Ted Barris

They seemed to pop up overnight. One day I was driving through Pickering up Brock Road and there was the Greenbelt land – fields, gullies and natural forest. The next day, following the same route, there were signs as big as all outdoors shouting out to all who passed:

“100-foot by 300-foot lots!” those signs proclaimed.

As I recall, it was just before the recent Greenbelt controversy erupted that I first saw the signs. Just before Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s report accused the Ford government of endorsing “the biased process in favour of certain developers and landowners who had timely access to (Housing Minister Steve Clark’s) chief of staff … (developers who) could ultimately see more than a collective $8.3 billion increase to the value of their (Greenbelt) properties.” That’s when those signs went up.

And I looked beyond the signs and where once there had been verdant green space, now there was bulldozed raw soil apparently ready for development of those 100-foot by 300-foot lots. And I began to think about those lots.

That’s a fair chunk of land. Not lots really. More like acreages or at the very least estate lots. And I kept hearing in my head all those Ontario Conservative government rebuttals to Ms. Lysyk’s criticism of their behind-the-scenes activities.

“We need to do everything we can to get shovels in the ground,” from Housing Minister Steve Clark.

“We’re not going to relent in our ambition to get housing built across the province,’” our own MPP, Finance Minister Peter Bethlanfalvy, told the CBC.

And Premier Doug Ford’s strategy: “We need to use every tool in our toolbox to build more homes. That includes unlocking more land to build homes families can afford,” he told the National Post.

Well, I’ve done a little analysis and research, albeit anecdotal, and it appears to me the Ford administration’s plan to build 1.5 million houses, in part on the 7,400 acres it has removed from protected Greenbelt, by 2031, is fundamentally flawed for other reasons.

First of all, a bit of basic arithmetic. There are about 43,560 square feet in an acre. And a lot that has 100-foot frontage and is 300 feet deep is about 69 per cent of an acre, or 30,000 square feet.

I asked a real estate broker how much that land might cost, if it were serviced (with hydro, water, sewer, gas, etc.), and he told me about $700,000. And add a house to that lot? A buyer could expect to pay about $2.3 million for the developed house and lot, he said.

According to Statistics Canada data from 2020, for non-senior couples (that is where the highest-income earner is under 65 years of age), the median after-tax income was $93,800.

And for family households with say two children, the median after-tax income was $105,500.

My real estate contacts say there’s no way that a middle-class family could afford one of those 100-foot by 300-foot lots. Not ever!

OK, let’s assume that those lots I’ve just described were not intended for middle-income families, but for acreage or estate lot buyers. Let’s look then at some of the prices in another former Greenbelt area now paved over in the Seaton community explosion of the past few years.

House prices I checked in that region, off Taunton Road, range from $730,000 to over a million. And one of the realtor’s sites suggests that the lower-end price would require a $109,500 down payment, with a fixed-interest rate of 15 per cent.

And I hear the premier’s criticism of his predecessors at Queen’s Park: “The previous government changed the Greenbelt 17 times … because they were building mega mansions for their buddies. They were building a golf course … and a Jiffy Lube,” Ford said, and added his government has chosen to transform Greenbelt land to build affordable homes.

Which Ontarians do the Ford Conservatives think can afford either those prices or those interest rates? Certainly not the average middle-income Canadians surveyed by Statistics Canada.

And why should any more Greenbelt land get swapped away to create luxurious, completely unaffordable 30,000-square-foot lots for either those Ontarians the Conservatives claim to have in mind, or more likely “their buddies” in the property developers’ clique?

No. Each time I pass that development sign on Brock Road, all I see are middle-income Ontarians shut out, and the government’s developer pals lining up for the Greenbelt gravy train.