October 17th, 2007
The Neptis Foundation’s Commentary on the ‘Places to Grow’ Plan
By Duncan Patterson // No Comments
Now that the Liberals are back in the drivers' seat, we can look forward to business as usual. What does this mean for the development of urban form in the province? David Caplan at Public Infrastructure Renewal will be continuing with the Growth Plan for Northern Ontario that his department has launched into, before moving on to the other key areas of the province not covered by Places To Grow. In addition, PIR will continue to hammer out the details of their strategy for curbing sprawl and encouraging transit use for the GGH. For aid in both of these tasks, we can only hope that they refer to the ongoing research of the the Neptis Foundation.
A Toronto-based independently-capitalized research institution, Neptis closely watched the evolution of the province's Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (the 'Places to Grow Plan'). Last year, after the final draft of 'P2G' was introduced, they released a most informative commentary reviewing its strengths and weaknesses. I fully encourage people to read the actual commentary themselves, but what follows is a quick summary of Neptis's points:
As with Peter Tabuns's criticism of the growth plan, Neptis's criticisms are mainly focused upon the seemingly weak intensification targets. The plan calls for 40% of all residential building to occur in already built up areas by 2015. There are several problems with this strategy.
First of all, the targets are actually pretty low - leaving 60% of all residential growth to happen pretty much exactly how we are used to it happening - in spread-out, meandering, single-use suburbs, between the edges of the growth centres and the Greenbelt. 40% is not very far from what we know to be the status-quo in the region. Already intensification for the Greater Golden Horseshoe (the GGH) was estimated at 36% between 1991 and 2001, and the trend is for this percentage to increase. Likely, the actual intensification portion of projected residential building will occur in the form of tall towers, unless municipalities step in. The trend of 'either flat or tall', as I recently heard it described, is only likely to continue under the proposed plan.
The second problem with the intensification targets is that they are just too darn uniform. The GGH is a widely varied area and the identified growth centres are qualitatively different based upon their geography and their history. Intensification is already happening at very different rates in different places. According to Neptis, intensification in the City of Toronto between 1991-2001 was already at 96%. For the inner ring of suburbs, it was estimated at 28%, and the outer ring was intensifying at an average rate of 17%. So we can see that while 40% seems like a dramatic increase for places on the outside such as Simcoe County where only 8% of their residential growth was in the form of intensification over this period, it should probably be higher for a place like Niagara Region which is already at 33%. The Neptis report figures that outside of the City of Toronto the proposed intensification targets would only result in a total of 16% of all development units being transferred from rural sites to sites within urban boundaries.
But the primary problem with the province's intensification targets is that, according to Neptis, they are measuring the wrong things. First of all, between 1991 and 2001, 50% of the intensification in the GGH occurred within half a kilometer of the urban edge, which the report refers to, reasonably, as a "particularly ineffective form of intensification." In fact, development so close to the 'urban edge', which itself is a shakily defined thing, is hardly intensification at all! This sort of phenomenon is just not accounted for in the Plan.
As the Neptis report says, "The Growth Plan contains many policies, but few tools by which to measure progress toward their achievement." Intensification targets should not be so focused on measuring residential growth. It ignores the very complicated nature of the planning problems. For one thing, the plan fails to recognize the difficulty of centering employment in urban growth areas when location decisions made by employers are often focused on property tax, parking availability and access to highways.
In order to account for the complexity of intensification, targets should include population density, dwelling units, and office floor space. These metrics should then be linked to distance from higher-order transit. Also the plan fails to include a measurement of the transportation mode shares within intensification areas which is very important. All of these statistics are missing from the Growth Plan's targets and from its strategy for measuring success.
Says the report, "Identifying appropriate sites for intensification in established urban areas can take place only in the context of a region-wide plan for investment in transportation facilities." This is a very important point - intensification and transit must happen in concert with one another. Intensification cannot usefully happen without robust transit inter-connectivity. Transit is both useless and difficult to materialize without proper intensification. For this reason, the Liberals' Move Ontario 2020 transit plan is essential, their much lauded Growth Plan being impotent without it. Neptis however questions the emphasis on inter-nodal transit, claiming that the regional transit plan should focus first on nodal catchment areas, that being the key frontier in confronting sprawl.
While the Neptis commentary applauds the policy objectives, it does not find the implementation metrics or the incentives / disincentives to be sufficient to achieve Places to Grow's stated goals. Further, the commentary emphasizes the fundamental role that region-wide infrastructure, and specifically transit infrastructure, must play in achieving the objectives. This is very important to keep in mind. If the Liberals' transit promises turn out to be just so much hot air, then the province will never be able to achieve its stated planning objectives.
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