In the GTA the question of whether an individual municipality should continue population and economic growth isn’t up for debate. That question has already been decided. But what really needs to be considered is how to grow and the decisions that GTA municipalities are in the process of making now will shape our communities for decades to come.
To provide some context, other than Lake Ontario, there are no natural barriers to constrain the GTA’s outward growth. And since Lake Ontario has been subject to infilling, even it to a small extent has been encroached upon. And the result of no natural boundaries, supportive provincial policy, demand for single family homes, cheap fuel for our cars, big pipes and roads, etc. has been decades of unconstrained growth and sprawling suburban municipalities. (It’s a lot more complicated than that, so check out Frances Frisken’s The Public Metropolis: The Political Dynamics of Urban Expansion in the Toronto Region, 1924-2003 or John Sewell’s Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Sprawl).
The pace of outward growth is now being disrupted by two pieces of provincial legislation: “The Greenbelt Act” and “The Places to Grow Act”. In short, the Greenbelt protects 1.8 million acres of land from development in 2005 and is based on supporting the environment, recreation and agriculture. Greenbelts aren’t a new concept. BC has an Agricultural Land Reserve and Ottawa also has a Greenbelt.
The companion piece of legislation is “The Places to Grow Act”. It charts out growth in the GTA until 2031 and expects an additional 3.7 million people to move to the GTA by then, bringing the total population to around 11.5 million. Plus, the plan includes the forecast for 1.8 million new jobs. On the maps it includes land designated between the Greenbelt and the developed area that has the potential for further outward development (it is commonly called the Whitebelt). Since Places to Grow was enacted in 2005 the province has given growth targets to regional municipalities and the regional municipalities are now in turn setting growth targets for their local municipalities (most suburban municipalities in the GTA are two tiered).
For most GTA municipalities it took around 5 years to get to the point where there is a clearer picture of what kind of growth targets they actually have to deal with. And now the question they all have to grapple with is how to grow. Between last year and this year most municipalities will be deciding how much of that growth will be intensification (within the current built up area) and how much will be in the Whitebelt (a lot of that is still being farmed). Some are toying with the idea of growing the Greenbelt, so the province now has guidelines for municipalities to follow. Markham, one of where I work, has yet to determine its intensification and is having a public meeting on Tuesday, February 16th.
The Greenbelt and Places to Grow have the potential and intention to move the GTA’s municipalities towards being more sustainable, livable, walkable, bikeable, transit oriented, compact and complete communities. But getting it right isn’t going to be easy. There are divided opinions within the suburbs; residents who want their community to stay suburban and others that want to urbanize, developers who want to continue building low density single family homes and others who are interested in density and condos, and farmers who want to sell their land to the highest bidder regardless of their intended land use and others who are desperately seeking long-term security to keep their farm where it is. It is complicated to say the least and no municipality is having an easy time with the decisions that they have to make.