I am writing to express my…

I am writing to express my opposition to developing the Greenbelt for housing.
As a provincially licensed engineer and an environmental professional, I have a strong understanding of the role of natural areas, particularly wetlands, as well as the damage their erosion and removal can cause. Once these areas are gone, they cannot be restored. The Greenbelt in particular is crucial to reducing temperatures in cities such as Toronto, temperatures which have already been increasing year after year.
In the face of unprecedented and accelerating biodiversity loss and the ever-worsening climate crisis, it is vital that the Ontario government do its utmost to protect the farmland, wetlands, forests, rivers and other natural areas that sustain us. As Ontario’s Housing Affordability Task Force explained in its 2022 report, we do not need to sacrifice environmental protection to address the housing crisis. That’s because “a shortage of land isn’t the cause of the problem.” (p.10) There is a vast supply of land already open for development within existing municipal settlement boundaries.
Sacrificing the Greenbelt to build large "luxury" single-family homes is not an appropriate solution to the housing crisis. This is not the kind of housing that is needed, and it will cost cities, the province, and ultimately the taxpayer a lot of money. As a province we need to be focusing on affordable housing, near transit and workplaces, rather than single family homes in a car-dependent suburban desert.
There are many other potential solutions to this housing crisis which can and should be explored, such as:
1. Repurposing empty office buildings as low-income housing,
2. Building more reasonably priced housing than "luxury" homes and condos, and
3. Changing zoning requirements to allow for medium-density housing in areas currently zoned only for single-family homes.
I encourage you to look into Strong Towns, an urban planning movement which has also done financial analysis of several American cities, as well as a few Canadian cities, to see the impact of types of housing development on a city's budget. Car-dependent suburbs consisting of single-family homes cost cities money in every case, and must be subsidized by high-density downtowns to prevent cities from going bankrupt. The urban planning YouTube channel Not Just Bikes has an excellent series of videos discussing these suburbs and their cost.
The removal of land from the Greenbelt will have consequences beyond climate impacts and the loss of biodiversity. The loss of farmland will only deepen Ontario's dependence on imported food, which will hit consumers harder and harder as the price of fuel increases and import costs go up, not to mention threaten the livelihood of our province's farmers. The loss of wetland will result in increased flooding risks, especially for homes built on these areas.
I urge you to withdraw all amendments likely to weaken the protection of farmland and natural heritage in Ontario, and strengthen protections for the Greenbelt rather than weaken them.