prestigious awards for the pioneering Environmental Learning Centre for the Kitchener-Waterloo YMCA and, most recently, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Sustainable Building from the Green Building Festival, Toronto 2006.
In November 2007, Charles founded the Eden Mills Carbon Neutral Project. Eden Mills is aspiring to be the first village in North America to achieve carbon neutrality. (www.goingcarbonneutral.ca)