Friday 24 April 2015

Greenbelt Review Ignores Housing Supply/Demand Imbalance

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