When Justus Veldman first started poking around the old St. Marys Paper property in Sault Ste. Marie, he stayed at Fern Delarosbil’s guest house on the banks of the Goulais River.
It’s a beautiful spot with an outdoor hot tub and one of the area’s best private beaches.
Delarosbil doesn’t allow just anybody to stay at his place.
You have to be “interesting,” he said.
Veldman, the former farmers’ market vendor who’s transforming the Sault’s 120-year old paper mill into a multi-use urban village, is nothing if not interesting.
First, there’s his curious obsession with footwear.
“I want to write a book on shoes,” he says. “One of the things that I do before I walk into any meeting is look at someone’s shoes.”
In order to do a complex development like his Mill Square public/private partnership deal in Sault Ste. Marie, Veldman needs to size people up quickly.
“You just have to look at their shoes,” he says. “Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of the time, you’ll be correct.”
Curiously, it’s hard to get a fix on Veldman’s own choice of footwear.
He’s been seen slogging through sewage in hand-stitched blue suede vintage boots from Wisconsin, then striding through Sault Ste. Marie’s city hall in crude farmer boots.
Veldman’s ascent, from seller of daylilies to city-shaping proponent of integrated restorative development in just 15 years, is similarly unorthodox but nonetheless perfectly logical.
He started life in the Netherlands, one of 10 children born to a Dutch Reformed pastor whose missionary callings took him to three continents.
Justus immigrated to Canada when he was
nine and left at age 13, travelling with his family to South Africa,
the United States (Michigan and Wisconsin) and four other communities
in the Netherlands.
From his father, he inherited an ability to communicate and implement ideas.
His mother gave him a passion for communities and for giving more than you take.
His Superior Skills projects, training unemployed Ontario Works recipients to sew, farm, craft wood and grow insects in the former St. Marys pulp tower, is probably attributable to Veldman maternal influence, Justus said.
In the 1990s, Justus returned to Canada to work as a mechanic for an Ontario John Deere dealer.
He ended up marrying the boss’s daughter, Harlene, who continues to keep the books for their numerous business ventures.
Around 1999, Justus and Harlene started selling plants at the popular farmers’ market in St. Jacobs.
“Basically, it was a mobile, small, tiny, little garden centre on a trailer that we would unpack on Saturday mornings,” he says.
Then, they bought a full-sized garden centre in Courtland and moved it to nearby Tillsonburg.
Customers would say: “You can sell us this plant. Can you also plant it for us?”
And so began the family’s first foray into managing property.
His brother John came to Canada from the Netherlands, learning the interlocking stone trade so sidewalks could be added to the growing list of services offered by Courtland Professional Property Management.
And then, the Veldmans hit it big.
Toyota bought the land for its RAV4 plant in Woodstock from one of their customers and Courtland was hired to handle property maintenance during construction.
That led the brothers into some new areas: scrap metal, garbage, grass cutting, snow plowing, recycling of plastics and cardboard.
John continued to build the property management business, while Justus increasingly branched into developing distressed industrial properties through Riversedge Developments Inc.
Justus did a half-dozen decommissioning and redevelopment projects including a foundry in Sparta, Mich., a glass plant in Hamilton and a rubber plant in Welland, before he was invited to bid on the St. Marys Paper site.
Sitting under the stars on Fern Delarosbil’s back porch, Justus didn’t spend his evenings dreaming up some compelling personal vision for the Romanesque Revival structures built by Francis H. Clergue.
That’s not the Veldman style.
“What I did in that hot tub was managing expectations,” he said.
“This is not our project. This is your project. We’re just happy to facilitate the discussion and manage the process of what tourists would like to see.”
That, and adding elements like sewing and insect-rearing to ensure the community expectations are sustainable.
“The last thing we want is another Shania Twain Centre,” he said.
