As someone living in Ontario…

As someone living in Ontario who still dreams of buying a home one day, I understand on a day to day basis, the affordable housing crisis. However, this proposal seems to attempt to tackle this problem through a single lens. There are so many other innovative ideas and yet this proposal has taken the crudest approach to do things quickly. Solving something fast and solving something the right way are two different things. Can this even be considered a solution when we have to destroy the environment to do it? This is proposing that we remove the biodiversity that these areas protect, the watershed, all the positive environmental impacts that the greenbelt gives us just to put a bandaid on a crack in dam wall. Aside from the housing crisis, we are all still responsible for the climate crisis that seems to have no end. Going through with this proposal would be detrimental to our efforts in protecting our environment and the consequences of this will be felt for generations to come.

I also challenge the effectiveness of this solution. We are talking about destroying thousands of acres of land to create urban sprawl. Creating little suburbs within a five minute drive of a strip mall, yet so far from where these people work and everywhere else that every home will need multiple cars. We've done this before. Has this approach ever really made a dent in the housing crisis? We have a much bigger problem in trying to connect these places to central areas like downtown Toronto, something that still has not been solved in places further from the centre of the GTA. We've attempted to make light rails, we've made highways, we tried so much and spent billions of dollars to reach these little suburban pockets and yet we are still decades from our goal. Why don't we look to other countries and their way of densifying urban areas? Many European and Asian countries have built housing to promote density, pedestrian friendly neighbourhoods and access to existing public transit. While this might approach might take longer, it is one where we can leverage existing transit systems and we don't need to irreversibly destroy thousands of acres of protected land in the process. I cannot imagine, that with all the talented urban planners we employ, there were no better ideas than having to decimate the greenbelt just to create more urban sprawl. This proposal does not seem like something that Ontarians would benefit from in the future, only developers and their bottom line.