Douglas Todd: Although it’s almost taboo to discuss opening up the ALR to housing, some argue it’s the key to combating unaffordability
Every year, Canadian media outlets publish Demographia’s report on housing affordability, which shows Toronto and Vancouver are cursed with some of the highest dwelling costs of 94 cities in North America, Britain and Australia.
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Cox’s theory is that Vancouver and Toronto are “impossibly unaffordable” not only because of rapid population growth, but due to “urban containment.” By that he means planning policies that stop housing going up on land on the periphery of cities.
Cox’s thesis – which maintains drastic upzoning in the core of cities has pushed land prices into the stratosphere – tends to be anathema in both the Vancouver and Toronto regions, where polls suggest a strong majority are resolute about protecting green space and farmland.
I’m among those who have long opposed “urban sprawl,” while supporting the concept of B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve, which has its counterpart in Ontario’s zoning for urban greenbelts.
Last year, Ontario Premier Doug Ford had to backtrack on his push to open a large chunk of the greenbelt around Toronto for housing, particularly after it was discovered some developers were speculating on land values because of his plan.
As Cox points out, even the OECD, a club of 38 wealthy nations, “has raised the alarm about urban containment.” It’s “warned that without sufficient developable land within urban-growth boundaries, housing affordability will deteriorate.”
Given that a B.C. NDP government brought in the ALR in the early 1970s under the stewardship of former MLAs like Harold Steves, the current government is not about to start chipping back the ALR, even to construct desperately needed housing.
Steves, 87, continues to be an active Richmond farmer and said the B.C. NDP is doing the right thing.
The NDP government is encouraging cities to build residential highrise clusters, especially around rapid-transit hubs, the latest including an 85-storey tower in Burnaby. It’s also forcing municipalities to blanket upzone virtually all “single-family” lots for four to six units.
Even though Liberal leadership hopeful Chrystia Freeland admitted last week that record high migration rates to Canada must go down to ease stress on housing, Steves said a temperate region like Metro Vancouver will always draw many newcomers.
Although Steves is frustrated that B.C.’s farmland is not at all living up to its potential as a source of food, he would not support cutting into the ALR, which is made up of the five per cent of arable B.C. land.
Demographia dismisses Steves’ approach as “planning orthodoxy.” In places like California, B.C. and Ontario, “high housing prices, relative to incomes, are having a distinctly feudalizing impact,” says Demographia.
“The primary victims are young people, minorities and immigrants. Restrictive housing policies may be packaged as progressive, but in social terms their impact could better be characterized as regressive.”
The Agricultural Land Reserve has value, van Kooten said. But, in reality, it’s not leading to effective agriculture. “It’s preserving open spaces, more than active farms.”
Like Steves, van Kooten said the ALR is being chopped up by new property owners, who are erecting mansions under the guise of farmhouses on small parcels while doing a trivial amount of farming to get a tax break.
It would be beneficial to make some rural expanses of Surrey and Langley available for housing, said van Kooten, who now teaches business at Langley’s Trinity Western University.
“When one follows the Fraser Highway from Langley City towards downtown Surrey,” he said, “there are huge open areas that are in the ALR but are not productive from an agricultural perspective.”
“If you were to suddenly say, ‘Let’s allow development in some of the Surrey section of the Agricultural Land Reserve,’” van Kooten said “you probably wouldn’t get nearly the same pressure on homes in Aldergrove.”
Even without the ALR, van Kooten maintained most arable land in the Fraser Valley, and across B.C., would remain viable farms. And, with the right zoning, he said more land in and around Metro Vancouver could be protected as green spaces and parks.
The planning options are many. And while Steves continues to support higher density housing, the farmer and climate activist completely agrees the ALR is not working the way it should. Far too much agricultural land, Steves said, is being chopped into near-useless hobby farms.
In other words, even if most of the public and politicians are not ready to allow housing on urban farmland, people from both sides of the issue think it’s past time to reform the ALR.
How to do so is an issue for another day.