Milton's rapid growth lays ground for highrise development

The boom town west of Toronto - where young families have flocked in search of affordable houses - is now preparing for vertical growth. It's also trying to play catch-up as the fast-rising population outpaces services like roads and transit.

Thestar.com
March 17, 2018
By Tess Kalinowski

When Jess and Adam Lee brought their newborn daughter, Olivia - six pounds, seven ounces - home this month from the new Milton District Hospital, they were thrilled with the calibre of care they received in their adopted community.

Jess was relieved to find she liked the obstetrician who worked out of the hospital, where 89 babies were born in December and another 79 delivered in January. The number of births has been steadily increasing over the past decade as Milton's population has grown, according to Halton Healthcare.

That growth is being fuelled by families like the Lees, part of a young, house-hungry demographic driven to the outskirts of the Toronto region by the relative affordability of real estate.

The Lees bought a three-bedroom, semi-detached house last spring, just before the Toronto area's property fever broke. They paid about $700,000 for the kind of home with a yard they could not afford near their old condo in Etobicoke.

When they looked at houses in their old neighbourhood, they were "basically our max budget and needed a lot of work," said Adam.

He figures it would have taken at least $1 million to raise those fixer-uppers to the standard of what they bought in Milton.

"We would walk around our neighbourhood and see the houses there and there was just no hope, even on two salaries, of affording them," said Adam, who teaches high school in Mississauga. Jess is an occasional teacher in the Halton board.

Neither had ties to Milton. But the greenery and parks reminded Adam of his parents' place in Scarborough, where, as a boy, he loved romping around a big yard with a pool.

Couples like the Lees have helped make Milton a Canadian boom town. A decade ago there were 32,104 people. Now, it's about 113,000, with 30.5 per cent population growth between 2011 and 2016. The average age of Milton residents is 35, making it the youngest community in Ontario, say town officials. Census figures show about 30 per cent of the population is 19 or younger, compared to the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area, where it is about 23 per cent.

In a bid to curb urban sprawl, the Ontario government is forcing the Toronto area to pack more people in less space. Its 2006 Places to Grow legislation, updated last year, is aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive locations and valuable farmland. It is forcing communities to build up instead of out.

That means denser housing even in a suburban landscape such as Milton, where a traditional starter home with a yard is a magnet for young families.

That model is changing, say Milton officials. They are preparing their town for vertical growth, too. Meanwhile, the influx has congested the roads and other services, which continue to lag behind residential development.

Sure, Milton has more grocery stores. But years after the town began growing, schools are still struggling to house the population and GO transit can't accommodate all the commuters looking for an alternative to the long drive downtown. Development charges don't cover the health and emergency services the town and region must provide.

Mayor Gordon Krantz is approaching 38 years in office. He prefers to dwell on the benefits the boom has brought his town, and on Milton's progress.

The new 129-bed hospital opened in October. The Velodrome, a legacy of the 2015 Pan Am Games, attracted 4,000 spectators to a cycling event in December. Milton is anxiously awaiting a provincial announcement that will see a branch of Wilfrid Laurier University built at its 400-acre Education Village Innovation Centre.

Although there is still a need for more schools, new buildings have opened and the boards have reduced the number of children being shuffled from one facility to the next as the boundaries shift. GO has added a few more trains. Nevertheless, Krantz concedes, "Running a municipality is like trying to put together a big puzzle. There's the odd piece missing."

One of those pieces is a post-secondary campus. Road capacity is another. Halton Region has just launched a legal challenge to a plan that would put a CN freight depot, with an estimated 1,600 truck movements a day, directly across from a Milton subdivision.

It's unclear what impact the province's cancellation of the GTA West Highway will have on Milton's future, said Krantz.

"With what the province is doing now … extending or widening (Hwy.) 401 through this area — it's a Band-Aid. It won't suffice," he said.

Cars will be a reality for the foreseeable future. Meantime, Milton's housing options are already evolving.

"The days of single-family lots like I live on are going the way of the dinosaur. The modern generation are accepting that more and more," said Krantz.

Even in Milton, "highrise will be the order of the day," said the mayor, who knows that height equals controversy.

They may be inevitable, but taller buildings must be especially sensitive to the environment in a place like Milton, said town and regional Councillor Colin Best, who ran on an anti-growth platform against Krantz in 1997.

"We've already got a skyline. It's been here 120 million years," he said, referring to the Niagara Escarpment, which was actually formed 450 million years ago and is a UNESCO world biosphere reserve.

Milton is determined to avoid the mistakes that led neighbouring Mississauga and Brampton to sprawl. Unlike Mississauga, which grew from the outside in, Milton is growing from the inside out, said Best.

To protect the views of the escarpment while adding to its density, the town is developing its first comprehensive urban design guidelines for tall and midrise buildings. There are a few highrises already that have been subject to site-specific zoning.

But there are two development applications that could set the bar higher: one for three apartment buildings with proposed heights of 16 to 25 storeys, the other for three towers with 27 to 31 storeys.

Many people still don't even recognize that Milton is part of the Greater Toronto Area, says chief administrative officer Bill Mann. But the town holds itself up as the 905-area poster child for the provincial Places to Grow intensification plan.

So far, most of the growth has been traditional suburban lowrise housing, but "if you come back in six months, you would be seeing a lot of cranes going up," he said.

"The vision is to provide a complete community of close to 400,000 (people) in 30 to 40 years."

Milton's historic downtown stands on a flood plain that can't accommodate highrise development. There are a couple of high-density nodes around town, but the highest densities will be built around the GO station, Mann said.

Across Halton, development isn't paying for itself, says regional chair Gary Carr. Provincial development charge rules are leaving Halton - which includes Burlington, Oakville and Halton Hills, as well as Milton - about $40 million short of the revenue it needs for services such as paramedics, public works, parking, transit, highways and libraries. Those shortfalls are being pushed to residential property taxes, Mann said.

Milton's share of that gap is about $11.4 million.

Developers pay about $19,000 per single or semi-detached housing unit and about $7,000 per one-bedroom condo. In 2016, the town collected $21.3 million in development charges and the 2018 budget sets out $41 million in anticipated development fees. The charges are determined by the municipality but guided by provincial law. Non-residential charges are calculated differently.

Carr says the province doesn't permit the region and municipalities to make developers pay for the real cost of growth.

"Four per cent of the property tax in the region is to pay for health programs," said Carr, who is threatening to stall Halton's next round of growth, the biggest yet.

"The bottom line is they want us to grow in Milton, Oakville and Halton without the infrastructure," he said. "Developers are raising home prices and our taxpayers are subsidizing them."

Carr can't resist a jab at Toronto for planning a single-stop subway extension in Scarborough at a cost of more than $3 billion, while Milton is at the bottom of the list for the provincial GO rail expansion.

The demand for commuter service in Milton is so great that the 1,600-space station parking lot is frequently full by 7:30 a.m. Although there are plans to provide another parking lot, GO isn't planning a covered parking deck like those installed at some stations.

There's a widespread suspicion that Cambridge commuters are driving in to catch the train from Milton to downtown Toronto. But Greg Percy, chief operating officer of Metrolinx, says licence plate checks reveal no more than 5 per cent of cars in the Milton lot are from Cambridge.

Some Milton commuters looking for more frequent service than the town's weekday rush-hour-only trains - 10 running to Union Station in the morning and 10 returning in the evening - are driving south to Bronte to use the Lakeshore West line.

GO hasn't been able to negotiate more capacity for its trains because the Milton line is a major Canadian Pacific freight route, said Percy. Milton isn't yet part of the provincial regional express rail plan to put all-day, 15-minute service on the GO system.

"Milton just wants what everybody's getting," said Percy, but talks with the railway are "in a tactical pause."

"We are actively looking for ways to increase capacity. They're very much on the radar, but we have no sugar pill that's going to make things better in the very near term," he said.

Aditi Sharma, 24 and Ankur Chawla, 29, moved to Milton last year as a geographical compromise between their respective workplaces in Mississauga and Guelph.

For Chawla, who drives against the peak traffic flow, it's a clean 30 minutes to Guelph. Sharma's office near the airport should be a 40-minute drive, but most days it takes an hour and the frustration begins long before she hits Hwy. 401.

"Going in to Mississauga is brutal in the morning. I find the roads aren't built to handle the population of Milton," she said. "There's a lot of roads you drive down and they're single lanes. It's crazy because it's so backed up, especially in rush hour."

Main thoroughfares such as Britannia Rd. will be widened, said Mann, the chief administrative officer. But it's taken a long time because of the expropriations required.

"A lot of the farms were not receptive to giving up the land," he said.

Whether Chawla and Sharma stay in Milton depends on their work, say the couple, who are both accountants. In the meantime, Sharma says, it is a little too quiet for a young couple without children.

They miss the street life and the array of international restaurants the foodies enjoy in Toronto and Mississauga.

"It's not fair to compare it, but when you go out on the streets in Toronto, there's always something going on. There's tons of people, there's tons of choice. If I want to eat Chinese food I can pick between five restaurants. Here I can only pick between one or two," said Chawla.

For some long-term Milton residents, though, the growth has all become a bit much, say Royal LePage realtors Chuck and Melissa Charlton, who moved to Milton from Toronto's Junction neighbourhood in 2006.

The same housing prices that have attracted development and new real estate clients are prompting others to move west to Guelph and Cambridge, where they get more house for their money, say the realtors.

"We used to be at the point where you could get a detached home for that $500,000 or $600,000. Now you're getting a townhouse. That's why you see the push further west," said Chuck.

Many of their clients are just like them, say the Charltons.

"I was that guy. I'd go down to Queen St. (in Toronto). I'd go record shopping. I really enjoyed the city," said Chuck, 40. But he wasn't sure he wanted to raise kids there.

Melissa, who had just acquired her real estate licence, didn't want to fight the Toronto traffic between showings. "I didn't want to have to deal with parking on the street just to show one house," she said.

Mann says that growth has been good for everyone.

"Last year we set the record - property values went up 46 per cent in one year," he said. "It's all about housing demand and housing stock."

Milton by the numbers

145,000

Estimated population in 2021

235,000

Estimated population in 2031

71%

Milton residents who commute in town or to Toronto or Mississauga

50%

Milton workers who live in town or in Mississauga

6.9 million

GO transit riders on the Milton line in 2016-17 fiscal year, up 3% over the previous year

17.7 million

Lakeshore West GO riders in 2016-17, up 4% over the previous fiscal year

14,748

Public elementary and high school students in Milton in 2017, 4,818 more than in 2011

137

Portables in Milton schools in 2017, in addition to 30 classrooms in "PortaPaks"; there were 92 portables in 2011