Brampton City Council voted 9-1 in favour of the Metrus townhouse proposal, despite an angry mob at the council meeting.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/04/18/brampton_councillors_approve_controversial_townhouse_plan.html
The right decision - negotiate with the developer, get a few useful concessions (library and park site) especially for low-rise residential.
In my opinion it is a case of the wrong decision for the right reasons (if that makes any sense).
If you are going to rezone these lands for residential a medium (perhaps even high) density residential use is the best decision, despite the misguided objections of an organized community.
Rezoning here, though, is not the right thing to do. The sole and only reason that Metrus wanted the lands rezoned is because they lost out to another developer on Walmart as a tenant.
In isolation, without any tenant names, the city had planned on these lands being commercial. The city does not have a "Walmart specific" zoning classification. If it was good planning that these be commercial lands (providing, both, community services and employment opportunities) then that does not change just because a developer loses a tenant and is too lazy/incompetent to re-work their development to attract other tenants.
If Metrus had not lost Walmart, would they be asking for this rezoning? Off course not. If they had not lost this tenant, would the city be looking to rezone the lands of the other developer who did not get the behemoth from Arkansas?
As a taxpayer in Brampton I was not looking forward to the city spending money at the OMB with the "these houses are too small and dense" argument....but I would have loved them to be going there with the "good planning means a diverse community with multiple land uses. Metrus recognized the planning principles behind the commercial zoning when they thought they had Walmart and spent many months trying to land Walmart. Those planning principles have not changed just because Walmart chose to locate elsewhere" argument.