Environmental group slams developers
Non-profit says builders using loophole on land not meant for development
The development industry is under attack by an environmental advocacy group that blames homebuilders for the spread of urban sprawl into Ontario farm country.
Environmental Defence says developers are using a loophole in the Ontario growth plan — an anti-sprawl policy — to build subdivisions in remote places beyond the Greater Toronto Area such as Simcoe, Peterborough and Wellington counties and the Niagara Region.
“The development industry has been undermining the growth plan every chance they get,” said Tim Gray, executive director of the nonprofit environmental body.
He accused the Building and Land Development Association (BILD) and the Ontario Real Estate Association (OREA) of falsely linking the Toronto area’s skyrocketing home prices to a land shortage.
Gray’s comments followed new research from the Neptis Foundation. It says that 26,000 hectares of land in the Greater Golden Horseshoe — never intended for major development — have been or is being built on since the growth plan was introduced in 2006.
That land is in areas where many homes still depend on ground-well water and septic waste systems, Neptis said. It means municipalities are allowing developers to bypass builtup areas in favour of remote locations and call it intensification even though the predominant housing type is single-family detached houses.
Linking pipes to those developments costs hundreds of millions of tax dollars even when developers pay the upfront costs, said Neptis executive director Marcy Burchfield.
But she said even though developers play a role in what gets built where, “The buck really stops at the province.”
The growth plan provides for enough single-family homes — detached, semi-detached and townhouses, Burchfield said.
“Sixty per cent of the growth plan was planned in that form of development. The issue is, should this kind of scale of development be go- ing into these areas?” she said. BILD CEO Bryan Tuckey said Neptis’s calculations of land available for development don’t take into account constraints such as natural heritage features and the distinction between employment and housing lands.
Neptis has declined to work with the industry to come up with a mutually agreed number, he said.
Meanwhile, the discussion of land supply is detracting from the real issue, which is a housing shortage crisis, Tuckey said.
“Between January 2016 and January 2017, (new build) lowrise prices went up 25 per cent in the GTA, (new) highrise prices went up 13 per cent. We’re not keeping up with demand of this growing region and the lack of supply is impacting the price of new homes,” he said.
He called the building industry one of the most regulated in the province.
“The residential industry has reduced its footprint significantly. We’re building almost as many highrise houses as lowrise houses. We are complying to the letter what (the growth plan) asks us to do,” he said. OREA CEO Tim Hudak responded to Environmental Defence by saying that “ideologically driven groups want to limit housing supply and housing choice for consumers.
“Unfortunately, the end result is that prices have gone up substantially, because we are not building enough homes to keep up with consumer demand,” he said in an emailed statement.
Both Hudak and Tuckey have said repeatedly that home buyers want houses with yards for their families and they are driving to qualify for mortgages that will afford them the space.
But Gray says people will buy what’s available.
“If it was the case that people preferred to live in these (rural) areas, the house in Innisfil would be selling for $1.5 million and the ones in downtown Toronto would be selling for $600,000. People really want to live in places that have services nearby, that they can walk, that they have transit options, they can go out to entertainment or school or work,” he said.
“What’s driving this is a conventional approach to development that maximizes the profits of people that have been involved in building that kind of housing forever and doesn’t lead to the quality of life we want.”