AlvinofDiaspar
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From the Star:
URBAN GROWTH
Suburbs doing little to curtail sprawl, study says
Toronto ranks first overall for `community sustainability, but 905 faces serious problems
Aug 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Andrew Chung
Staff Reporter
Competitive cyclists searching for training grounds regularly ride north of the city, dodging tangles of traffic on the way as a sacrifice to the gods of open country roads.
But the sacrifice is becoming onerous for Amit Ghosh, who says it can now take an hour and a half of riding – as far as 50 kilometres from downtown Toronto – just to get to roads that aren't studded with subdivisions and parking lots.
"More roads, traffic, malls, subdivisions," says Ghosh, who runs Toronto's Midweek Cycling Club. "What used to be a country road is now an arterial road. A place that was ideal for cycling all of a sudden becomes a suburban area where you feel like you can't ride safely."
Like molten lava burning a path through the landscape, profound development is consuming more and more farmland and forests in all directions around Toronto.
It's why the regions around Toronto fare poorly compared with the city in a new study that ranks municipalities across Ontario in terms of their physical design, liveability and economic vitality.
The study, to be released tomorrow by the Pembina Institute, a national think tank on energy and environmental issues, measures what the authors call "community sustainability" – hinting at which places are best poised for the future.
It also tells a worrying tale of the stark contrasts between Toronto and its suburbs.
The City of Toronto ranks first in the province for sustainability, thanks for the most part to its compact design, heavy transit use and high population density.
The city's suburban cousins, though economic powerhouses, rank near the bottom of the 27 municipalities studied in these areas.
This poses a serious problem, the institute says, for a reason revealed in the 2006 census.
"There's a significant threat on the horizon: no net population growth for Toronto," says the study's project director Mark Winfield, who teaches environmental studies at York University.
"It means it's going outwards, to precisely the places doing the worst in terms of urban form," Winfield says.
The province didn't anticipate this. Last year with much fanfare it adopted its growth plan for the Golden Horseshoe, the vast U-shaped basin that hugs Lake Ontario from Niagara through Greater Toronto all the way to Peterborough.
The plan assumed Toronto would absorb a healthy chunk of the immigration-fuelled population growth in the area, thus diminishing the sheer scope of sprawl.
Toronto's population was pegged to grow by 170,000 from 2001 to 2011, a half-million by 2031. But the reality so far isn't even close. Toronto grew by just 0.9 per cent – fewer than 22,000 – in the last five years.
Meanwhile, the regions are bursting. York Region, for instance, has grown by 163,000 in the same time frame.
"This tells us," Winfield says, "that things are playing out worse than we had assumed."
The province acknowledges the city's not growing as rapidly as anticipated, but a government spokesperson says, "They still represent the best numbers and they will be reviewed every five years."
The study takes an intricate look at categories that make places sustainable.
One of the most important measures is what planners call "smart growth": does the way a place is physically built up minimize its impact on the environment? Liveability looks at what attracts people to live in a place, such as relative income equality, access to community centres, and low crime rates. Economic vitality means jobs for people, incomes, real estate values and wealth creation.
Toronto does well economically and in smart growth – witness the dozens of high-rise condominiums going up inside the city – but very poorly in liveability, primarily for its high rate of child poverty, too little social housing and too few parks per capita.
York Region's economy is also hot, but it faces huge battles with smart growth and liveability. Most of its housing stock, 75 per cent, is single-family detached houses, the highest proportion in Greater Toronto. That means very little affordable housing and few rentals, so many workers must live outside the region and commute.
Winfield says such a set-up, combined with the population growth happening there instead of in Toronto, spells trouble.
"It means you're paving farmland, embedding auto dependent commuting which will compound congestion, which is already a serious economic drag on the region" in the range of billions of dollars.
John Waller, director of long- range planning for York region, points out the region's success with transit. Ridership is increasing with the new Viva bus rapid transit system. "And in the next 10 years," Waller says, "we'll be spending about three times as much on transit than on roads."
That's a huge difference, considering in 2004 it was spending twice as much on roads as on transit.
The province's growth plan calls for 40 per cent of new growth to happen inside built-up areas by 2015. Currently, only about 20 per cent of York's growth is happening in this way.
That still leaves 60 per cent of development on, for example, farmland. There, the density must be 50 people and jobs per hectare.
Winfield says some argue that that's no more "dense" than the status quo. In fact, York's newest subdivisions are already at that density.
"The argument is that it's business as usual," Winfield says.
Officials also face the huge problem of where to house the 100,000 people migrating to the GTA each year.
"We have an obligation to provide living space for new residents," says Larry Bourne, a geography and planning professor at the University of Toronto. "We can certainly do some of that through intensification, but a lot of it we can't. We'll have to use new land on the margin."
Waller says the region won't stop building on the edge. "Our approach and the province's approach is that you want a balance of housing opportunities."
To get the sprawl under control, the province will need to be more aggressive, Winfield declares, by denying urban boundary expansions, expanding the Greenbelt – ecologically sensitive land where development can't occur – and specifying rules on density.
"The province had the right idea to try to modify the urban form that's been occurring at the periphery of the Greater Golden Horseshoe," he says.
"But the problem is bigger than the policy assumed."
AoD
URBAN GROWTH
Suburbs doing little to curtail sprawl, study says
Toronto ranks first overall for `community sustainability, but 905 faces serious problems
Aug 26, 2007 04:30 AM
Andrew Chung
Staff Reporter
Competitive cyclists searching for training grounds regularly ride north of the city, dodging tangles of traffic on the way as a sacrifice to the gods of open country roads.
But the sacrifice is becoming onerous for Amit Ghosh, who says it can now take an hour and a half of riding – as far as 50 kilometres from downtown Toronto – just to get to roads that aren't studded with subdivisions and parking lots.
"More roads, traffic, malls, subdivisions," says Ghosh, who runs Toronto's Midweek Cycling Club. "What used to be a country road is now an arterial road. A place that was ideal for cycling all of a sudden becomes a suburban area where you feel like you can't ride safely."
Like molten lava burning a path through the landscape, profound development is consuming more and more farmland and forests in all directions around Toronto.
It's why the regions around Toronto fare poorly compared with the city in a new study that ranks municipalities across Ontario in terms of their physical design, liveability and economic vitality.
The study, to be released tomorrow by the Pembina Institute, a national think tank on energy and environmental issues, measures what the authors call "community sustainability" – hinting at which places are best poised for the future.
It also tells a worrying tale of the stark contrasts between Toronto and its suburbs.
The City of Toronto ranks first in the province for sustainability, thanks for the most part to its compact design, heavy transit use and high population density.
The city's suburban cousins, though economic powerhouses, rank near the bottom of the 27 municipalities studied in these areas.
This poses a serious problem, the institute says, for a reason revealed in the 2006 census.
"There's a significant threat on the horizon: no net population growth for Toronto," says the study's project director Mark Winfield, who teaches environmental studies at York University.
"It means it's going outwards, to precisely the places doing the worst in terms of urban form," Winfield says.
The province didn't anticipate this. Last year with much fanfare it adopted its growth plan for the Golden Horseshoe, the vast U-shaped basin that hugs Lake Ontario from Niagara through Greater Toronto all the way to Peterborough.
The plan assumed Toronto would absorb a healthy chunk of the immigration-fuelled population growth in the area, thus diminishing the sheer scope of sprawl.
Toronto's population was pegged to grow by 170,000 from 2001 to 2011, a half-million by 2031. But the reality so far isn't even close. Toronto grew by just 0.9 per cent – fewer than 22,000 – in the last five years.
Meanwhile, the regions are bursting. York Region, for instance, has grown by 163,000 in the same time frame.
"This tells us," Winfield says, "that things are playing out worse than we had assumed."
The province acknowledges the city's not growing as rapidly as anticipated, but a government spokesperson says, "They still represent the best numbers and they will be reviewed every five years."
The study takes an intricate look at categories that make places sustainable.
One of the most important measures is what planners call "smart growth": does the way a place is physically built up minimize its impact on the environment? Liveability looks at what attracts people to live in a place, such as relative income equality, access to community centres, and low crime rates. Economic vitality means jobs for people, incomes, real estate values and wealth creation.
Toronto does well economically and in smart growth – witness the dozens of high-rise condominiums going up inside the city – but very poorly in liveability, primarily for its high rate of child poverty, too little social housing and too few parks per capita.
York Region's economy is also hot, but it faces huge battles with smart growth and liveability. Most of its housing stock, 75 per cent, is single-family detached houses, the highest proportion in Greater Toronto. That means very little affordable housing and few rentals, so many workers must live outside the region and commute.
Winfield says such a set-up, combined with the population growth happening there instead of in Toronto, spells trouble.
"It means you're paving farmland, embedding auto dependent commuting which will compound congestion, which is already a serious economic drag on the region" in the range of billions of dollars.
John Waller, director of long- range planning for York region, points out the region's success with transit. Ridership is increasing with the new Viva bus rapid transit system. "And in the next 10 years," Waller says, "we'll be spending about three times as much on transit than on roads."
That's a huge difference, considering in 2004 it was spending twice as much on roads as on transit.
The province's growth plan calls for 40 per cent of new growth to happen inside built-up areas by 2015. Currently, only about 20 per cent of York's growth is happening in this way.
That still leaves 60 per cent of development on, for example, farmland. There, the density must be 50 people and jobs per hectare.
Winfield says some argue that that's no more "dense" than the status quo. In fact, York's newest subdivisions are already at that density.
"The argument is that it's business as usual," Winfield says.
Officials also face the huge problem of where to house the 100,000 people migrating to the GTA each year.
"We have an obligation to provide living space for new residents," says Larry Bourne, a geography and planning professor at the University of Toronto. "We can certainly do some of that through intensification, but a lot of it we can't. We'll have to use new land on the margin."
Waller says the region won't stop building on the edge. "Our approach and the province's approach is that you want a balance of housing opportunities."
To get the sprawl under control, the province will need to be more aggressive, Winfield declares, by denying urban boundary expansions, expanding the Greenbelt – ecologically sensitive land where development can't occur – and specifying rules on density.
"The province had the right idea to try to modify the urban form that's been occurring at the periphery of the Greater Golden Horseshoe," he says.
"But the problem is bigger than the policy assumed."
AoD
