Greenbelt won’t be loosened to ease housing prices, says Wynne

Premier Kathleen Wynne warns the Greenbelt will not be loosened to alleviate the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area’s housing challenges.

Thestar.com
March 29, 2017
By Robert Benzie

Premier Kathleen Wynne warns the Greenbelt will not be loosened to alleviate the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area’s housing challenges.

Wynne said Wednesday that Finance Minister Charles Sousa’s budget - which could be delivered April 27 - will not do anything to undermine the 800,000 hectare Greenbelt of lands protected from development.

“We’re committed to growing the Greenbelt not shrinking the Greenbelt. So that’s not something that we’re looking at,” the premier told reporters at Toronto’s Bishop Marrocco/Thomas Merton Catholic Secondary School.

Real estate industry experts have said that Toronto’s skyrocketing home prices are in part due to a lack of supply so new exurban housing subdivisions are needed.

But environmentalists, who welcomed Wynne's stance on Wednesday, say there's still plenty of land for housing without touching protected areas.

Wynne, whose predecessor Dalton McGuinty created the Greenbelt in 2005 to protect sensitive land from being paved over, said there are no plans to lift the restrictions.

“The Greenbelt is a hugely important swath of land that is like the lungs of this highly populated part of the province,” said Wynne.

“So that’s not something that we’re looking at. But we recognize that housing affordability is a huge, huge issue,” she conceded.

“It’s a huge issue right here in this part of the city that we’re talking about, but it’s also an issue outside of the core of the city,” the premier said at the school located on the corner of on Bloor St. W. and Dundas St. W.

“The finance minister is looking at a whole range of supply and demand side issues, but we’re not yet ready to bring those forward.”

Wynne stressed that Sousa’s spending plan that will likely come next month would have measures to tackle the affordability of GTHA housing.

“We believe that there are some other things that we should be looking at, and we’re doing that and we’ll be bringing forward some proposals on top of what’s already been done,” she said, referring to breaks that took effect Jan. 1.

Environmental Defence executive director Tim Gray said he was encouraged by Wynne's remarks.

"It makes it clear that paving the Greenbelt isn't going to lower home prices and it shows the government is standing firm against the misinformation campaign by the development industry," he said.

There are more than 100,000 hectares of land available for housing within the existing urban boundaries, he said.

"There's no reason to take apart the Greenbelt to solve a problem," said Gray.

But, he said, environmentalists are waiting to see what the government's updated growth plan and greenbelt land use policies look like when those are released, likely later this spring.

Home builders and realtors, who have been warning about a housing supply crisis, say they have no beef with the Greenbelt. They say it's the government's anti-sprawl growth plan, designed to create denser population nodes around services such as transit and health care, that needs tweaking to address the issue.

“The province needs to look at its growth plan and truly assess the impact of its policies on the housing market and on the supply and mix of homes," said Bryan Tuckey, head of the Building and Land Development Association (BILD).

"The current housing market situation has developed under the existing growth plan. If the province does nothing else, it needs to not move forward with even more restrictive growth plan policies," he said.

Tim Hudak, CEO of the Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA), said, “The real issue is bigger than just expanding or developing the Greenbelt. There is a lot that can be done to increase the number of homes on the market without touching the Greenbelt."

A recent study by the non-profit Neptis Foundation found that a technical loophole in the policy documents is actually encouraging the kind of sprawling housing development just beyond the GTA that the growth plan was intended to discourage.