places to grow

While I was living in Ontario a few years ago, the Province was developing a controversial plan to curb urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Last year they completed the Places to Grow plan, and recently it was recognised with the American Planning Association's Burnham Award. The plan identifies a number of urban centres that are to be revitalised with a greater mix of businesses, services and housing. There will be stronger public transport options and an emphasis on more liveable, intensified urban areas that will encourage more active lifestyles and reduced reliance on car-based travel.

The plan also sets targets for development densities within the existing urban areas of the GTA, with the intention of encouraging growth where existing infrastructure can support it. It's bold and far-reaching, and flies in the face of well-established development patterns. If you ask planners from the outlying municipalities of the GTA whether they think it will work, many would say no.

Groups like the Ontario Home Builders' Association claimed during the plan's consultation process that limiting growth areas would make housing less affordable by pushing up the cost of land. And developers in the outlying municipalities, like Pickering and Oshawa, said that there would be no market for new housing in those areas at the densities targeted in the plan. At the same time, environmental research organisations like the Pembina Institute felt that the controls over the urban boundary were too weak and that valuable agricultural land would be compromised.

The target densities are not actually any higher than those found in a lot of existing communities of Toronto, but the locations of proposed increases in density, and the perception of what this will do to local municipalities, have municipal politicians crying foul. They know that developers will keep on pushing the boundaries, quite literally, because they can. As Christopher Hume points out in the Toronto Star, the politicians are walking a fine line with this plan. Some of them are smart enough to know that business as usual is not a smart option, but if they resist development pressures too much, they'll be voted out.