An outstanding opportunity is being missed
– and it’s right under Ontarians’ noses. It’s the only chance we have, for the
next decade, to correct a tragic wrong being perpetrated upon thousands of our fellow
citizens seeking better quality of life for their families. And it’s called the
Greenbelt Plan Review.
About ten years ago, the government passed
a series of laws governing land use, mostly in the GTA and Southern Ontario.
The four Acts protect conservation, agricultural, recreational and
eco-sensitive territories. A laudable goal when viewed in isolation, but add in
the human component and you get a different result.
By 2025, 8-million people will call the GTA
home and 13-million will live in the Greater Golden Horseshoe by 2040. As a
result of the Greenbelt Plan and similar legislation they will continue to be forced
into sandwich-like vertical cubes built either on Toronto’s former parking
lots or inside “intensification-designated” residential lands falling under
largely immutable Official Plans of the area’s many cities and towns. A
burgeoning population has literally nowhere to go.
The result is insatiable demand, with
little supply. Gone are the days of a family’s ‘backyard dream’…these days youngsters
take their bicycles to the elevator, down 25 floors and over to the nearest
city park to ride. How fair does that sound? It may be wonderful if you’re a
Greenbelt deer or turtle, but for human beings, not so much.
Yet the current “traveling road show
Greenbelt review” under former Toronto Mayor David Crombie appears to be little
more than a sham. It’s an opportunity
for ultra-conservationists to rail against urban sprawl, with residential developers
once again cast in the role of scapegoats. It also looks as if the panel’s conclusions
are foregone with little to no change coming as a relief for those who would
own residential property within 100 kilometers of downtown Toronto. Is this
panel really consulting? Is it even listening?
U-Live, an acronym for “urban living in
viable environments” (www.u-live.ca) is a
non-profit movement that seeks to uphold the protections the Greenbelt Plan
affords to conservation, recreation and agricultural areas, while addressing
the serious housing supply and demand imbalance. U-Live supports expanding the
Greenbelt protections to include all river valleys within 50 kilometers of the
CN Tower and expand all four protective Acts outward by 50 kilometers, where
feasible. At the same time, U-Live is urging the provincial government to afford
municipalities more latitude to vary what may be constructed within designated
settlement lands and to permit limited (but required) incursions into nearer
Greenbelt territory in reviewing their individual Official Plans.
Ontario has an aging population and a
growing newcomer base. We need senior accommodations; townhomes; single family
semi-detached and detached homes, and we need all of these housing
configurations to be affordable. If we fail to acknowledge this by acting now,
the door slams for ten more years until the next review. If we don’t address
this now, the already huge daily influx to the GTA from far-flung residential
areas as distant as Cobourg, Gravenhurst, and St. Catharines will continue to
grow, lessening family time and increasing the GHG content of our air.
Rarely a day goes by when we don’t read
about the remarkable percentage increases in both GTA and Vancouver property values,
to the exclusion of almost every other part of the country. Vancouver is easy
to explain…no more land! You can’t build homes on the Pacific Ocean or in the
Rockies, both being natural barriers. But the barriers in Ontario are
arbitrary, imposed solely by policy and they affect us all.
These arbitrary policies need change. So whether
you are a resident of the City of Toronto proper dealing with increasingly
unmanageable intensification, a family looking for a reasonably priced home
within reasonable distance to the GTA, a farmer who seeks to sell or to protect
agricultural land, outline your concerns in a submission to the Greenbelt
Review and send it to landuseplanningreview@ontario.ca.
Peter