An ambitious provincial strategy is forcing the 905 to remake itself. Will developers and residents let it happen?
May 31, 2008 04:30 AM
Phinjo Gombu
Urban Affairs reporter
European-style piazzas for after-work mingling, towering office and residential towers stacked behind tightly packed street-friendly low-rise buildings, thousands of people streaming out of subways or headed home via a network of bicycle paths.
It's not downtown Toronto, or Manhattan or Paris, but how parts of suburban GTA communities such as Vaughan, Richmond Hill and Markham could look in 25 years.
The result of a sea change in planning principles and policies that promotes density instead of sprawl, the visioning exercise underway across the GTA is nothing less than the re-imagining of suburbia.
Propelling the change is a dawning realization that planners got it wrong the first time, yet change, after more than 50 years of unparalleled suburban growth in and around Toronto, doesn't come easy.
In some cities residents are already pushing back, fearful that the quiet suburban life they bought into will be swept aside. And developers – eager to recoup their investments now, not later – could try to move ahead with their own ad hoc plans.
Driving the change is the province's Places to Grow Act, an award-winning work-in-progress that aims to manage expansion and curtail sprawl by focusing growth in urban centres. Municipalities have to show how they'll conform by June 2009.
So, what's out?
Sprawling surface parking lots; city centres anchored by shopping malls; and an endless sea of detached homes on large lots.
And what's in?
Downtown hubs fed by public transit; densely populated communities along major roads; and buildings that have little or no setback from the street.
Valerie Shuttleworth, Markham's ebullient director of planning and urban design, sums up a recurring theme among many planners and politicians.
The goal, she says, is a "six- to eight- to 10-storey European urban centre where the pedestrian takes (precedence) over the vehicle and transit is key."
"That's the evolution of growth in the GTA," says Shuttleworth.
"That's the evolution Markham is going through right now, from a suburban bedroom community into an urban municipality.
"It's painful, but because we got to learn so much from Scarborough and North York when they went through it 20, 30 or 40 years ago, we hope we are going to manage it in a way that is more comfortable and acceptable to our residents."
Here's what's being planned:
A subway is coming to the 905 region for the first time, with plans to extend the TTC line into Vaughan. With it comes the possibility of realizing a decade-old plan – which planners are re-focusing because it is out of date – on what's now mostly vacant land. It could house 20,000 residents and 16,000 jobs within 500 metres of the line's final stop at Highway 7.
Richmond Hill has plans to build a GTA-wide transportation hub near Highway 7 and Yonge St. that could connect the Yonge subway line, GO Transit and Viva local and express bus services.
Markham, whose long-range plan is the most advanced, has already begun constructing its long-awaited downtown (east and west of Warden Ave. off Highway 7), which will house more than 35,000 people.
In Mississauga, re-imagination projects are under way in Lakeview and at Mississauga's Square One, where planners dream of rapid transit along Hurontario St. down to the lake.
In North Pickering, local officials are salivating at the impending development of the Seaton Lands, future home to 70,000, already billed as Canada's first planned, environmentally sustainable community.
The province has encouraged this movement by shielding land from future development with the Places to Grow Act and the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan, and by protecting a swathe of green space – the so-called Greenbelt – around the Golden Horseshoe.
Nowhere is the impact more apparent than in York Region, which, like many other regions, will see its population double within 25 years.
Almost 70 per cent of it is now protected from development. With 25 per cent already developed, just 6 per cent of the region's land is available for future development.
Planners have a name for that limited space: Whitebelt.
But the province says it can only be used after intensification targets are met within existing built-up areas.
In essence, the province is outlining targets for where and how much development will be allowed across the GTA until 2031.
And to make sure it happens, Queen's Park has issued an anti-sprawl directive stating that at least 40 per cent of all new growth must occur within the so-called urban boundary – the line at which buildings stood two years ago.
In Markham, where a vision for a more urbanized downtown emerged as far back as the early '90s, the provincial moves have helped to protect about 250 hectares of land that otherwise would have been filled with "singles, semis and townhouses" but was kept intact long enough to allow for the more compact, managed community that is now underway.
It's a bit different in Vaughan, where the city also managed, through zoning, to protect a key piece of vacant land, near Highway 400 and Highway 7 – despite the encroachment of big box retail at the edges of the proposed corporate centre.
The now real possibility that the subway would eventually be extended there has allowed Vaughan to revisit a decade-old plan for the city centre.
Markham wants low but dense cities and has planned its city centre on a field off Highway 7.
Vaughan, which has done away with height restrictions, plans to use the same long thoroughfare as its anchor, a sort of Bloor St. north.
An artist's conception includes a TTC subway stop in a landscape packed with pedestrians and "higher order transit" – that is, light rail – along the main street.
The question these days is no longer whether developers will buy into intensification, but whether they can be restrained from pushing forward ad hoc plans for towers that don't conform to the municipal vision.
In Markham, experience has shown that with the right incentives and market conditions, developers can be convinced to conform to a planner's ideas.
Yet the town is still faced with a proposal for a 29-storey building smack in the middle of what is supposed to become a more modestly scaled city centre.
Maverick developers are a challenge, acknowledges Alan Shefman, a Vaughan councillor who sits on a committee of landowners, politicians and citizens charged with coming up with a similar vision for his city's centre.
"We don't want to end up with an OMB fight," he says. "We want to develop. There will be some compromises."
One thing Vaughan's corporate centre won't be, Shefman vows, is another Scarborough Town Centre or Mississauga City Centre, both anchored by massive shopping malls and giant surface parking lots.
Vaughan's decision this month to quietly approve the first phase of the Royal Empress Development, which had plans before the OMB for towers 14 to 34 storeys high to house about 4,000 people, is the sign of a tall-tower rush yet to come.
Prominent developer Silvio DeGasperis, who has significant land interests in the proposed Vaughan downtown, says it is doable and the market – fuelled by the subway – will accommodate such growth.
But he warns that the municipal trend of raising development levies could make these developments unaffordable.
The biggest and loudest battles, however, are likely to be with residents who think intensification is a great idea – somewhere else.
In Vaughan, hundreds of residents have demonstrated on the streets and jammed council chambers to protest a proposed 17-storey tower at a strip mall at Highway 7 and Kipling Ave., saying it doesn't fit with the neighbourhood.
They got a stern lecture from York Region councillor Joyce Frustaglio and other politicians, who pronounced that intensification was here to stay, given the provincial mandate and the billions being poured into public transit.
But Woodbridge residents say the fight isn't over and such intensification isn't appropriate near where they live.
"None of them campaigned that they were going to turn Woodbridge into a concrete jungle," said a fiery Nick Pinto, a failed council candidate who has led the residents' charge.
"We are going to push back as long as it takes," he told the Star. "That's just the tip of the iceberg ... We are not going to be pushed over by anybody."
But whether they like it or not, these residents are likely to see at least a 10-storey building go up. Planning commissioner John Zipay told residents recently it was the new reality. The region and province want it, and the municipality has little choice but to go along.
Similar dissent is rising in Bolton, where local councillor Jason Payne told a packed meeting recently: "I'm not for intensification, I never have been, never will be.
"I don't believe we can squeeze in any more houses (in Bolton)," he continued, oblivious to the provincial directives.
