Ontario Liberals undermined own plan to control sprawl: Walkom

[ssiguy2]

Green belts are great ideas in theory but when a city builds out and those once rural farms become development opportunities then money always wins. This is exactly what is happening in Vancouver where the Agricultural Land Reserve is being eaten away at a dizzying rate.

You certainly can't blame the farmers who want to sell their ugly little money losing farms for millions in Vancouver sky high real estate market. The trouble is that some people will stop a development and feel all touchy feely about being able to do so but the result is usually something much worse. They aren't allowed to develop the property on mass but are allowed to sell a portion and allow another house to go up. Sounds OK until that one house becomes 2 and then becomes 4, then 8 etc. What results is hundreds of rural homes with no planning and little infrastructure..................a death by a thousand cuts.

This is why greenbelts usually don't work because at the end of the day you cannot tell someone they can't sell their property. Greenbelts are also at the mercy of the municipal governments and the whims of all the corrupt politicians who's palms are constantly being greased with developers money.

Yes strict planning can help and set guidelines but as they say "rules are meant to be broken" and with developers and politicians calling the shots they always are. This is why I have always supported extra levies and development fees for green areas where a portion goes for the infrastructure and a separate portion goes to a "park bank". The extra money can be used to purchase hundreds of parcels of land and have them designated parkland.

Get rezoning for land is one thing but being able to sell off parkland is quite another. In fact it is next to impossible as well it should be. The parks don't have to be made "user friendly" right away but as money comes forward or where parcels slower grow into each other to create larger parks. They will be there forever , still control rampant sprawl and lets the farmers benefit from their land holdings.

 

[innsertnamehere]

People have the right to sell their property, greenbelt or not. What they don't have however is the right to develop it. Greenbelts don't fail in that manner, Ottawas has held out perfectly as farming land. the problem becomes that sprawl often "jumps" the greenbelt. This is being seen in Toronto with the rapid growth of Barrie, cheap housing outside of the greenbelt. Torontos greenbelt is much, much larger than Ottawas making it harder to "Jump" it, but there are still spots along major highways like the 400 and 401 where it is possible.

If Vancouvers greenbelt isn't working, it means it doesn't work properly, not that the entire idea of a greenbelt is pointless.

The problem with Torontos is that the "white belt", or developable land around the city is huge, and there is so much space for the city to sprawl through before even hitting the boundary, and with failing efforts of intensification in all but a few municipalities, it produces a climate with very little difference from before the greenbelt. The greenbelt itself is standing up to development pressures perfectly fine, the issue is with the undeveloped area within the greenbelt being eaten up quicker than expected.

 

[DKsan]

Toronto's Greenbelt, and the P2G Act, cover municipalities outside the Greenbelt (or within it). This includes Brantford, Guelph, Kitchener, etc. Basically the leapfrogging was attempted to be subdued by directly covering those outside it. There's a special thing for Barrie and the Simcoe Area, but I still don't know what exactly that is.