GRIDS fails intensification rules
May 22, 2006

The city's 30-year growth plan adopted on Thursday falls far short of provincial demands for increased intensification of development, but this key fact was not mentioned during the five-hour decision meeting. And the planned level of intensification is also far lower than what could be achieved in Hamilton according to city staff.

The provincial government has ordered Hamilton and other cities to ensure that at least 40 per cent of new growth takes place within the already built-up area in the form of increased density. But the GRIDS (Growth Related Integrated Development Strategy) 30-year plan approved by councillors last week only promises 33 per cent.

The GRIDS plan anticipates an increase of 80,000 new households in Hamilton between 2001 and 2031. It allocates 26,500 of these to intensification of the existing built-up area. That works out to a rate of 33 percent intensification, but readers have to work it out themselves, because the percentage calculation is never presented in the 469 pages of material provided to councillors by staff.

Another 31,900 units (40 percent) are slated for vacant lands inside the city's urban boundary, while the remaining 21,600 (27 percent) are to be built on agricultural lands outside the boundary in upper and lower Stoney Creek. How the units are divided between the three categories was the main difference between the half-dozen options considered in the GRIDS process, but the numbers attached to each have shifted considerably during the last few months.

Last summer the "nodes and corridors" option called for 42,000 units of intensification, close to double the amount approved last week as part of the current version of the nodes and corridors option. And the 42,000 wasn't the highest amount of intensification considered possible by staff.

In response to a question at Thursday's meeting, Paul Mason, the city's director of long range planning said " there is a reasonable capacity for a little over 60,000 intensification units physically in the city". He went on to explain that even that level wouldn't impose significant changes on most of the city.

"I think in terms of establishing an image of what it means in terms of form, we would still look at relatively stable interior areas in our neighbourhoods, but we would see quite a transition along all the major roads in the city and slightly higher densities than we have at the moment, particularly in the community cores."

The missed target is not an accident, although that may come as a surprise to councillors if they didn't read all the way to page 68 of the 469-page GRIDS document. There we find the statement that the recommendation growth option only "approaches the 40 percent intensification level expressed in the Province's draft Places to Grow Plan."

The paragraph with that sentence recalls that the nodes and corridors option reported to council last summer in a consultant's report "envisioned an intensification level of 42,000 units by 2031". But the report explains that achieving that number would require "much higher densities than typical", so staff hired a different consultant to re-examine the plan. The second consultant came up with the 26,500 figure "based on local housing formation, demographic, economic and past intensification trends in Hamilton."

The failure to meet the provincial requirements wasn't mentioned in the 14-page summary given to councillors last week. On the contrary, that summary repeatedly suggests that the city's plan meets provincial targets. An example is found on page two where we read that "the recommended urban structure and associated growth option was developed in accordance with the Provincial growth forecasts, in accordance with the Places to Grow plan."

Then on page seven of the summary, we find the following paragraph. "The staging of new growth areas is directly related to the realization of the type of community envisioned in Vision 2020. A more vibrant, compact, transit-efficient forms of development, the achievement of the 40 percent intensification objective of the draft Places to Grow Plan, and the coordination of infrastructure investments are directly linked to the phasing and staging of development."

The "provincial direction.that municipalities adopt a strategy to accommodate 40% of the planned growth through intensification" is mentioned again on page 10, but again without any hint that the city won't comply. Altogether, the word intensification occurs twenty times in the summary report, but there is no suggestion that the recommended option won't reach the provincial standard.

The 40 percent intensification rule has been seen by most commentators as the centrepiece of new provincial planning instructions to cities like Hamilton, although some have argued that the target is far too low. A Neptis Foundation report issued in late March, for example, contended that a 55 percent target would be required to achieve even modest increases in transit use.

That report calculated Hamilton's 2001 intensification rate was 22 percent - lower than both Niagara and all the municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area. The Neptis report determined Niagara's 2001 rate to be the same 33 percent level that GRIDS hopes to achieve in Hamilton over the next 25 years.

A lower rate of intensification means more farmland is taken up with new housing growth. While Mason says over 60,000 units are possible, any expansion of the urban boundary could be avoided by allocating 48,000 units to intensification in the current plan, and that number could be cut much further if the city was willing to tighten the rules on the development of vacant greenfield properties within the urban boundary.

There are hundreds of hectares of those vacant lands especially on the south mountain. The GRIDS report assumes that there will be no increase in housing densities there when it allocates 31,900 units to those vacant lands. But Dillon Consulting pointed out a year ago that the city could meet the provincial target of 32,000 units of intensification (40 percent of the projected need of 80,000) and avoid any boundary expansions by increasing density requirements on the vacant lands by just 40 percent.

That suggestion is also in the GRIDS report, in appendix A, about 111 pages into the 469-page document. The full report is available on the city website at http://www.myhamilton.ca/NR/rdonlyres/7C0259D4-1A21-4BC9-BBF7-
52BC9FD808B8/0/May18GRIDSGMSCoverReportv11.pdf.