They paved paradise

Letters to the Toronto Star January 22 2011
Re: A region’s rise and sprawl, Jan. 16
Rather than building sprawling residential “communities” that may somehow evolve into more dense areas sometime in the future, as a Durham planner suggests, it is better to build higher density mixed use communities right from the start.
If one accepts that there is a significant risk that energy shocks, worsening environmental conditions and difficult economic times will characterize the future between now and 2031, the permanent impacts of what is built today makes it preferable that, where greenfield development is inevitable, such communities be built at double or more the provincial minimum density standards.
Such communities can be quite pleasant and marketable, and reflect not only demographic change but a latent desire of many people for something other than the typical blandness of suburban residential developments.
A more European town environment, with modern infrastructure and amenities, walkable distances to jobs and daily services, good transit, and less social isolation would serve the people of Halton, Peel, York and Durham quite well, and be very family-friendly.
As for intensification (adding jobs and people to already built-up areas), there is far more potential in every 905 municipality than most people believe. In virtually every retail area or office “campus,” multi-storey residential buildings can be profitably added on to the property, benefiting both the new residents and the existing businesses.
It is also sad to see today, after all that is known about sustainable urban development, that municipalities still take the path of least resistance and approve single-use, single-storey non-residential developments that should be multi-storey and multi-use.
John Stillich, Executive Director, Sustainable Urban Development Association, Toronto
The public continues to be deceived by the mantra that there is no choice other than to continue to sprawl our cities. In fact there are many options and choices about how we build homes and lives that don’t include sprawling suburbs and malls. We have only been able to do this because of the idea that we have more land than we know what to do with.
Even this plethora of land can be exhausted within our lifetime. When I was a child the city ended at Finch Ave. I went horse-back riding along Steeles. Only a few short years ago the last remaining fields still grew corn along that road. Now the “city” sprawls almost to Lake Simcoe. This all happened in a matter of decades.
Consequently the era I’ve lived through has seen the biggest loss of biodiversity since the dinosaurs were wiped out. Much of this is because species lost their habitat. To what? Urban expansion.
If we don’t or won’t get these connections made sooner than later the future of this planet’s biodiversity is even more dire. The irony is that we need nature and even those with pockets full of money won’t be able buy back what has been or will be destroyed should we continue to sprawl. And it will affect the quality of all of our lives, more so our future generations.
It’s not just biodiversity we are extinguishing as we sprawl. The GTA houses the world’s finest and most productive soils. Class one agricultural output. Covered with concrete, they do not feed us. Meanwhile we look at our grocery stores filled with food imported from all over the world. Can this system last? It is a short and bizarre time in history. That’s for sure!
Our best option is to freeze urban expansion, contain and continue to really “grow” within our existing cities and save what we have left. There is precious little in the GTA and it is worth more than most of us realize. This would be our best line of defense and a premium insurance policy for a future that might look more green than grey and lifeless.
Bernadette Zubrisky, Ecologist and Environmental Educator, Toronto
Thanks for the observations of how much this Toronto area is “megasticizing” over irreplaceable farmland. But it’s not just in the more pristine areas of your newspaper readership that the Places to Grow Act is undercut: Bloor St. in Yorkville also managed to drive over it by ignoring requirements for better cycling in dense urban areas, and the province has been quite capable of looking the other way.
Hamish Wilson, Toronto
Managing population growth by directing it to areas of high density may make life in the GTA more sustainable with respect to transportation and land use, but not other aspects of human life, such as food water and electricity supply and sewage disposal.
More people are going to want more electricity when we are nowhere near being able to supply the people we have with renewables. Since Ontario is a net importer of food, a larger population will be consuming more imported food and creating more greenhouse gases to get it here.
An effort to improve land use and transportation efficiency will lead to a strain on water supply and sewage disposal as well as an increase in the GTA’s carbon footprint if it does not include an effort to limit the total population.
Robert Nevin, Toronto
I have one sure-fire way to help end sprawl: Build communities on the parking lots surrounding the shopping malls. Currently malls are a monumental waste of valuable land. A change in tax strategy may be in order to make it less attractive for developers to just put up a mall and surround it with parking.
Put the parking underground and build residential, commercial, and recreational properties on top. This will be a win-win-win situation: The developer gets a captive audience for his mall, the city gets more tax revenue from residential property taxes and the community at large benefits from a much better urban environment.
Bruce Gates, Toronto
Proposals of this type go back at least 15 years. The result is more sprawl. Like King Canute ordering the tide to stop coming in, the provincial government thinks saying something will make it so.
As long as municipalities depend on Market Value-based property taxes, nothing will change. Using taxes from densely populated areas to subsidize thinly populated areas — sprawl — will not change human nature, which is to get more for less.
Downtown Toronto — the historic City of Toronto — generates huge revenues for every square kilometre. That revenue is used to support thinly populated suburbs that can’t support public transit without large subsidies and that require two to three times as much linear infrastructure (roads, sidewalks, sewers, water) with the attendant costs.
I predict that five years from now the Star will have another article about some nitwit who thinks he can roll back the tide.
David Vallance, Toronto
Phinjo Gombu and Catharine Farley should be given a big round of applause. They did a terrific job with their article on urban sprawl.
I fully support those municipalities that plan for their residents rather than plan for their developers.
Hopefully your team can also do an equally effective story about wind turbines and the effect they will have on urban sprawl.
Andy Harjula, Cavan
Smart growth — or outsmarted? Who are we kidding?
Brampton, Bolton, Caledon, Halton, Alliston, Mississauga, Orangeville, Milton, Vaughn, Whitby, Markham, Aurora, Newmarket, Barrie, etc., were all once former bastions of prime foodland — places locals could count on for food. And what did we trade all of that potential for?
Well if we look real close we are left with an endless concrete jungle fortified by such silly notions like those that come out municipalities like Mayor Susan Fennell’s Brampton.
On the one hand she actually considers herself a “green” mayor while in contrast her municipality actively pre-empts plans to save foodlands by the province’s Places to Grow initiative. Her worship might recognize the goals set by the initiative as absolutely essential for the food security of future generations.
It is only with such obvious lack of foresight and naivete that leaders of those aforementioned municipalities could logically ever consider such uncontrolled growth in their communities as a legitimate economic engine — paving over their greatest assets, their own foodlands.
As these municipalities gradually encase themselves and their constituents in the urban sprawl that results, they move their municipalities inexorably closer and closer to becoming mere places to starve.
Steven Kaasgaard, WildGreens Canada
So the GTA municipalities are expecting all kinds of growth by 2031 — 23 per cent in Toronto alone. Where are all these people coming from? Have the planners not read the 2003 Senate report, “The Demographic Time Bomb,” that states by 2040 Canada’s population will peak at 37 million people and then decline?
The populations in most OECD countries are already in decline. Suburbs in Japan, for instance, are being returned to agriculture.
Canada’s fertility rate is 1.5 children per woman and that 37 million population figure will only be reached with heavy immigration, which may not occur.
The GTA planning estimates are not realistic.
Jim Garner, Ottawa