Province sets tough new targets to curb sprawl

By 2031, 60% of new homes to be in developed areas

New intensification targets announced by the province are “ambitious,” but in line with the efforts of local municipalities to contain sprawl, local planners say.

The province announced Thursday that, by 2031, municipalities will have to ensure that 60 per cent of new residential development happens in already developed areas — up from 40 per cent today. It also set an interim target of 50 per cent by 2022.

“Sixty per cent is ambitious,” said Michelle Sergi, director of community planning at the Region of Waterloo. But the region is “a long way toward putting all the appropriate policies in place,” she added, noting that the region’s current target of 45 per cent was higher than the previous provincial target.

Even when development takes place in undeveloped areas — socalled green field development — the province is saying it will need to be more intense. Any future projects on undeveloped land will have to accommodate more people and jobs — a minimum of 80 per hectare, up from the current 50. Around light rail and bus rapid transit the minimum density targets will be

double that, at 160 residents and jobs per hectare.

There again the cities in the region have already done a lot of work to encourage intensification along the Ion light rail route, Sergi said.

Kitchener already has density targets that are in line with the province’s new ones, said Natalie Goss, a senior planner with the city. The city’s new Official Plan is being challenged at the Ontario Municipal Board, so aren’t yet in effect, but “our intent appears to line up with the provincial targets,” Goss said.

In Waterloo, city planners recognized as early as 2000 that the city was running out of raw development land, and began to encourage denser development at busy intersections, commercial nodes and along busy arteries. In recent years, with a surge of student housing near the universities, as well as denser housing in Uptown, near Waterloo Park and in areas such near the old Bauer plant on King Street, “we’ve averaged in excess of 70 per cent of residential units that have been within the built-up area,” said Scott Nevin, the director of growth management at the City of Waterloo.

The tough new targets provide some flexibility, Sergi said: first, because they’re phased in over several years, and second because the targets don’t have to be uniform across the region, so long as the overall average density is achieved. In other words, the region can direct greater densities to urban areas and busy transit corridors, where densities may be even higher than the targets, so that other areas, such as in the townships, can see less intense developments.

The province is giving municipalities until 2031 to meet the new, tougher targets set out in its updated growth plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe region, which stretches from the Niagara Region to Peterborough, and which extends as far west as Waterloo Region and Wellington County.

Municipal Affairs Minister Bill Mauro said Thursday that the objective of the plan is “building complete and more compact communities, that support transit, create jobs, reduce sprawl and protect our environment.”

The new targets “send out a really, really strong message about curtailing sprawl, which is something the region is supportive of,” Sergi said. It also meshes with efforts to focus intensification in some areas, such as near Ion and along busy transit routes. “In that sense it’s positive.”

But she did concede it may require “a change in mindset” from the development industry. Some critics have blamed for the current housing supply shortage in Toronto and the surrounding areas on Ontario’s policies to limit sprawl.

But Kitchener is already seeing denser development proposals, that blend residential and commercial and that include a mix of apartments, townhouses and single detached homes, Goss said. It’s not as though developers won’t be able to build any more single detached homes, she said. “There’s land out there for single detached homes as well as for townhouses and apartments.”

It’s not clear what would happen if a municipality failed to meet the intensification targets, Sergi said. The province might not approve municipal efforts to say, expand the area where development can happen if it felt a city or region wasn’t doing enough to encourage density. Cambridge planners said they couldn’t comment on the new targets until they’d had more time to study how they might affect local planning policies.