Environmentalists balk at attempts to stall provincial growth plans

YorkRegion.com
Oct. 3, 2016
By Lisa Queen

Following a summit in York Region, environmental groups are urging the province to forge ahead with its plans to protect greenspace despite overwhelming concern among municipal leaders with the government’s aggressive population density targets.

“I think the province is on the right track,” said Sony Rai, director of Sustainable Vaughan, following the summit led by former Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion at York Region’s headquarters in Newmarket.

He applauded the province’s plans to build more compact communities that offer higher-density housing, which reduce urban sprawl and support better public transit such as light rapid rail.

Unfortunately, municipalities still tend to opt for the single-family neighbourhoods of the 1950s despite the province’s existing growth plan, according to the Ontario Greenbelt Alliance.

York Region’s housing stock is 87 per cent low-density detached and semi-detached homes and only 13 per cent apartments and townhouses, the organization said.

Their comments came following a press conference by McCallion, York Region Chairman Wayne Emmerson and Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti after the closed-door summit Friday.

The summit brought together municipal leaders from the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area who raised concerns about future population growth in the Greater Golden Horseshoe.

Another four million people will be added to the Greater Golden Horseshoe over the next quarter century.

The province is looking how to accommodate the additional people as it updates the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, the Greenbelt Plan, the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan and the Niagara Escarpment Plan.

But the province’s approach could fill communities with skyscrapers and other high-density housing as residents are crammed into relatively small parcels of land, often in communities without the necessary services to support them, said McCallion, Emmerson and Scarpitti.

“They (municipal leaders) are concerned about the density, they are concerned about lack of sound planning rather than planning by numbers, they are concerned about the lack of economic plans to back up the growth plan, they are concerned about no financial plan, they are concerned about the jump from one density to a much higher density and they clearly indicated one plan does not fit all,” said McCallion, an advisor to Premier Kathleen Wynne on issues facing the GTHA.

But Rai dismissed the concerns, calling McCallion “the architect of urban sprawl.”

Meanwhile, he accused York Region of opting for more low-density housing because it relies too heavily on development charges, the fees developers pay towards services such as roads and sewer pipes for new subdivisions. Development charges are passed on to new homebuyers.

“York Region is in debt by over 2 billion dollars and is paying off this through development levies,” he said.

“The region collects more development levies from single-family homes than it does for townhomes and condos. York Region requires sprawl to balance its books.”

Scarpitti argued municipalities have and continue to embrace new housing types that protect the environment, offer more housing choice and support transit investments.

But the province is pushing too much intensification too fast, he said.

“We have very serious concerns,” he said.

“We need to press the reset button.”