In the shadow of the greenbelt it’s all about sprawl
Ontario has created its own land-use scandal by misusing our most valuable non-renewable resource.

thestar.com
By SHAWN MICALLEF
March 10, 2017

At a discussion panel on GTA sprawl last year, Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner Dianne Saxe said “land use planning is Ontario’s oil sands.” It was a provocative statement, equating a controversial environmental issue with one that lurks all around us in plain sight.

It’s not an issue that ignites province-wide political wildfires the way hydro rates or gas plants do, but it’s a scandal that should. Land is our most valuable non-renewable resource. Provincial Greenbelt legislation, preserving a ring of land around the Golden Horseshoe, has been a global leader in how to contain sprawl, encourage smart growth, and preserve both farmland and wild spaces next to a massive metropolis.

Yet inside the greenbelt and across the province, school, hospital and LCBO planning undermine its noble efforts, a trifecta of bad land-use planning.

As the population of children drops in many areas, more than 600 schools could close across the province. A sign of the heightening tension, or perhaps sensing political opportunity, this past week Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown called for a moratorium on school closures. Whatever Brown’s motivation, what happens to these buildings we’ve invested considerable public resources in, is important.

Take 19 Glen Agar Dr., the site of a former Etobicoke school near Martin Grove and Rathburn Rds. that the Toronto District School Board declared surplus in 2013. The school site, backing onto a grassy hydro corridor, was partially sold off to a developer who will build 53 single-detached houses there. The public nature of the site is partially preserved with a new park, but building more single-family homes inside Toronto is a failure of this neighbourhood to carry some of the city’s growth burden.

Initially, 104 townhouses were proposed, along with 12 detached houses, however that plan was nixed, in part, by residents’ objections that they didn’t fit the neighbourhood. This is the kind of “gentle density” often lauded by urbanists but that is off limits in large areas of Toronto, sometimes called the “Yellow Belt,” as it’s the colour of detached-only areas on planning maps.

All homeowners in Toronto are reaping the windfall of owning property in a prosperous, growing city like Toronto, but only some absorb it, like the Liberty Village and Yonge and Eglinton areas, hero neighbourhoods that accommodate growth while cowardly Yellow Belt neighbourhoods object to even expensive townhouses, hiding behind “stable neighbourhood” rhetoric.

A school closing suggests neighbourhoods are stable in appearance only, but that a publicly owned parcel of land was developed with the lowest possible density in a city with a housing crisis is especially regrettable. There are other options available too.

Near Queen St. W. and Ossington Ave., the Senhor Santo Cristo Catholic School is being turned into a community hub, part of a “core hold” policy that keeps schools intact and in community use should they need to reopen if demographics change in the coming decades.

Though there are lost opportunities to add denser housing inside the Greenbelt, other parts of the province don’t even have this kind of legislation, like Windsor, a city surrounded by some of the best farmland in North America that is slowly being gobbled up by sprawl, some of it government led.

How’s your old high school doing? Mine, a publicly funded Ontario Catholic school, used to be in the middle of the town of Tecumseh (which I like to call the Pickering of Windsor), an easy walk or bike commute for a large portion of the student body. It was closed and part of the site has been redeveloped as single family homes, with the other half of the school currently abandoned, and a new school was built far out of town in what was until recently a field where corn and soybeans grew. Now, most everyone has to drive or be bused to this “exurban” school.

Also in Windsor, a city with an abundance of large “brownfield” sites - that is to say, former industrial areas waiting for their next life - the province has plans to build a new “mega-hospital” outside of town, gobbling up more farmland and squandering all the much needed economic and civic revitalization benefits an urban site would bring to Windsor.

Then there are the LCBOs. Even in the older, dense parts of Toronto these big-box boozy blights are foisted on the landscape, like the one-storey, half-block long shop on The Danforth between Broadview and Chester subway stations. That such a thing was built atop a subway line, without any additional residential units on top of it, undermines the efforts of so many planners and housing advocates trying to make this city more affordable.

The old Ontario motto was “Keep It Beautiful,” but in the shadow of the Greenbelt, we’re doing our best to keep it sprawling.