Meanwhile, developers are saying that new developments need infrastructure guarantees—that, on the service side, intensified expansion must be virtually risk-free. For them, even though intensification should be cheaper than continued horizontal growth, the infrastructure pot of gold still seems small and tenuous.
Only Alberta—deliciously rich in the world’s most cherished commodity, oil, and with ballooning surpluses—seems positioned for the kind of growth so optimistically forecast for Ontario. (And, indeed, the sprawl into the bald prairie around Calgary and Edmonton continues unabated.) Premier Ralph Klein’s view on sharing Alberta’s wealth through increased transfer payments seems to be: if other Canadians want a piece of us, they can move here. And they might.
Nonetheless, there may be method to the Ontario government’s madness. If the automobile created vast horizontal suburbia, Canadians’ love-hate relationship with cars might spell its end. According to automobile-industry watchers, Americans own just over one car per eligible driver, while in Canada less than three-quarters of licensed drivers own cars. Morever, Canadians are less enamoured by big power and comfort on four wheels, preferring compact vehicles. But with oil tilting toward $100 a barrel, even the most compact cars still run expensive. The car-less society may be blue-skying, but we may be more primed for intensification and verticality than ever before.
If you called Michael Moldenhauer a “big developer,” he would laugh, even though he currently has twelve projects heading for market in the gta and an asset base approaching $200 million. Moldenhauer does infill (redevelopment) work, specializing in the niche marketing of expensive, customized housing projects that offer prestige location, low maintenance, and high-end amenities for the affluent buyer.
“This week there are eighty-one houses on the market in Oakville alone, listed at over a million each,” explains Peter Natyshak. “An infill project like our Memoirs is aimed at the growing buy-down market. These are senior bankers, investment dealers. The demographic is fifty-plus years old, second property in the Caribbean [or] Muskoka, incomes over two-fifty a year. They are selling their big houses in the two- to three-million-dollar range and looking for smaller homes with milliondollar finishes.”
The buy-down houses Natyshak is selling come with private elevators, wine cellars, and no discernible yards. Memoirs is described in the weighty sales prospectus as an “English Square” composed of a “village common” surrounded by stucco-and-stone houses trimmed with square timbers—“English Country” in our peculiarly Canadian architectural vernacular. “The owners will each pay about $200 a month toward the common maintenance of the English Square,” Natyshak continues. “Taxes will be $12,000 to $15,000 a year, but there’s a universal perception you can’t do anything about taxes. Low commons, on the other hand, are a desirable feature of any development, no matter how affluent the buyers.”
The casual reference to taxes, however, masks an explosive issue. Under the steely stewardship of “Her Honour,” Mayor Hazel McCallion, eighty-four years old and in her tenth term, Mississauga has been built on a brilliant if regionally divisive sales slogan: more house for less money. The other part of the equation (and sales pitch) is that constant growth creates a fresh tax base, allowing the total burden to be spread more thinly. As Calvert says, “Mississauga is debt-free and has millions in reserve funds. Our approach is to encourage job growth. Between 1991 and 2001 there were no property tax increases. Mississauga was booming, with lots of jobs and huge revenues to the city.” And Mississauga is not alone. A hinterland of edge cities surrounding Toronto presents the provincial capital with a strategic dilemma: what is Toronto going to do for a tax base to support its full-service urban programs if Mississauga and others keep sucking up all the loose change?
In the new “giga-city” environment envisioned by the province, Toronto, like its growing neighbours, will have to compete. Each city chosen to intensify under Ontario’s Growth Management Plan is intended to be business-driven, a dense glittery core town walled in by virtual “urban fences.” They have been pre-selected to grow, but, like rival sports teams, the new giga-cities will have to become pro players, competing with each other for provincial funding to meet huge infrastructure needs, for developers’ cash and commitments, and for high-source immigration. They must compete, this field of contestants, and then live or die according to their own struggles. It is like the Athenian League of the fifth century BC—run by Spartans. The plan identifies urban sprawl as the new Persian enemy, and intensification as the weapon to defeat it, but it may create a new chimera all on its own.
Forget the future for a moment, forget planning. What is not anecdotal or speculative is the measurable decline of the current physical infrastructure of our cities, a trend now visible even in fully planned cities like Mississauga. The problem with Big Planning is that a plan runs out of grandiosity after a generation, and begins to crack. Across the province, the comprehensive grid infrastructure created during Ontario’s John Robarts-William Davis boom years of the 1960s and 1970s—the roads, sidewalks, bridges, sewers, and water systems—has reached the end of its natural lifespan. It has all started to crumble. And alongside the infrastructure crumble, outside the gated “English Country” communes, also showing wear and tear are the vast housing projects, some more affluent than others, built out into the endless greenfields of the “905” region around Toronto. Those snapping up Victorian houses in Toronto are told (by realtors and smug neighbours) that the equity of homes built with materials far less resilient than Dundas shale and solid oak diminishes rapidly—and with that crumble goes the whole cookie. Hidden from sales brochures, the suburban “vastland” creaks ever closer to a full-blown reality.
If the plan is for a pre-planned province, then how does Canada’s biggest planned city itself fare, a full generation after the shovels first hit its heavily blueprinted soil? Until the recession of 1989, Mississauga was the fastest-growing municipality in Canada. Between 1976 and 1981, it grew a whopping 26 percent, slowing down in the next five-year term to a still-respectable 18 percent. This is how the growth history is presented in its official publications, in measurable five-year increments.
