Burlington Update

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Population density concerns grip City of Burlington residents as new waterfront development is approved
(The Globe and Mail, Oliver Moore, Mar 15 2019)

The biggest development bogeyman in this city west of Toronto is a building that hasn’t been built, a site now distinguished only by construction debris, muddy snow and bits of litter.

But the 26-storey tower slated for near Burlington’s waterfront – a building approved by a provincial tribunal, over the city’s objections – has ruffled so many feathers that the new mayor and council voted this month to clamp down on development.

For one year, and possibly more, the city won’t approve any development applications in an broad area that stretches from Lake Ontario north past the Burlington GO train station. Staff will use the time to try to assess the city’s land-use policies, which politicians hope will strengthen their hand in future development disputes by giving them the data they need to push back. And the ultimate goal is maintaining the current feel in the centre of this city of 185,000.

The development debate in Burlington is one that reflects growth across the Greater Toronto Area, which is expected to receive roughly 2.8 million new residents by 2041, according to provincial projections. How to accommodate these people – who will be looking for housing they can afford and a commute that isn’t too terrible – is one of the biggest issues facing the region.

“If we just have highrises everywhere in the downtown, you lose your sun, you lose that small-town feel where people know each other’s name,” said Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward, who displaced two-term incumbent Rick Goldring in a fall election that she described as hinging on development concerns.

“We had a comprehensive five-point platform that we would talk about at the doors," she added, in an interview at her office. "And the residents wanted to talk about overdevelopment in their neighbourhoods and downtown in particular, and a sense that they were losing what made Burlington unique and why they moved to Burlington in the first place if they’re not from here. We heard that everywhere.”

…Weighing heavily on the broader debate about accommodating the people expected to come to the Greater Toronto Area is the history of a region traditionally reliant on single-family homes as its dominant form of real estate.

It’s an approach requiring swaths of land that are in increasingly short supply. Burlington is one of several GTA communities where new greenfield building sites are essentially used up, making its downtown development freeze more meaningful.

“When you cut off supply, we know what that does to the price of houses,” warned Suzanne Mammel, executive director of the Hamilton-Halton Home Builders’ Association.

“The average homeowner, they want to move to Burlington, supply has now dwindled. So we know that, based on pure economics, the prices will go up. And that makes it harder for people who want to live here.”


Read it in full here.