Suburbia’s Last Stand

Two things seem certain: Ontario’s Growth Management Plan represents a massive experiment in social engineering, and people resist being engineered. Those with capital—especially the “high-source” immigrants most desired—come with expectations, principal among them land and a house of their own. Living by his grandfather’s maxim that “a man without land is nobody,” the fictional Duddy Kravitz found Montreal’s Jewish ghetto to be a good place to leave. The allure of the suburbs has long been land, space, and lower taxes. While the city governments of Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto complain about lacking the resources to absorb vast numbers of new and necessary immigrants, it has increasingly been the edge cities, with their promise of a green oasis free from urban blight and dangerous social cross-currents, that have become the chief sponges.

The suburbs have survived, even prospered, in the post-World War II years by constantly growing, and in so doing they have satisfied this national need. But if greenfields will no longer be served up to bulldozers, if they are to be replaced by higher buildings in intensified cities, will the allure be the same? Will vertical boxes attract high-source immigrants? Or will such people continue to demand a yard of their own?

There can be no intensified development without builders, and not all are sanguine about Ontario’s Growth Management Plan. To Charles Stuart, vice president of MarketVision Realty, a research and real estate brokerage firm specializing in core development projects in downtown Toronto, Big Planning smacks of hubris. “Fifteen years ago the City of Toronto was working very hard to save its local traditional industries, like the needle trade,” he says. “It desperately resisted every attempt to rezone these dying industries, as the corporate tax base dried up and the companies moved to Asia. We live in a global economy, not an urban one, and certainly not a provincial one. The whole thing was ridiculous. They did not have the science or the capacity to do a real study on a real city, then or now. Now they claim they can do a whole province!”

In fact, broad discussions between the province, municipalities, and developers are ongoing, and, while the plan is in place, the implementation procedures are not etched in stone. Framed in the colourful palette of the “greenbelt,” “brownfields,” “purple intensification areas,” and the “white zone,” it is a hothouse debate attempting to settle on targets, dates, and process. And on core issues there is disquiet. In “Pull Don’t Push” (April 2005), the Greater Toronto Home Builders’ Association “Response to Greater Golden Horseshoe Growth Plan,” developers maintain that the Ontario government “must accept solutions that will allow people to choose where they want to live, and not imply that they know best how people should live.” The gthba brief offers conditional support and pointed critique. “The recent surge in downtown condominium development in Toronto is not driven by smart growth policy. It is driven by the market,” suggesting that intensification must occur naturally, not by government fiat. In its press release, gthba president Julie Di Lorenzo adds: “Based on our experience, a ‘push’ approach to regulation does not succeed in the long term.”

Di Lorenzo offers other cautionary notes. Behind the comforting language from Ontario’s planners about their intention “to manage growth; support economic development; reinvest in public infrastructure; and protect our natural environment,” Di Lorenzo worries that the infrastructure cash on the barrelhead (for roads, public transit, water, sewer pipes, etc.) will not be there, that “local opposition to intensification is a fact of life,” and that the “not-in-my-backyard syndrome cannot be ignored.” Most of the cities slated for intensification are, in truth, mature Ontario towns (Cambridge, St. Catharines, Barrie, and Oakville, among others) that only pretend to be cities—like little metrovilles.

According to Donna Hinde, whose downtown Toronto firm is advising smaller towns on the coming impact of intensification, “We have to tell our municipal clients where to put 12,000 units in a low-density, sprawling neighbourhood like Mississauga. In an older community where everyone knows their neighbours they are not used to change, and this is a huge change itself, never mind the design ideas that might follow the density shift.” Peter Natyshak, vice president of sales and marketing for the Moldenhauer Group, says that in Oakville there is a powerful “group of ratepayers that don’t want buildings over four storeys.”

The gthba, Natyshak, Hinde, and others are hedging their bets. The province is facing a planning conundrum, and it seems politically incorrect to overly criticize attempted solutions. Still, the gthba may “support the objectives of the Growth Plan,” but Moldenhauer points out that he already spends fully two-thirds of his time on “council meetings, focus groups, ratepayers association meetings, regional and municipal hearings,” and he worries that the new regulatory regime will be costly and will further delay development. Moldenhauer argues that much of what you pay for in a new house today is not apparent—it’s in an invisible mountain of reports and files, a paper shadowlife that grows bigger with every political initiative.

The gthba wants a few “sticks” to bring localities into line, and a few “carrots” in the form of direct incentives to municipalities and home builders. As it stands, many developers believe that if the choice presented by the Growth Management Plan is to intensify or lose out on the infrastructure and development sweepstakes, smaller municipalities will pass. With a moratorium on building in the greenbelt, and development of white-zone areas (between the greenbelt and purple intensification zones) now dependent on municipalities meeting intensification targets set by the province—targets which many say they cannot or will not reach—some developers are wondering where they will build.

For the larger cities like Toronto and Mississauga, the situation is quite different: they must keep growing to sustain their tax bases. But Mississauga’s debonair director of policy planning, John Calvert, echoes the point made about the surge of condominium development in Toronto. Mississauga, he says, has long recognized that it must intensify, and it has few places to go but up—“bluefields” you might call them. ( If you’re running out of greenfields, those dwindling parcels of well-drained farmland, you simply make more—out of thin air.) Calvert says that his city has long had “the power to amend itself ” by issuing building permits and rezoning land. He details how Mississauga recently “pre-zoned” its City Centre lands, openly copying a Toronto initiative called the King Street Plan. One of Ontario’s most successful developers, Danny Salvatore of Fernbrook Homes, would concur. Fernbrook is currently constructing a clutch of five shiny residential towers in Mississauga’s City Centre, a project that broke ground well before the Greenbelt Act.

And then there is the money. Despite a robust national economy and Ottawa buying in with initiatives like the Canada Strategic Infrastructure Fund to support public transit and water quality projects, “have-not” Ontario is running deficits and its battle to solve the “fiscal imbalance” with Ottawa is foundering. It remains the only province without a formal immigration deal with the federal government, and it is still largely beholden to the automobile industry for primary growth and the profitability of many tertiary industries. From one side of Queen’s Park come marketing programs designed to lure the automobile industry to “Ontario the Good” (where, among other benefits, the health of auto workers will be secured). And from the other side, the environment and urban-planning side, come the protestations: we must concentrate growth, and the twin evils are sprawl and cars.