Planned Sprawl in the GTA

[Undead]

That's epic. When I worked as a reporter in a previous life, that's exactly the quote I would have chosen to include in my article. But are you sure this isn't from the Beaverton or Babylon Bee?? LOL

I'll just insert this NIMBY of the year award nominee story here:

'There will be some red faces on council': Newmarket neighbours plan to fight proposed townhouses

'Managing growth and its impact on residents is as old as the history of Newmarket'

www.thestar.com

From said article:

View attachment 316116

 

[Northern Light]

And the development boom in Collingwood has apparently left that town short of water, at least until 2025 when a water treatment plant expansion is complete.

They have enacted an Interim Control by-law to address the issue, essentially freezing most large developments that don't already have building permits.

The Star Article discussing this below, also looks at other communities using ICBLs to slow development for various reasons.

On the shores of Georgian Bay, an Ontario boom town puts a sudden stop to development. Why? It says it’s running out of water

Council says there soon won’t be enough treated water to flow through the taps of all the new condos and homes being built in the area.

www.thestar.com

For those that need a way around the paywall:

Outline - Read & annotate without distractions

Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles. We remove the clutter so you can analyze and comment on the content.

outline.com

 

[innsertnamehere]

I hate ICBLs.. they do nothing but hike housing prices by strangling supply to try to hide municipal failures of properly forecasting growth and ensuring adequate infrastructure is in place to support it.

I mean Burlington put an ICBL in almost 3 years ago now across most of its intensification areas and has effectively strangled new development over that period while the NIMBY mayor has the Official Plan rewritten to try to permanently restrict development. It probably won’t be lifted for another year or two until LPAT appeals can be resolved.. meanwhile even approved developments can’t move forward unless they had a site plan application active before it was implemented. It’s a convenient way for a mayor who got elected essentially on a platform of stopping development of not having to approve a single development in her first term more or less.

sewage related ICBLs are bad as well as it shows the failure to ensure growth is supported by municipal infrastructure. It’s not like running out of sewage capacity is a surprise.. anyone can see it coming. municipalities have failed if they run out of capacity before being able to build more.

 

[Northern Light]

I hate ICBLs.. they do nothing but hike housing prices by strangling supply to try to hide municipal failures of properly forecasting growth and ensuring adequate infrastructure is in place to support it.

I mean Burlington put an ICBL in almost 3 years ago now across most of its intensification areas and has effectively strangled new development over that period while the NIMBY mayor has the Official Plan rewritten to try to permanently restrict development. It probably won’t be lifted for another year or two until LPAT appeals can be resolved.. meanwhile even approved developments can’t move forward unless they had a site plan application active before it was implemented. It’s a convenient way for a mayor who got elected essentially on a platform of stopping development of not having to approve a single development in her first term more or less.

sewage related ICBLs are bad as well as it shows the failure to ensure growth is supported by municipal infrastructure. It’s not like running out of sewage capacity is a surprise.. anyone can see it coming. municipalities have failed if they run out of capacity before being able to build more.

We really don't tend to agree much.

While I dislike NIMBY nonsense; and support intensification.........

I also don't believe in a right to build.

Cities should be not be compelled to bill all taxpayers to reward only 1 who wants to build something.

If you need more road, more sewer, more school etc. you can pay for it.

If a new sewage plant is 500M; in a region with 100000 households that's $5,000 per household in costs; so one party (or 2, 4, or 10) but a small minority of the community can profit with what amounts to corporate welfare.

****

As to Burlington............where the issue was height/scale etc of building.....

Developers brought this to a waterfront site, which should have been mostly parkland.........

The problem is not the scale overall, its that its on the wrong side of the damned street and is architecturally regrettable.

An ICBL is not the way to address that; but good planning isn't sufficient when the LPAT is persistently overruling local plans.

Yes, Burlington should have bought the site for parks years ago.............but 20 years ago, the thought of that scale of building there wasn't even in planners/councillor's imagination.

 

[afransen]

^ Isn't that what development charges are for?

 

[WislaHD]

Yes, Burlington should have bought the site for parks years ago.............but 20 years ago, the thought of that scale of building there wasn't even in planners/councillor's imagination.

I'm not exactly sympathetic to the "planners failed to anticipate development" line of reasoning.

15 years ago we already knew about the Growth Plan and anticipated growth targets for the Golden Horseshoe. Municipalities and planning departments are doing their jobs wrong if they are only reactive to development trends and in the business of land use managing, rather than proactively planning where the growth is to occur and how it should be shaped.

Even within Halton Region you can see a stark contrast with how Milton and Halton Hills have proactively led their planning policies to manage growth (Milton simply wanting more of it, while Halton Hills wanting less of it and actively seeking to transfer their growth targets elsewhere in the region) compared to Burlington and Oakville's lethargic planning*.

(* - I will give Burlington planners some credit that their planned mobility hubs had significant growth targets only to be hijacked by a NIMBY electorate and council, while Midtown Oakville's planning was upended with much higher density targets set by the province (and desired by the market) than could be anticipated even a few short years prior)

 

[Northern Light]

^ Isn't that what development charges are for?

Yes...........but

Generally speaking the charges don't cover costs on that scale.

On top of which the province has imposed assorted limits on charges; for instance, the TDSB isn't even allowed to levy charges in Toronto at all; even though several schools are bursting at the seams.

The lame excuse from the province, that an under-utilized school in South Etobicoke means no money for mid-town Toronto.

 

[W. K. Lis]

Yes...........but

Generally speaking the charges don't cover costs on that scale.

On top of which the province has imposed assorted limits on charges; for instance, the TDSB isn't even allowed to levy charges in Toronto at all; even though several schools are bursting at the seams.

The lame excuse from the province, that an under-utilized school in South Etobicoke means no money for mid-town Toronto.

A "let them eat 'cheesecake'" excuse.

From link.

 

[lenaitch]

(* - I will give Burlington planners some credit that their planned mobility hubs had significant growth targets only to be hijacked by a NIMBY electorate and council, while Midtown Oakville's planning was upended with much higher density targets set by the province (and desired by the market) than could be anticipated even a few short years prior)

But isn't that representative democracy? Planners are staff.

 

[WislaHD]

But isn't that representative democracy? Planners are staff.

Indeed. Quite an interesting question given that the prevailing mandate of the planning profession in Ontario is to serve the public interest.

Is that public interest set forth by City Council? I would immediately wonder who is being excluded from that conversation and is not a part of said public interest. There is the usual disenfranchised population groups to speak for, but I would also be concerned about the Ontario that today's youth will one day inherit when they become of voting age, as well as the interests of future residents who may decide to migrate to this region from elsewhere in Canada or abroad at some future date. Both population groups have zero say on what municipal planning policy should look like, but will constitute the majority of tomorrow's residents and will inherit the consequences of decades of entrenched homeowner interests on their future communities (as we see playing out with the housing market across the region). The directions of City Council seems like an inadequate way to ensure that all stakeholders are accounted for in planning policy decisions that involve a longer term time-horizon extending beyond the next election cycle.

Of course, those non-electorate stakeholders (who might not know that they are stakeholders) can't be expected to have a meaningful contribution to planning decisions being made today. This is where I would personally place onus on the planning profession to consider those interests when making decisions at the site-specific level (e.g. delivering affordable housing, ensuring representative community consultation, considering if children have a place to play in the neighbourhood), as well as at the macro-level (e.g. actively planning for how projected population growth targets can be accommodated in the municipality, not embroiling future generations of residents with substantial infrastructure investment deficits). It is also worth pondering about the situation where two representative levels of government clash on public policy, as is the case when a municipality proposes a secondary plan limiting growth around a major transit station area, in contradiction to prevailing provincial planning policy.

However, as you rightly point out, it is difficult to expect that the municipal planning staff contradict the directions of council. They are staff after all, and tasked with serving the interests and whims of council. I suppose this all to say, that I believe there are some serious problems with the way we do planning in Ontario, especially when it comes to long-term planning of land-use and growth. I'm not sure how much more bold you can expect the municipal planning staff to be, but I do believe that we collectively have to be bolder as a region to meet the challenges of growth, mobility, and inequality before us (which unfortunately, probably falls to the leadership of our elected officials...).

 

[lenaitch]

Indeed. Quite an interesting question given that the prevailing mandate of the planning profession in Ontario is to serve the public interest.

Is that public interest set forth by City Council? I would immediately wonder who is being excluded from that conversation and is not a part of said public interest. There is the usual disenfranchised population groups to speak for, but I would also be concerned about the Ontario that today's youth will one day inherit when they become of voting age, as well as the interests of future residents who may decide to migrate to this region from elsewhere in Canada or abroad at some future date. Both population groups have zero say on what municipal planning policy should look like, but will constitute the majority of tomorrow's residents and will inherit the consequences of decades of entrenched homeowner interests on their future communities (as we see playing out with the housing market across the region). The directions of City Council seems like an inadequate way to ensure that all stakeholders are accounted for in planning policy decisions that involve a longer term time-horizon extending beyond the next election cycle.

Of course, those non-electorate stakeholders (who might not know that they are stakeholders) can't be expected to have a meaningful contribution to planning decisions being made today. This is where I would personally place onus on the planning profession to consider those interests when making decisions at the site-specific level (e.g. delivering affordable housing, ensuring representative community consultation, considering if children have a place to play in the neighbourhood), as well as at the macro-level (e.g. actively planning for how projected population growth targets can be accommodated in the municipality, not embroiling future generations of residents with substantial infrastructure investment deficits). It is also worth pondering about the situation where two representative levels of government clash on public policy, as is the case when a municipality proposes a secondary plan limiting growth around a major transit station area, in contradiction to prevailing provincial planning policy.

However, as you rightly point out, it is difficult to expect that the municipal planning staff contradict the directions of council. They are staff after all, and tasked with serving the interests and whims of council. I suppose this all to say, that I believe there are some serious problems with the way we do planning in Ontario, especially when it comes to long-term planning of land-use and growth. I'm not sure how much more bold you can expect the municipal planning staff to be, but I do believe that we collectively have to be bolder as a region to meet the challenges of growth, mobility, and inequality before us (which unfortunately, probably falls to the leadership of our elected officials...).

Tp paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the worse form of government . . . except all the others. A large component is accountability. Land use planning is public policy, and I no more support bureaucrats making this type of public policy than I would the developers themselves. The role (theoretically) of the bureaucracy is to provide expert advice and speak truth to power - not be power. As we have seen during the pandemic, perhaps we should have left it to the experts, but we get to hold the elected officials accountable - we don't get to fire the bureaucrats.

There is a follow-on story in the Star today about how one of the developers is now in a bind because buyers have made commitments and deposits to a phase he doesn't even have a building permit for (otherwise he could proceed). How is that allowed to happen?

We well marginally involved in a zoning issue several years ago when we lived in the rural GTA, when it was discovered that a piece of rural land near a small community had somehow been zoned industrial (I forget how or when it was determined that happened). During a committee meeting, the lawyers actually came out and said that the developer bought the land and therefore had a right to make profit from it. People may be surprised to know that much of the land in the GTA and elsewhere that is still farmland is actually owned by investors and developers. Profit is the motive, not community.

 

[WislaHD]

It is funny to compare the willingness of different municipalities in the region to embrace development. Clarington completed a report recently to inform a Secondary Plan surrounding the planned Bowmanville GO station. This map detailing block plan by height caught my attention:

https://pub-clarington.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?DocumentId=18082

Interesting to see how that will play out in Bowmanville when public input is added.

 

[DirectionNorth]

It is funny to compare the willingness of different municipalities in the region to embrace development. Clarington completed a report recently to inform a Secondary Plan surrounding the planned Bowmanville GO station. This map detailing block plan by height caught my attention:

https://pub-clarington.escribemeetings.com/filestream.ashx?DocumentId=18082

View attachment 317742

Interesting to see how that will play out in Bowmanville when public input is added.

I must say that if gone through with, that would be a good* plan.

*I think that more can be done to ensure that the residents in the area highlighted by the plan can get to the GO station, especially those in the north-west corner.

 

[W. K. Lis]

I must say that if gone through with, that would be a good* plan.

*I think that more can be done to ensure that the residents in the area highlighted by the plan can get to the GO station, especially those in the north-west corner.

Will they allow duplexes and triplexes outside that area? Likely no.

 

[SunriseChampion]

Tp paraphrase Churchill, democracy is the worse form of government . . . except all the others.

To be fair...and I do love Churchill (not a typo).......he was informed by bullshit FPTP "democracy". Which isn't democracy at all, but a faux democracy that ends in absolute minority rule. Like South Africa during your youth.