They open the front door, stand on the stoop and there it is. The Wall.

Directly across from the heritage-themed townhouses on Perez Road stands a three-storey monolith stretching the entire block. Now under construction, it’s foamed in blazing yellow.

Next summer it will buzz with 42 new vacation rentals attached to a sweeping, arched 60-room hotel clad in reflective glass, looking all the world like Terminal 4 at Pearson Airport.

This is the Old Town’s new signature gateway project. And some people wonder what the heck went wrong with our planning process. How did we turn into Mississauga?

“It’s unlikely the people who live behind that development are ever going to see the sun again,” says Stuart McCormack. “The massing of this is not consistent with the town.”

McCormack was on council back in 2018 when John and Adam Hawley unveiled their plans for a commercial development on this prime eight-acre site beside the amazing Garrison Village enclave.

Then it included a small food store, an arts centre, more retail space and a squat four-storey hotel that looked like a benign apartment building.

But that was then. Four years passed. There were five revisions. The hotel morphed. The roof got higher. The food store swelled into a two-storey emporium. The retail multiplied. Parking for almost 400 vehicles emerged.

And The Wall of short-term rental units, with parking below each, sprang onto the site plan. The original proposal was to have rental apartments above stores — a traditional model. But now a strung-out motel is glued to a hotel, and throws its shadow upon the neighbours.

“When I go back and look at the drawings that were used by the planning group,” McCormack says, “they appear substantially different to what I’m seeing now. There were brick columns, no one-way glass on the windows, not as much massing. To a certain extent, yes, this looks like an airport hotel.”

It’s to be called the Clayfield, owned by Hawley’s corporation and run by Hyatt. The hotel and the rentals are part of the largest commercial development in NOTL’s history, which will be made up of 16 buildings.

Seven years ago residents reacted badly. Council saw a petition with 164 names on it objecting to the hotel, the height, the anticipated tourist traffic, the parking and congestion. They approved it anyway.

Since then, the project’s footprint has expanded. And this time without political oversight.

How does this happen?

“This speaks to a much larger issue,” McCormack says, “which is the town’s willingness to delegate site approval to staff. For keynote projects, such as Parliament Oak (hotel) and this, it would be prudent for final approval to come back to council. This has the potential to dramatically change the face of the town.”

“We need to make sure that what we were told is in fact what’s being put up. By the way, how many of the planning staff live in Niagara-on-the-Lake, I wonder.”

Sunday morning, and Perez Road has dog walkers and gardeners on one side, chain link and steel trusses on the other. How are people who live there, who bought homes once bordering an open meadow, reacting to The Wall?

“Well, it was a surprise,” in the words of a couple who have lived there for years (and prefer anonymity). “We expected a commercial area, of course, but nothing of this scale and scope.”

The concerns: the height. Cars. Congestion. Traffic. More tourists in a town already being loved to death.

But there is also good. Services will be expanded. More walkability. “I won’t have to drive to Virgil now for a quart of milk.”

They’re resigned. “What are you gonna do about it?” a lady with a Lab asked. “You just have to trust the city knows what they’re doing,” her friend said.

Or not.