Ontario is in a housing…

Ontario is in a housing crisis! Hundreds of thousands of Ontarians are priced out of the housing and rental markets, and hundreds of thousands more immigrants will require housing in the next few years.

What Ontario Needs:
Multitudes of mixed income and mixed format housing units.
A significant proportion of these must be rental and truly affordable to working people.
These units must be close to public transit, schools, parks, and other services to reduce dependence on automobiles and thus reduce greenhouse gas production while improving quality of life.
These units should not encroach upon irreplaceable farm land that Ontarians depend upon for long term food security.
These units should not be built upon wetlands and forested lands that Ontarians require to ensure our contiued supply of clean water.
These units should not be built upon floodplains vulnerable to our increasingly unstable and changing climate.

What this proposal will actually do:
Supply a small number (50,000) of what will inevitably be large, high profitability, single family dwellings affordable only to higher income earners.
These "McMansions", because of their size and isolation from each other, will produce a disproportionate per capita share of green house gases from heating and cooling.
The residents of these developments will inevitably require private automobiles, usually at least two per home, to access employment, groceries, supplies, education and recreation, which are not present within the vast majority of new suburban developments.
Because of proposed reduction in development fees, servicing these housing units will require large inputs of municipal taxpayer dollars.
These green field developments will use a significant proportion of currently protected and vital food and water security lands.
Some of the housing developed will inevitably be vulnerable to damage by climate change due to proposed reduced environmental oversight and protection.

On balance, I strongly oppose this proposal. The only persons advantaged will be a very few land speculators and a relatively small proportion of those needing housing, virtually all of whom, if they can consider purchase of a new, high footprint, green field home, are able to afford decent homes in any case. The people disadvantaged will be those who are excluded from housing due to low incomes and the lack of rental and mixed housing, and the people of Ontario in general, whose long term food, water and climate security will be compromised by the use of irreplaceable land which provides indispensible ecosystem services.

In addition, the land speculators who benefit from these changes will inevitably be emboldened to purchase further lands within the Green Belt in preparation for the next round of exclusions of presently protected lands.