City staff are seeking changes to the provincial growth plan that will encourage more sprawl development in Hamilton. Some repeat arguments made by the city to increase the size of the aerotropolis, or to bookmark future boundary expansions onto farmland, while others call for shifting growth decisions from Queen’s Park to the municipality.
Like the city’s submissions on revising the Greenbelt, these are late comments sent to the provincial review process without first passing them by Hamiltonians and only now being even approved by councillors.
The Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe – also called Places to Grow – was enacted in 2005 and is now undergoing its mandatory ten-year review. While planning staff say they endorse the objectives and principles of the provincial anti-sprawl rules, they argue for tweaking several specific features to reduce the density requirements for new development.
The Growth Plan currently requires greenfield developments to accommodate at least 50 jobs and/or residents per hectare (pjh). The city says that’s too high for industrial lands and also hampers residential growth.
“Fifty pjh on the employment side is difficult to achieve since the employment target tends to be lower, especially Hamilton where the city has fewer office buildings which have higher density yields,” says the staff report adopted by planning committee. “As a result, the non-employment target must be higher to reach the overall target of 50pjh.”
In Hamilton’s new official plan, the residential density target is now set at 70 pjh which staff say “in certain greenfield areas may not be appropriate”. That’s partly required to offset a target of just 37 on the aerotropolis and all other industrial lands.
The city also wants to further lower the density levels by excluding various lands from the calculations including those given environmental protection such as stream corridors and woodlots and reducing buffering requirements. It also wants to exclude acreage used by the city for roads and other infrastructure servicing new growth.
“By removing these features, the density calculation would be more realistic; it would include all types of non-developable lands not suitable for development rather than a subset of undevelopable lands,” recommends the city submission. “Infrastructure and transportation corridors [should] be added to the list of lands to be excluded from the greenfield density calculation.”
The effect would be to sharply reduce the density requirements especially in areas like the aerotropolis and those being eyed by the city for future urban boundary expansions.
One of those areas is Elfrida – a 2800-acre zone south and east of the corner of Upper Centennial and Rymal that the city tried to include in its official plan as a ‘future’ residential growth area. Provincial rules forbid such bookmarking, and Queen’s Park removed all references to this growth plan when it finalized Hamilton official plan.
That led multiple Elfrida area land developers to appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board, and they were able to convince city council to join that appeal – which is still ongoing. The city’s comments on the Growth Plan appear to directly reference this dispute.
“The Growth Plan should provide specific policy direction on how the municipality can protect lands outside the urban areas for strategic long term employment areas,” argues the city. “These areas have significant infrastructure investment, and are located on key transportation routes and hubs. In Hamilton, long term protection of lands in the vicinity of the Airport is required to meet the 2041employment forecasts of 350,000 jobs.”
The comments being sent to the province formally accept the requirement that starting this year at least 40 percent of new development must occur within the already built-up city, but suggest that the previously identified boundaries of that area need to be modified.
And while Hamilton’s density is much lower than cities like Toronto, and staff previously calculated that at least 60 percent intensification could be achieved, the latest comments include no requests from the city for higher requirements.