Ontario Greenbelt Scandal Shows How Not To Do Development
Farmland in Ontario. (Source: Flickr/Camera Eye Photography.)
Housing development was all over the national headlines in Canada this summer, for all the wrong reasons. In a saga called the Greenbelt scandal, Ontario Premier Doug Ford advanced a plan to remove conservation protections from select areas of agricultural land around Toronto to enable new housing construction.
Much of the outrage was over the apparent collusion of government officials and private developers, who stood to reap huge profits from landholdings suddenly open for construction. But from a housing policy perspective, the scandal is much broader.
With a population of 2.7 million, Toronto is Canada’s largest city, and with a surge of more than 130,000 new residents from 2021 to 2022, its housing needs are acute. The metropolitan area has 6.7 million people, including a dense urban core that prices out many would-be buyers and renters, and a highway-fed web of suburbs.
The Greenbelt is a 2-million-acre conservation area meant to protect farmland and be a natural buffer for Toronto development. It was created in 2005, and forms a crescent over the northern part of the metropolitan area. The city’s growth, and the corresponding ascent in land values, make it an obvious target for the kind of greenfield development so prevalent in North America.
That also makes the area a prime candidate for “thickening”—that is, rather than raiding protected lands in outer suburbs, the region needs to enable housing construction and incremental development in existing population centers. Such development leverages existing infrastructure and transportation networks, and is far more fiscally responsible than the endless road-building and maintenance burdens of the suburban development pattern.
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An example of a better path comes from Toronto’s Ontario neighbor, Hamilton, where the city embraced a strategy called “holding the line,” to encourage development within city boundaries.
Jen Keesmaat, former chief planner for Toronto and one of Canada's most prominent urban planning voices, systematically debunked many of the talking points from the provincial government and supporters of the Greenbelt deal.
Writing on Twitter, she argues “The #GreenbeltGiveaway has never been about building housing, either. It is about the profit, the uplift in value, that comes from re-designating agricultural land to residential land.”
As such, it is a highly inefficient way to spur urgently needed housing development. “This land is farmland—no water, sewer, roads, schools, transit. It will take years to build out the necessary infrastructure … if it was desirable to do so. Meanwhile, land designated for housing adjacent to transit stations that is owned by the province remains empty,” writes Keesmaat.
Canada’s Journal of Commerce did an analysis of the Greenbelt plan showing that even if 50,000 housing units were built there, it would be “unlikely to have a lasting positive impact on house affordability.”
In the most recent development, the province said it would reverse its decision to allow construction on the selected plots and would not compensate developers whose holdings would have benefited from Greenbelt rezoning. Similar battles are probably playing out in your town or city, couched in the antiseptic language of rezoning and variances. That’s why it’s so important that housing advocates and supporters of incremental development remain vigilant and ask local governments to do the math before approving them.
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Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.