Quote:
Originally Posted by edale
It's kind of amazing to me that there seemingly isn't much outcry from Canadians about the artificial, government imposed land constraints driving housing prices to absurd levels. Yes, it's great to want to limit sprawl and preserve rural areas, but when a tiny bungalow is going for $6million in Vancouver or $3million in Toronto, it seems like the greenbelt is due for an adjustment. Canadian metros already are pretty tightly contained. There's not nearly as much sprawl as US metros, and the sprawl that is built is pretty dense-- think LA or Vegas style rather than Detroit. The housing market is ridiculous in most Canadian metros and it's basically because the government says fields should remain as fields, all while accepting huge numbers of immigrants, many of whom basically buying their way into the country. I'm far from a MAGA type, but that dynamic would drive me crazy.
I can understand the greenbelt restrictions in Vancouver better than Toronto. As the only temperate region in Canada, southern BC does need to preserve land for agricultural use, and space is very limited due to the mountains. But Toronto could easily expand further into the vast Ontario countryside without much downside other than the ills of sprawl.
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Greenbelt restrictions are wildly popular in Canada. Like, wildly popular. Ontario's Premier let slip in 2018 during his first election campaign that he would consider modifying Toronto's Greenbelt and his polling numbers plummeted until he revised his position.
Yet 70% of Canadians would prefer to live in a detached house if they could, which is only slightly lower than American preferences. There is somehow some huge disconnect and misunderstanding of how anti-sprawl regulations drive up pricing for detached housing. Pro environmentalism and government intervention and a complete misunderstanding of the policy implications mix into this weird attitude of people constantly complaining about being unable to afford a house but also being opposed to building more of the damn things.
Toronto still allows new subdivision development, just on a restricted basis (compared to Vancouver which has basically banned it entirely). Even then, there is a huge push in politics in the GTA right now to implement a full freeze after currently approved growth areas are built out. The Conservative provincial government is having none of it, but a lot of local municipalities are voting to freeze their urban areas entirely (and the province is going to be overriding them).
I don't agree that Toronto's farmland surroundings are particularly sensitive or that Ontario "isn't actually that large" - the issue is more so the car dependency of any suburbs that get developed than land use in my opinion, but even then there is a lot of progress getting made on that front on the newest suburban areas around the GTA. The best farmland in Ontario is generally in Niagara and along the north shores of Lake Erie, which are areas which are already highly protected under the Niagara Escarpment act or are not subject to really any development pressure. Most farmland that would get eaten up by relaxed development regulations in Toronto is north and northwest of Toronto, which is getting into a significantly colder belt of land which isn't as fertile.