Sprawl for all? What Doug Ford’s proposed changes to planning rules might mean for future growth

Changes proposed by the province will replace the rules that have governed growth for the past two decades.

Thestar.com
April 20, 2023
Noor Javed

The province wants to throw out planning rules that have been the blueprint for building Ontario cities for the past two decades, replacing them with proposed changes critics say will discourage densification within cities and open the door to sprawl.

Earlier this month, Doug Ford’s government introduced Bill 97 -- the Helping Homebuyers, Protecting Tenants Act 2023 -- which, coupled with changes to the provincial planning statement, undoes most of how Ontario has planned its cities since 2005 through its Places to Grow legislation. That policy was focused on creating complete communities with access to transit, employment areas and a variety of housing near existing infrastructure.

It’s the third time in a year that the province has brought in legislation -- some of which has yet to be enacted -- that overhauls the current planning system, all with the goal of building 1.5 million homes by 2031.

The proposed changes are open for comments until June 5, with the new provincial policy expected to take effect in the fall.

The Star talked to experts across several industries to understand how the province’s new planning rules will impact them.

Shifting toward housing
The proposed changes continue with some of the goals of Places to Grow, but they also put forward different priorities, which include generating “appropriate” housing supply and making land available for development.

“All of this is about freeing up lands for housing,” said Paula Boutis, a municipal and land use planning lawyer with Aird & Berlis. “The balance has shifted and other priorities like heritage, employment, complete communities and preserving agricultural lands are just not as important now.”

Boutis added that it’s an “open question” whether the changes will make housing more affordable while also meeting climate goals.

Victoria Podbielski, press secretary for Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark, said the goal of the proposed policy is to make “land use planning in Ontario clearer and simpler to follow.”

She added that the province supports “the construction of new homes of all types -- both by increasing density in built-up areas and addressing the housing needs of rural residents.”

Planning for more sprawl
At the crux of the changes is the creation of a new Provincial Planning Statement, which eliminates intensification targets and allows cities to expand their urban boundaries at any time without having “to demonstrate the need for expansion.”

Instead of mandating density targets within cities -- the target was previously 80 residents and jobs per gross hectare -- the new plan softens the language to merely “encourage” density targets for new developments to be around 50 residents per hectare.

“This means that you will have different communities -- right next to each other -- aspiring to meet different targets,” said Thom Hunt, the chief planner in Windsor and the chair of the Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario. “So it will be interesting to see how this will all be co-ordinated.”

He agreed that it could mean density targets end up being determined by the whims of a council instead of a being held to a provincial target.

According to Podbielski, “Municipalities will be key partners in enabling suitable density and intensification through local planning approvals.”

The new proposal does identify major transit station areas in 29 of Ontario’s largest and fastest-growing municipalities with mandated density projections.

Hunt said the last year has been full of upheaval for planners, which made it more difficult for them to do their jobs. “Stability within the planning system is required to accelerate housing production and create new forms of housing,” he said. “That’s hard to do when things change every few months.”

Hunt said despite the province’s clear focus on opening land, it’s not “just a land supply issue. It’s more complicated than that. You need to build housing in a different form and format for it to be affordable.”

Boutis, who previously worked as a municipal planner, said it’s inevitable cities will give in to the pressure to meet the market demand for low-density housing.

“The pressure is so intense, I suspect municipalities will approve it all, because they need the developments -- even though it’s not compact, good for the environment or financially sustainable,” she said. “It’s going to be sprawl for all.”

Fears for farming
Peggy Brekveld, president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, fears the new changes will further threaten farmland -- which is already facing development pressure across Ontario.

“Agriculture works best when it’s in large swaths of lands and it helps farmers to do the business of farming,” said Brekveld. “And some of the changes being announced put that … system in jeopardy.”

Among those changes are to give municipalities flexibility for more residential development in rural settlements and to split large farms into smaller lots to create additional residential units and housing for farm workers.

“Only five per cent of Ontario’s landscape has agricultural potential,” she said. “It’s a finite resource, and we should really look at how we are going to protect it.”

Brekveld also worries that by opening up agriculture areas for development, it will increase the speculative value of farmland and make it expensive for farmers to sell the land to other farmers.

Confusion on climate
The proposed changes’ potential to encourage more sprawl and farmland fragmentation raises environmental concerns, said Tim Gray, with the advocacy group Environmental Defence.

A lot of woodlands and wetlands currently remain because they are on farms, he said. If development encroaches on farms, it’s likely much of those environmentally sensitive areas will be lost.

“This is a fundamental change in direction away from a recognition that we have limited farmland and limited biodiversity and we need to conserve it,” said Gray.

The proposed changes are like “going back to the 1950s, and we are going to build highways and sprawl and farmland only has value as development in waiting.”

He said the policy also puts out conflicting expectations around climate change. While it pushes sprawl on one hand, it also requires cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate change.

“If you read the plan in totality, you can see that achieving any kind of climate change objectives with this approach to planning is ridiculous,” said Gray.