The Greenbelt is…

The Greenbelt is fundamentally necessary for recharge of the hydraulic cycle. And it can only serve this function if left in its natural state, unencroached by urban sprawl. If the issue truly is a question of providing rapid, high quality housing, expanding single family unit suburbs into the Greenbelt is a destructive solution in the long term that is wholly unnecessary. As we know, houses do not existing in isolation: 50,000 new houses require infrastructure to service them: transportation, power, water and wastewater services, etc. Essentially a town would need to be built where it does not yet exist. Again, if the issue is creating housing, is it more expeditious to build a new town in a greenfield or densify residences around existing municipal infrastructure? The latter is the clear solution. And this does not necessary need to mean building high rise apartment or condo blocks to cast long shadows over adjacent single family homes! We need to look no further than Montreal for the solution: they have city neighbourhoods with multifamily duplex and triplex units in place of single family homes that, per square kilometre, rival the density of Toronto’s mixture of high rise/single family row houses, for example. We cannot look to cannibalizing the Greenbelt as a first resort to increased housing! The sprawl does not have to be the solution if regulation permits re-zoning existing land within municipal borders.

As a practicing structural engineer and a citizen of Ontario residing the GTA I strongly oppose encroachment of any kind into the Greenbelt.