Reducing parkland dedication…

Reducing parkland dedication is an extremely poor and short-sighted move that will have negative impacts on especially urban populations for the foreseeable. We already don't have enough greenspace in our city centres! This will negatively affect quality of life for everyone, it will reduce the ability for people to have a common, free space to interact with each other, to build community. Greenspace is so important for our mental health, it's been shown time and again! Parks in cities help reduce microclimates and reduce pollution. If you care about healthy communities, reducing parkland dedication is the wrong choice. This encourages poor and unsustainable development, this builds bad cities, not world-class cities that people want to live in a visit.

We need parkland dedication, ACTUAL parkland dedication, not 'in lieu', that has already starved us for green space. We need these spaces where people live, or they mean nothing. Where do we walk dogs? Where do my kids play? These are the spaces that make high-rise living actually livable, and high and kid density is where our focus on housing needs to be. The developers can more than afford it, the people in Ontario cannot thrive without it. We need responsible, sustainable growth that includes robust parkland.

https://www.therecord.com/news/council/2022/08/23/growth-pays-for-growt…