Greenbelt popular, but resulting intensification may not be

YorkRegion.com
Jan. 27, 2016
Lisa Queen

Most people are eager to protect greenspace, until it threatens their neighbourhoods, an executive member of a ratepayers' association cautioned at a community meeting discussing the future of Ontario's Greenbelt.

The Greater Golden Horseshoe will be home to another four million people by 2041, with 700,000 of those additional residents calling York Region home, according to growth forecasts from the provincial government.

The question is where to put them.

The more greenspace you protect, the more those new residents have to be accommodated through intensification in already established communities.

That is something to which existing residents often object, Alan Smith said.

"People tend to freak out about density," Smith, an executive member of Thornhill's SpringFarm Ratepayers' Association, said at a Greenbelt meeting hosted by the Brownridge Ratepayers' Association at the Dufferin Clark Community Centre last Thursday night.

"People like land stock, they like more transit, but as soon as you mention putting up a condo on the corner (near them), they all freak out."

The provincial government is in the process of reviewing 87 recommendations from former Toronto mayor David Crombie aimed at protecting and possibly expanding the Greenbelt, an area of almost two million acres of protected greenspace, farmland, forests, wetlands and watersheds in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, including much in York Region.

Crombie has recommended preventing more urban sprawl by increasing development densities, boosting public transit and preserving farmland.

All indications from the province are that the Greenbelt will be expanded, according to Brownridge ratepayers' association president Mario Racco.

Racco, a former Thornhill MPP, supported enlarging the Greenbelt in 2005 and continues to encourage expanding it.

Meanwhile, York Region is working on a plan to determine how it will accommodate its growth over the next quarter century.

Environmentalists are worried about urban sprawl devouring too much greenspace, while developers are warning that the region risks chasing away traditional family-friendly development if it opts for too much intensification.

While polls show as much as 90 per cent of people want to protect land, they are nervous about how the resulting intensification will impact their communities, Lorenzo Catuzza, director of Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, a non-profit organization working to protect and promote the Greenbelt, said.

"The Greenbelt is very, very popular. It is. People support protecting land, we know that historically," he said.

"But I talk to a lot of ratepayers' groups and I know there is a lot of anxiety sometimes around intensification. People worry about how their neighbourhoods will change when we begin to intensify."

But it is possible to protect greenspace while creating livable communities to accommodate growth, Catuzza said.

Achieving residential and employment densities that would protect greenspace and support investments in better public transit doesn't mean building concrete jungles, he said.

"What does that look like in your neighbourhood? What you'll find is that to achieve the densities they're talking about, it is not necessary to have high-rise buildings. You can achieve almost everything with mid-rise, a mix of slightly more intense houses and mid-rise," he said.

"You don't have to change the scale of a neighbourhood dramatically to get to the densities that support transit."

Protecting the Greenbelt, the largest in the world, is important because it supports a unique and vibrant mix of farms, forests, wetlands, rivers, trails, town and cities, Catuzza said.

It serves as the foundation for a vital economy, including farming and tourism, helping to generate $9.1 billion in economic benefits and 161,000 jobs, he said.

There are more than 5,500 farms containing more than 856,400 acres of farmland,

The Holland Marsh and the Niagara Peninsula have been designated specialty crop areas.

The Greenbelt takes in 535,000 acres of lakes, wetlands, river valleys and forests and is home to 78 wildlife species at risk.