The lack of authority at the municipal level means that resisting growth is futile, according to Burton.
The best you can do, and what he says he has consistently promised to do, is to control it, with the 2009 Livable Oakville official plan that directs it to growth nodes and corridors and away as much as possible from the stable established neighbourhood streets where we live. (See our upcoming piece: Burton talks 58-storey towers.)
North Oakville and some other "legacy" areas, he points out, were set down in policy in the 1990s as to how they would develop.
From the very beginning, Burton also points out, Oakville has grown. In fact, there have been waves of growth in percentage terms even greater than what we would get if indeed the 33,000 new housing units were built. The arrival of the Ford plant led to a dramatic increase in residents almost overnight, to give one example.
With 550 people in 1841 and 213,769 in 2021, Oakville has in fact experienced 3.36% growth on average per year, or on average doubling every 21 years, or more than 8.5 times. Given immigration, why would there be any reason to expect that would not continue for the foreseeable future?
However, many existing Oakville neighbourhoods are much less densely populated than they were originally. Families are smaller and many people are “over housed”, with multiple empty bedrooms.
This leads to under-utilized facilities, uncertainties around school closures, while at the same time population growth in other areas (even transit nodes) requires expensive new facilities and new schools.
When challenged that the provincial government has moved to address this by giving every property owner the right to build three units per lot regardless of zoning, Burton is firm: "People want the built structure on their existing streets the way they are, so I don’t believe much will happen with this."
We are less sure of this. There are many older homes on larger lots that might well be candidates for development under this new legislation. Nor are we sure that that would be an entirely bad thing. Some streets might revert to the population they had before smaller families and empty nests became more common. The streetscape might change and some might resist.
In any case, such development is now as-of-right, by provincial edict, subject only to setbacks and zoning, so time will tell.
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