Suburbia’s Last Stand

Anyone brave enough to dive into the summer waters of Lake Ontario from the north shore will find two surprises. Below the surface of dancing algae, the diver will hit a crystal wall of water—the thermocline—cold enough to take a person’s breath away. Plunging deeper, through temperatures as low as 4°C, our diver will find loose brown slabs strewn over the lake bottom—the broken and scattered ruins of Dundas shale, a vestige of the Devonian age. This sedimentary rock was formed more than 300 million years ago when vast salt seas flooded the area and compressed the silt of millennia into a fine-grained stone. It underlies much of southern Ontario, but on the north shore of the lake the shale was exposed to the unyielding foment of currents and storm waves and could be crudely salvaged by pioneer settlers. Ideal for house foundations, the smooth Dundas shale was relatively easy to obtain, work with, and lay down—a commodity. Wading into the water with long-handled hooks, two men would drag out a “toise” of shale in a day and a half and then sell it for four silver dollars.

By 1850 Port Credit, in what is now the City of Mississauga, had become home to a fleet of shallow-draft schooners, called stone-hookers, that carried crews out to rip out stone from the shallows. In violation of the Queen’s regulations against undermining the shoreline, stone-hooking persisted well into the twentieth century, when the invention of two new commodities—Portland cement and the motor car—replaced the craft after the Great War.

You can see the original stone-hooked Dundas shale today, if you know where to look. There is a pioneer farmhouse still standing on Lakeshore Road West in Oakville, Ontario. It was built in 1853, and the owner must have been a colonial gentleman, for the foundation of his extensive high porch and the fine Victorian Gothic house itself were built of this handsome and durable stone. Perhaps that is why the old house stayed put, solid and secure as the decades came and went. Until now.

As part of “Memoirs,” a one-hectare site featuring thirteen houses built around an elaborately landscaped oval parkette, the original farmhouse will be uprooted—hand-quarried pioneer flagstones and all—and moved a hundred metres south to frame one side of an iron-gated entrance. There, in presumably its final resting place, it will face its replicated twin, erected to match it symmetrically on the other side of the common drive. Real and fake, side by side.

The developer of Memoirs is Michael Moldenhauer, thirty-nine, president of Moldenhauer Group, and today he is wearing an understated, hand-finished charcoal pinstriped suit. His stylish glasses sit unused on the boardroom table; his hair is perfect. He is uncannily sharp for this early-morning interview, despite the fact that in less than two hours he will be presenting a paper to the Ontario government on its new Growth Management Plan, an initiative that could determine the future of every brick, pipe, and pylon in the province for decades to come.

By the Ontario government’s own conservative estimates, over the next thirty years four million new immigrants will arrive in the province, with the vast majority settling in the Greater Golden Horseshoe region. The issue is not whether the province needs them—with demanding baby boomers retiring and pension funds flattening out, aggressive immigration is required to keep the economy churning and the taxes rolling in. The question is where to put them—where and how to absorb them.

In February 2005, Ontario’s Greenbelt Act received royal assent. Over a vast penumbra of greenfields, the act immediately froze development in a 1.8-million-acre arc surrounding the Greater Golden Horseshoe region. The protected area is more than double the combined size of the Niagara Escarpment and Oak Ridges Moraine, and the purpose is clear: preserve the natural environment of the region by halting suburban sprawl. Combined with the Places to Grow Act (passed in June 2005), the goal is also to avoid costly new subdivisions (which have pushed farms under and made teeming millions beholden to the automobile) by concentrating growth in twenty-five purposefully “intensified cities.”

“Public Health and Urban Sprawl in Ontario,” a 2005 report by the Environmental Health Committee of the Ontario College of Family Physicians, highlights the obvious—“Sprawling urban developments lead to increased driving, which results in increased vehicle emissions”—but it also chronicles the negative social and health effects of environmental obesity, road rage, injuries from car accidents, homicides by strangers, driver fatigue and mental stress, community loss, social isolation of car-less dependants (women, children, and seniors), and, of course, increased air and water pollution.

Such reports buttress the arguments for containment, but there is more to the social isolation issue. According to another study, “Visible Minority Neighbourhoods in Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver” (Statistics Canada 2004), in 1981, in Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas, there were six ethnic enclaves; by 2001, there were 254. The report defines such visible-minority neighbourhoods as areas in which over 30 percent of the population is from a single visible-minority group or “the probability that a member of a visible minority group will meet only members of the same group in a particular neighbourhood.”

There is obvious comfort in sameness, and culture retention across generations can be reassuring to parents, but the depiction is nonetheless one of parallel societies springing up in discrete patches that, to varying degrees, are choked by their own isolation. Such communities, clustered and segregated by a pulsating motherboard of grid roads, are like tiles in the “multicultural mosaic,” with minimal crossover and chronically frustrated access from one tile to the next.