Uproar rises over location of new Toronto housing
TORONTO — Spreading across 2 million acres, Toronto’s Greenbelt is a vast swath of protected and ecologically sensitive lands that forms an arc around the city and its suburbs, as if holding Canada’s most populous and fastest-growing region in an embrace.
“It’s our Central Park,” said Jeff Bowers, 57, recently retired from a “high-stress, 24/7” job in technology, who was hiking recently in one corner of the Greenbelt. “The Greenbelt was declared, it was decreed. It had a sacredness to it. Now, the current government is tinkering with that, and that’s creating a lot of uproar. You can imagine if they said they were going to develop Central Park.”
Yet this is what is happening in Toronto.
The Ontario provincial government in December opened up privately owned parts of the Greenbelt to developers for the construction of 50,000 new homes, arguing that the move was necessary because of Toronto’s worsening housing shortage and an expected influx of newcomers stemming from sharply rising immigration rates.
The move on the Greenbelt has forced Toronto to confront more than ever the competing forces reshaping it as a metropolis: its ambitions to be a world-class city and the destination of talented immigrants against its goals to be green and curb sprawl, as embodied by the Greenbelt itself.
“There’s broad agreement now that we need to build a lot of housing because we have a supply shortage,” said Matti Siemiatycki, the director of the Infrastructure Institute at the University of Toronto. “But the question is, really, ‘How is it going to be done?’”
Toronto, like many metropolises worldwide, is suffering from housing shortages, skyrocketing real estate prices and the hollowing out of the middle class.
The development plan by the provincial government, led by a conservative premier, Doug Ford, has proved unpopular and has also raised ethical questions after reports that some of the lots removed from the Greenbelt were owned by politically connected developers.
The federal environment minister said recently that Ottawa might use federal environmental laws to block some of the development, but stopped short of giving details.
But opening up the Greenbelt has also been endorsed by developers, some economists and farmers, who argue that it exacerbates Toronto’s housing crisis and that the strongest opponents to development do not own land inside the Greenbelt.
Consisting primarily of privately owned land, the Greenbelt serves as a physical barrier against sprawl and is home to some of the most fertile farms in Canada, as well as to rivers, wetlands and forests that shelter hundreds of animal species and offer countless trails to hikers.
Created in 2005 by the provincial government, the Greenbelt quickly gained a cultural significance that belies its age: sacred to its fervent supporters, and derided as a rainforest by others who consider it an arbitrary obstacle to growth.
The provincial government in December removed from the Greenbelt 15 tracts of privately owned land totaling 7,400 acres, in that way stripping them of their protected status and opening them up to the construction of 50,000 new homes. At the same time, the government added 9,400 acres of new land elsewhere in the protected area.
Critics have said that the government does not know what the effect of the land swap would be because it did not adequately study the value of the land being removed or added — and held only a perfunctory public consultation period.
“We discourage this idea of land swap because not all land is created equally,” said Edward Mcdonnell, CEO of the Greenbelt Foundation, a charitable organization that seeks to protect the Greenbelt and receives government financing, adding that “the large majority” of the Greenbelt is privately owned.