How Passion and Stubbornness Helped Grow a Vibrant Community

An interview with Hendrick Farm’s Sean McAdam

It takes a hint of obsession, and a whole lot of stubbornness, to fight for what you believe in. An entrepreneur to the core, Sean McAdam wouldn’t adhere to the standard way of doing things. Passionate about protecting nature and bringing back a true sense of place, he persevered to bring his dream to life — a development designed to put community and homeowners first. We sat down with Sean to talk about the steps he took and the red tape he fought, to be able to build Hendrick Farm the way he envisioned it — properly.

Amber: Let’s go back to the beginning of your career. Tell us about how you got started. Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Sean: When I was a kid, yes. I always thought that I would work for myself but I had no idea what I would do. I always liked the idea of business. It never actually occurred to me that I could, or should, work for anybody. I’ve just always thought, “I’ll be responsible for myself and that’ll be just fine.”

Amber: Why development? How did you get involved in the field?

Sean: I bought a house in Chelsea in ’97, got married, and we had our first kiddie in ’99. We had a beautiful log house that made great sense for a couple, but no sense at all for a family. The house backed onto a large forest and I would ask myself, “What if someday somebody develops that?” So, as luck would have it, I was driving by the other side of the forest looking around for houses and that’s when I came across this big piece of land. I saw a sign saying “53 acres for sale”. I didn’t know the first thing about land development, so I thought maybe I should buy it and subdivide it. I could keep a piece for us, sell of the rest, and maybe that’ll pay for the land. I begged, borrowed, and scrounged, and ran up every family member’s credit card to buy those 53 acres.

At this point, I knew how to install a dishwasher and that was about the extent of my technical skills. So that quickly became a terrifying enterprise because I clearly had no idea what I was doing. It worked out, though, because I was the first developer to do anything in about twenty years here in Chelsea.

Amber: What gave you the courage to just go for it?

Sean: It never really dawned on me that I needed courage. That’s one of the great things about stupidity; it doesn’t occur to you how much danger you’re in. I instinctively felt that it was an under-tapped market. Then, through happenstance or mishaps, I ended up having to buy the land that surrounded that original piece I bought.

One of the things I realized was that a lot of people were interested in coming to Chelsea and having a house here, but they didn’t know how to start the process. When I did my second project in 2001, I teamed up with a builder to make the process easier for customers.

One of the obstacles I found in doing my previous developments was that people were hesitant to move to two acres of land in the woods if they were coming from downtown Ottawa. They loved the idea of the country and hated the idea of the suburbs, but were afraid of the isolation. It also occurred to me, from a land use standpoint, that the idea of taking a whole piece of land and carving it up into equidistant lots really didn’t make sense. If you want to protect green space you need to cluster the houses closer together. I started talking to the municipality about that 18 years ago, but they really had no appetite for it.

Amber: How did you succeed in doing things differently?

Sean: The whole system just struck me as ridiculous. I had the experience of hearing these customers saying over and over again how they loved the idea of living in the country but that they didn’t like the idea of the social isolation. If you take the antithesis of all those things, take all of those not-ideal elements and turn them on their head, then you end up with this [Hendrick Farm]. I’d like to think it’s a reflection of the history of what has happened here, the context of the village fitting nicely with Gatineau Park, the lovely creek bed that runs through, and a reflection of how neighbours have historically viewed this land. My approach for this was to first start talking to neighbours and people who have lived here.

For about three or four years, I toured little groups of neighbours and asked them, “What do you see here? I know you want it to be left as an open field, but if it was going to be developed, what things would you like to see?” I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with it, having lived in Chelsea at this point for some time, but I needed their support. So I went through that exercise and then put together the plan. I pitched the municipality and, at that point, I had the political capital to do so because I had neighbours who were on my “side”. I kind of turned that process on its head. It took years, though. I filed for my application to subdivide here on, and I’ll remember the day for a while, October 20th, 2008.

Amber: How do you keep up your motivation to keep something like this going when it takes so long to build?

Sean: There’s this business motivation, the regular entrepreneurial motivation that all entrepreneurs have. Successful entrepreneurs (in my view) look at a problem and have an idea of how to solve it. The fact that it may be profit-making is usually secondary. I don’t think you can actually be successful in starting something from scratch with profit as your motivation. Profit is great, don’t get me wrong. Profit should be celebrated a hell of a lot more than anyone cares to admit, I just don’t think it’ll come unless you are passionate about what you’re doing. So I became increasingly passionate — some may argue obsessed — with the idea of properly planning a community and properly planning land use. It was a combination of passion and stubbornness, I guess. Nothing that’s happening here has been invented by me or any one person. This is how places used to get developed before the zoning enthusiasts came along. This is what happens when a community develops, rather than when government develops, and I think that’s fundamentally the difference. So I just kept moving along, step by step, making it happen.

Amber: When did you hire your first employee?

Sean: It was Fred. Fred does everything. He pitched me! When we set up the organic farm in 2011 we brought in farmers who knew the difference between the different types of vegetables, which was all news to me, and they hired Fred as a carpenter. He did a lot of the renovations on the farm gate/stand and built a lot of the initial farm infrastructure. Fred is also the quintessential entrepreneur and so he said to me before the end of the summer: “I’ve been watching you, and you need me”, and I said: “I think you’re right”. And so here we are.

Amber: How are your challenges different today from when you first started?

Sean: Now we’re managing the rollout of it, so we’re actually building. We’ve built about 22 houses already, and were about to start on another 24 over the course of the next 4 months. We’ll be building about 50 houses a year. In the last year we put in all the roads, water, sewer, and the electric and gas lines. It’s those things that have been challenging/time consuming.

Amber: So why this area? Why Chelsea/Ottawa? What made you want to move here in the first place?

Sean: I love the country. I was working in Ottawa and I’ve never been able to stand the idea of the suburbs. I don’t get why people would want to live there. I think it’s just bad for you, frankly! In fact, studies of various types are showing that it is very, very bad for people. I’ve always liked the idea of living downtown in a big city or in the country, but nothing in between. When I got married, we were looking for houses in ’97, and we knew our budget was $150 thousand maximum. At that time, that could get us a vinyl-sided house in Barrhaven or a log house on an acre of land in Chelsea. Barrhaven was about 45 minutes from Parliament Hill, whereas Chelsea was about 15 minutes from Parliament Hill. So we moved here and have been here ever since.

I have lived all over the world but I cannot think of a better place where you can live 15 minutes from a capital and have complete country life, with every single benefit of living in the city.

Amber: How would you describe the community? Do you find that Chelsea is tight-knit and has its own vibe, or do you find that it is integrated with Ottawa?

Sean: That is a very good question because that is something that I have seen change dramatically since I moved here. At first, Chelsea was viewed as this bedroom community. It was the place you escaped to after work. But on evenings and weekends, if you needed to go grocery shopping or you needed to do any of the other things one does in cities, you had to get into your car and drive into Ottawa. In the last five to seven years I have started to notice that people are beginning to view Chelsea as a destination unto itself. There really is a tight-knit social fabric in Chelsea and that is a nice thing to see.

Amber: Tell us a little about the Hendrick Foundation.

Sean: The Foundation came out of conversations with the municipality and discussions about preservation of green space. One of the critical components was the introduction of an organic farm and the preservation of agriculture in general. How do you sustain that? We could either sell carrots for 45 dollars each or figure out some other way to finance it. The farm is zoned residential and so the taxes associated with it assume it’s going to be wall-to-wall housing. The municipality has expectations in terms of taxes so there has to be some sort of financial input. I thought, what if we, again, do it the old fashioned way where the community supports the farm? So we registered the foundation as a not for profit that has a number of related missions. One is to own and operate the farm, and one is to run education programs that teach people about organic farming, but it also looks after all of the parks and trails. We’ve also injected a component on land use to try and educate people on the alternative ways that are, in my biased view, proper development. So the educational component, the agricultural component, and the preservation of the green space component are all looked after by the Foundation. And in return for those services, 1% of all home sales goes to the Foundation.

Amber: So if you could go back to day one of starting all of this, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Sean: Plan for what you think the budget and timeline will be, and then multiply it by four!

Amber: Your dream for Hendrick Farm is not yet fully developed so how do you communicate this dream to people without being able to show them?

Sean: We have a top notch marketing team. I’ll defer to them!

Jules Ribi: It’s never been about the product. Even though our homes are superior, it’s really all about the lifestyle. You can’t manufacture or buy the memories that you’re going to have living here because it’s such a unique experience. When people visit the site, they develop this automatic emotional connection.

You have to be pretty specific as to how you’re going to paint that picture, so the images we use and the content we curate are specific to that. You’re continuously building and layering so that people are getting that feeling.

Amber: What is the most satisfying thing that has happened to you throughout this entire process?

Sean: We always very, very affectionately refer to our first customers as our 2012 customers because that is when we first went to market. I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am to see them and their kids in the streets here after school. These people took a huge risk on us.

I sound so corny when I tell this story (I am always worried there is going to be a large rolling of eyes when I say this), but some of the things that are central to the design of Hendrick Farm are the road layouts, the road patterns, the road sizes, the scale of the roads, and the marriage of the architecture and the streetscape. The streetscape is all about the houses and the houses are moved closer to the road, just like you would find in any nice looking old village. They all have large front porches and it is a very social front to the house. That was all deliberate and very much how old villages/neighbourhoods used to work.

So back to the eye rolling…about 6 months ago the first families moved in.

It was the beginning of winter. I was here on a weekend. There is a family who lives here, just up the road, who is unilingual anglophone. Another one of the first families who moved in is francophone. They didn’t know each other at all when they first moved here. When I arrived here that one weekend, here were the kids of these two families who had never known each other before moving here — and unable to speak each other’s language — playing road hockey on the main street together. We deliberately designed it so that people could play road hockey on the main street and here it was, happening naturally. It had happened exactly as I had hoped, and within weeks of people moving in! I loved it. That has to be the most satisfying moment.