Want a livable city? Forget developing the Green Belt

Forget hockey pools: the real betting action lies in being the closest among your neighbours to estimating just how much over asking that house down the street is going to go for.

In the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) region, the seemingly unstoppable escalation of home prices has become a prime source of dinner party conversation, a growing sense of good fortune for those lucky enough to have bought a decade or more ago, and no small amount of anxiety about what it all means for the next generation.

But most of all, it has led to much analysis of what lies behind the real estate bidding wars gripping our cities and whether there is anything that can be done to cool off a red-hot market driven by low interest rates and big mortgages.

Obviously, a lot of what is happening boils down to supply and demand: Demand for living in a city that has become an international destination coming up against a tight supply of homes. According to the Ontario Real Estate Association, the answer to this supply-demand imbalance is to weaken land protection for Ontario’s Greenbelt and pave over more farms and forests to make room for more sprawling subdivisions. But with roads gridlocked and transit still not keeping pace with our bulging urban boundaries, is this really the answer?

A 2014 Royal Bank of Canada and Pembina Institute’s homebuyer survey revealed that 81 per cent of GTA homebuyers said they prefer walkable transit-friendly neighbourhoods to car-dependent locations, even if it means trading a large home and yard for a modest home, townhouse or condo.

That’s why in 2006 the province created the Growth Plan, which directs cities and towns to grow “smarter” by using less land, creating communities with densities that support transit, offer a range and mix of housing, and attract jobs while saving money by making better use of existing infrastructure. Also worth noting is that more than 104,000 hectares of land are currently available in the GGH for development — roughly the size of 1.5 Torontos (according to the Neptis Foundation).

Despite this huge amount of available land, we are still seeing lineups of buyers for older homes in city neighbourhoods that offer services, schools, and transit within walking distance.

And it’s not as if driving an hour or more out of the city is actually going to deliver a lot of price relief. In 2016, the average cost of a new single-family detached home in the GTA hit $1.24 million. Adding insult to injury, most of these new homes are in far-flung subdivisions that come with major commuting headaches — and costs.

So if people want to live in lively urban neighbourhoods with good amenities and transit, wouldn’t it make more sense to build housing there and offer a better mix of housing?

If we really want to accommodate this demand, we first need to rethink the idea that more cardependent subdivisions with large and expensive homes are going to make our cities affordable places to live. Instead, we need to meet people’s actual desires by building up, in between and in new, innovative ways.

Some of the most beautiful cities in the world like Paris, London and Rome do this. These cities also do something else well — invest in transit that is frequent, convenient and reliable. Those conditions can only be met if there are enough people using the service to justify it. That requires compact communities, not spreadout subdivisions.

Over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen a boom in condominium, townhome and mid-rise living, particularly in Toronto and its outer suburbs. These are positive trends, but we need to ensure that these developments mesh well with existing infrastructure and neighbourhood qualities. We can’t leave highrise residents without green space to stretch out in, and we can’t leave existing and new residents sardined into overloaded transit vehicles.

We also can’t keep Canada’s biggest urban region from growing, especially as its reputation as a place that mixes great economic opportunities with a high-quality of life spreads around the world. But we can make that growth smarter by giving buyers what they are actually looking for — an affordable place to call home that doesn’t take hours to get to every day.