The Surprising Way Greenbelts Can Increase Urban Sprawl

Are anti-sprawl policies protecting cities, or unintentionally making housing less affordable and commutes even longer?

What if the policies designed to stop urban sprawl are actually making it worse? Mike Moffatt and Sabrina Maddeaux unpack the unintended consequences of urban growth boundaries, greenbelts, and development charges, exploring how they may be driving families farther from city centres, increasing commute times, and fueling "leapfrog development."

They examine why housing affordability, environmental goals, and smarter regional planning need to work together and why it's time to rethink some long-held assumptions about how Canadian cities should grow.

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Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.

Sabrina Maddeaux: When it comes to urban development, people tend to fall into one of two camps which don’t fall neatly down ideological lines. In the first camp, you have urban planners, fiscal conservatives, and environmentalists championing the fight against urban sprawl, albeit for different reasons.

And on the other side, you have groups worried about a lack of family-friendly housing, suburban developers, and some existing residents who want to keep their neighbourhoods as is, who would rather see cities grow outward rather than upward.

Now, the group fighting urban sprawl has been successful in implementing anti-sprawl policies, particularly in Ontario. Their policy toolkit includes building hard boundaries like urban growth boundaries, imposing steep development charges on suburban development, and establishing massive greenbelts.

Their logic is simple and compelling to some: draw a line in the sand, make outward expansion painful or illegal, and the market will naturally pivot inward. The city will densify, infrastructure dollars will be saved, and the environment will be protected. That’s all good in theory, but is it working in practice? A growing number of environmentalists, including The Missing Middle’s own Mike Moffatt, are of the view that many anti-sprawl initiatives, such as urban growth boundaries, are causing more sprawl than they are preventing. Mike?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah. So here’s my argument: if you’ve spent any time driving in southern or eastern Ontario, you’ve probably experienced a very strange pattern of development. Let’s say you want to drive from downtown Ottawa to a community along Highway 7, like Perth or Carleton Place. You’re driving through a built-up area in the City of Ottawa. Then you hit the Ottawa Greenbelt, and there’s not much in there. You get to the other side of the Ottawa Greenbelt, and you go through another built-up area in Kanata, and then boom, it just kind of ends. Then after another 25 or 30 kilometres, you’re in Carleton Place. You get to Carleton Place, and then bang, you’ve got all of these new family-sized homes that have been built in the last 10 to 15 years or so. It’s very strange where you’ve got built-up development, then nothing, then built-up development - 25 kilometres of nothing, and then boom, a whole lot of single-family homes.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, I’ve seen that driving out of the GTA to Ottawa as well - the uneven development. And when we have a housing crisis, it really strikes you that there’s not a lack of space or a lack of land. There are huge pockets of land that are very close to where people want to live and work that just aren’t being used at all.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. And this type of development is all too common. It’s one of those things that once you see it, you really can’t unsee it.

A lot of those developments cater to families that work in Ottawa. I can actually prove that those residents are working and playing in Ottawa, but it’s going to get a bit wonky, so I hope that’s okay.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Go ahead. Nerd out.

Mike Moffatt: It’s going to rely on some data. A lot of place-based data that Statistics Canada releases is defined at the metropolitan or metro level. The metro that everybody is familiar with is the GTA - the Greater Toronto Area. But overall, Statistics Canada defines 41 different metro areas across Canada. If you’re going to track metro-level data, you need to define the boundaries of the metro.

Take the GTA, for example. Clearly, the City of Toronto itself is in the GTA - it’s right in the name - and I don’t think anybody would be surprised that neighbouring communities like Mississauga are in the GTA as well. But then you go outwards, and you have to make some judgment calls, like whether Milton is in the GTA, or Pickering, Oshawa, Burlington, and so on. You’ve got to sort of figure out what’s in and what’s out.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, and I’ve been seeing people use GTHA for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, so it does get confusing very quickly. How exactly does Stats Canada make that call?

Mike Moffatt: They define the boundaries of a metro area based on how economically integrated a town or city is with nearby communities. The easiest way to determine that is by looking at commuter traffic - the number of people who live in one place but drive to work in another. Statistics Canada updates these boundaries every five years to go along with the census. They collect a bunch of census data, ask people about their commutes, and then they update the boundaries.

Back in 2021, Statistics Canada added Carleton Place, Arnprior, and a bunch of other communities near Ottawa to the Metro Ottawa region. The reason they did this is that those communities had become so-called commuter villages, as over a third of their labour force actually works within Metro Ottawa. Now, people move to communities for all types of reasons, but a fair bit of it was a predictable response to policies put in place by the City of Ottawa to limit sprawl. These are families who theoretically could live in Ottawa - many of them used to live in Ottawa - but they decided to move to Carleton Place and commute to Ottawa every day for work.

Sabrina Maddeaux: That’s really interesting as people are taking longer and longer commutes to achieve affordability, if they can at all. You wonder where some of these boundaries will end. You showed me a great Ottawa Citizen piece from 2014 where the industry did predict that changes in the City of Ottawa’s policies would push families to move outside the city.

The specific issue the article focused on was development charge increases. The president of the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association warned that development was increasingly being pushed outside the city, which would cause an increase in commuting, and he warned that this would hurt the city’s finances. In his words, “that means the city is not getting taxes and yet still needs the infrastructure for all the people coming in from the villages to work here.”

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, and that is a huge problem. Those families pay their municipal taxes to Carleton Place, but they use the infrastructure in Ottawa to commute there, go to the mall, or whatever. I absolutely love the response from the City of Ottawa’s planning committee chair in response to the homebuilders’ concerns.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Right. The chair’s response was: “Growth outside the city is in line with expectations of how those smaller centres would expand. We haven’t seen them come forward and say, ‘We have to amend our official plan to accommodate more growth.” I’m guessing those communities did end up growing faster than the City of Ottawa expected.

Mike Moffatt: Absolutely. As somebody who makes a lot of predictions, I have sympathy for anyone who makes a prediction that goes horribly wrong. But if you look at the data, it’s almost like a hockey stick where those comments were made and then boom - population growth and home building skyrocket. Homebuilding exploded in Lanark County, which is the region just outside of Ottawa where Carleton Place is.

Around 2016 or so, about 18 months after those comments, you start to see an influx of families into that region. Population growth rates triple almost overnight and entire subdivisions go up. These communities became commuter suburbs for the City of Ottawa rather than what they used to be, which was self-contained, economically contained small towns. To be clear, I’m not just picking on the City of Ottawa here because none of this is unique to them. You see the same thing in places like my hometown of London, Ontario, where you’ve got these empty areas, and then once you leave the city limits, you get whole new subdivisions springing up in surrounding communities like Komoka. None of this is Ottawa-specific.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah. This type of development is known as leapfrog development, where policies such as urban growth boundaries, greenbelts, and high suburban development charges that are designed to cause development to move inward instead do the opposite and cause subdivisions to leap over the boundaries or high taxes and into neighbouring communities.

This then makes sprawl even worse because instead of building a new subdivision at the edge of town, you’re building it 10 or 20 miles away and requiring workers to drive in each day for work. How much of a problem is this?

Mike Moffatt: Unfortunately, I would say it’s an understudied topic, but some academic literature does exist. What it says is that leapfrogging happens under certain conditions. It’s not universal, but there are times where it is a real problem. Where we tend to see it happen more often is, first of all, when planning is local rather than regional. You’ve got a single municipality like London or Ottawa making these boundaries, and it’s easy to move into the next community.

It also tends to happen where there are significant differences in taxes, land costs, and red tape between the core community and the smaller communities around it. It’s a lot easier to build a new home in Lanark County than in Ottawa, so that’s where the developers are going to build it.

Next is where commuters can drive into the city each day free of charge. You don’t see this as much in places like London, UK, where they have taxes you have to pay if you drive into the city; we tend not to have those in Canada.

The theory behind all of this is you put in the urban growth boundary and allow for densification of existing neighbourhoods, but a lot of these municipalities didn’t do the second part - they didn’t allow for that kind of densification.

You’ll often hear supporters of urban growth boundaries say that it’s not the boundary that’s the problem, as there is still development land left in it. That might be true, but in my view, it misses the point. When communities limit land use, they make land artificially scarce, which drives up the price and makes it relatively more expensive to build in the city compared to the surrounding area. It’s not just that you physically run out of land, but that you make that land artificially scarce, driving up the price so that only the richest families can afford to continue living in the city.

Sabrina Maddeaux: So then I take it that urban growth boundaries could potentially work, but by densifying, doing regional or provincial rather than local planning, and by having similar rules and tax rates across the region?

Mike Moffatt: Yeah, all of those matter. As well, having more transit options within the city helps, as it reduces the commuting costs for those families who decide to stay in the city.

Finally, urban growth boundaries and greenbelts tend to be more successful in Europe, particularly continental Europe, largely because population growth is lower, so there’s just not as much growth pressure to build new homes.

I have to say, though, that this is nearly an impossible issue to study or even discuss, and that’s not for scientific reasons. We can go out and get the data, run studies, and do models, but so many environmentalists, academics - and I wear both of those hats - as well as urban planners, absolutely refuse to even consider the idea that urban growth boundaries and greenbelts might actually be causing more sprawl than they’re preventing.

Why do you think it is? Why are so many of us hesitant to even consider the notion that these rules might be problematic?

Sabrina Maddeaux: It’s a very human psychological barrier to not want to change your mind or admit that you were wrong, especially when you’ve publicly and often advocated for an idea. I do think that’s happened with the environmental movement where they committed to these ideas, advocated for them, and now they’re such a part of the movement’s identity and ideology that it’s very difficult for them to reconsider them, even though there’s mounting evidence that these actions simply aren’t working and are often not just not working, but counterproductive.

It’s really refreshing to see experts like yourself who are environmentalists and do care about this come out and say we need to reconsider the evidence here and make different choices. But I’m curious, to someone that’s very much more inside that movement, what you’re seeing and what you think the barriers are.

Mike Moffatt: I do think it’s that people are hesitant to change their mind. To be clear, my own views have evolved on this in the last 10 to 15 years. 10 to 15 years ago, I would say, “Yeah, of course we need to put in these rules to prevent sprawl.” But we also have to look at the results of the last 10 to 15 years - is this working?

I think we’ve gotten to the point where this is no longer a policy issue; it’s become the ultimate virtue signal, particularly among politicians in the GTA and southwestern Ontario. We’re going to see it a lot this year because we’ve got a municipal election where you get these men and women saying, “I voted to freeze the urban boundary, therefore I’m saving the planet and saving farmland.” The actual real-world outcome of that vote is completely beside the point to them. Did it actually work? It allows a lot of these politicians to feel morally superior while the actual families they claim to champion are quietly forced to pack up their U-Hauls and move to Woodstock or wherever so they can afford a home with a backyard.

Then those newcomers to Woodstock drive every day to their jobs at Grand River Hospital in Kitchener, or wherever it is they work in a larger community. How on earth is that saving farmland or reducing carbon emissions? You’re not stopping people from having a family-sized home; you’re just pushing it 20 miles down the road and having to build wider highways so they can get from their homes to their jobs.

Sabrina Maddeaux: Yeah, people are going to want to have enough space to raise their families in a way that they can afford to do it, and they will find a way to. That often means moving further away and commuting more, driving more. So this is often counterproductive and has the opposite impact of what was initially the goal.

Thank you so much for watching and listening, and to our producer, Meredith Martin, and our editor, Sean Foreman.

Mike Moffatt: And if you have any thoughts or questions about where to find a Starbucks in Lanark County, please send us an email to: [email protected].

Sabrina Maddeaux: And we’ll see you next time.

Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:

Looming development charge increases have builders worried

Funded by the Neptis Foundation

Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative