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Freeze urban boundaries for two years, says Greenbelt group

Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation says population projections should be updated before sprawl expands.

TheStar.com
Aug. 17, 2016
By Tess Kalinowski

An environmental charity dedicated to protecting the Greenbelt around Toronto is recommending the province freeze the development boundaries of regional municipalities for two years.

That's how long it will take to update population growth projections using this year's census and develop new guidelines around the way communities assess the amount of land they need to accommodate that growth.

The proposal from Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation will likely to draw fire from builders who say the provincial growth plan is already constraining land use, limiting the supply of new housing and driving up the price of homes in the Toronto region.

But the Greenbelt advocates say the current method of assessing land needs is "fatally flawed." It supports a government-appointed panel headed by former Toronto mayor David Crombie that recommends denser development. The environmental group is issuing its report Wednesday suggesting how those recommendations can be strengthened when the province updates its Smart Growth plan.

Pausing the expansion of municipal borders is a reasonable proposition given that the province is already projecting lower population growth than it was four years ago, said Kevin Eby, a former Waterloo Region director of planning, who wrote the report for Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation.

"We're not saying that there shall never be expansions again or municipalities have to create hard boundaries," he said.

But, said Eby, "There's enough of a question now about the population forecasts that we shouldn't be bringing any more land in until the 2016 census is released."

Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation want Queen's Park to clarify the deadline for achieving higher densities.

The method of assessing how much land is needed for development also must be standardized, says the group.

Many planners have looked at past housing trends to predict future needs. If patterns show there will be a desire for low density detached houses, the municipality then expands its boundaries to provide space for those homes, even though it may already have the capacity for higher density townhomes or apartments.

"They're just projecting the same building forward so you're getting a double whammy of poor planning. On one hand you're over-projecting how much land you need and then you're projecting on historical evidence that we clearly know is changing. What we build now is completely different than what we built 10 years ago," said Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation CEO Burkhard Mausberg.

Protecting the Greenbelt means preserving a million acres of prime agricultural land that produces everything from strawberries and wine grapes to cattle, he said.

"If the growth plan doesn't work, what we will find 20, 30 years from now is that inefficient sprawl will have come to the boundary of the Greenbelt and put pressure on the Greenbelt to have that land reduced in size," he said.

Although Ontario's Smart Growth plan is 10 years old, it hasn't influenced development around Toronto yet. Those plans were already in place when the legislation took effect, said Eby.

"The next 10 years is where you're going to see the impact of the growth plan," he said.

The province has extended the period to comment on its Co-ordinated Land Use Planning Review review until Oct. 31.