A jungle of condo towers southeast of King St. W. and Dufferin St. has been sprouting wantonly for 15 years. The proximity to downtown and heritage feel have made the spot a boon for developers, an experience to package and sell to young professionals in search of urban homes.

Now the term Liberty Village evokes some of the most bitter feelings regarding city-planning. Toronto has scrambled to put in adequate transit paths leading from the newly dense hub to downtown, and amenities like park space there remain inadequate. For people moving into the residential towers, the neighbourhood has lacked some of the necessities of a complete community — like a nice park for the dog to explore, and a family doctor just down the street.

That’s changing now, but it has involved a gruelling game of catch-up.

Liberty Village isn't unique in the Greater Toronto Area. On the contrary, there seem to be countless examples of developments springing up without sufficient nearby transit, parks, libraries, schools and clinics to support the number of people moving in.

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The problem is that the GTA is one of the fastest growing regions in North America due to immigration, and if the area doesn’t build “up and in,” the only other option is sprawl.

Most policy-makers and residents favour intensification — which is more sustainable and conducive to complete communities than sprawl — but there is often fierce neighbourhood (NIMBY) resistance to density. Neighbourhood advocates fear the exportation of downtown Toronto to their communities.

Those who have been watching the city’s growth carefully say Toronto has yet prove to residents that development will enhance existing communities rather than simply bulldoze and gentrify them. Achieving that will require better planning, and a whole lot more community buy-in.

There’s no question that Toronto has room to intensify. A 2018 Fraser Institute study showed Toronto’s overall density — 4,457 inhabitants per square kilometre — paled in comparison to that of New York City, at 10,935, and even Vancouver, which has 5,493.

But not all areas are equally suited to an increase in density. That’s accepted in Toronto’s official plan, which designates about 85 per cent of the city as small scale “residential,” as well as the province’s major growth plan, which highlights downtowns as its main “urban growth areas.”

The rationale is that downtown areas — where transit, parks, and health services are already established, are more easily able to absorb density than areas that aren’t yet built up. But the province’s plan also says that its growth targets for those areas are just baselines and that cities should aim to grow above and beyond the centres.

That language has given developers an in.

“It has become difficult for city planners to say no to intensification anywhere,” said Andre Sorensen, a geography professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough who specializes in city studies.

That’s largely because development projects rejected by the city can be escalated to the (soon to be reformed) Ontario Municipal Board — a provincial tribunal that decides whether developments may proceed on a case-by-case basis. The same growth plan that prioritizes downtown urban growth areas also promotes intensification in a broad sense, and the OMB has a history of erring on the side of allowing intensification.

“Intensification will increase pressure on our transit and mobility,” Sorensen said, so “More buildings downtown is not a big deal.” But problems arise, he said, when major developments go up in areas of the city that don’t already have ample infrastructure and services.

Take, for example, Humber Bay Shores, where condominiums have recently flourished at Park Lawn Rd. and Lake Shore Blvd. W.

Sorensen calls this spot “a fantastic example of where we’re getting intensification wrong.”

Roughly 11,400 people lived in the Humber Bay Shores census tract in 2016, about 6,000 more than lived there in 2011. Despite being only about 10 km away from Toronto’s downtown, it takes at least one hour to make the trip by public transit. According to Sorensen, most trips originating from Humber Bay Shores are by car.

“That’s really a problem,” he said.

In the densest census tract of Liberty Village, 7,502 people are packed into an area the size of two Trinity Bellwoods Parks — which is five and a half times denser than the city average, according to 2016 data. Compared to five years earlier, the density in that small area nearly tripled.

In Willowdale near Yonge St. between Finch Ave. and Sheppard Ave., density increased by as much as 65 inhabitants per hectare — greater than the number of people per hectare added to Humber Bay Shores. But because the density in the area was already high — 244 people per hectare in 2011, that didn’t represent a large percentage increase.

Then there are the suburbs, some of which are seeing a different effect. The density in Milton doesn’t exceed 57 people her hectare, but one part of the booming town has seen a 110 per cent increase in density between 2011 and 2016.

Richard Joy, executive director of the multidisciplinary Urban Land Institute in Toronto, said that the real problem is the order in which homes and facilities are built.

“I think, quite frankly some of the examples we would pick on as density or population growth gone awry are probably more a question of the sequencing not being perfect, and never will it be perfect,” he said.

CityPlace, the enormous condominium development on the west waterfront of Toronto’s downtown, grew at a much greater rate than initially expected in the 1990s, Joy said. One result was the city running out of park space to provide for the residents there, eventually throwing together a creative backup plan: a park over the downtown rail corridor, known now as Rail Deck Park. Plans for the park, estimated to cost more than $1.6 billion, are still being studied.

On the flip side, Joy said, there are places like Mirvish Village, the meticulously planned, mixed-use neighbourhood at Bloor and Bathurst Sts. that will replace legendary department store Honest Ed’s, and renew the block surrounding it.

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Joy said the city, under-resourced as it is, just can’t handle the number of development applications coming its way, and many end up before the OMB, the arms-length tribunal that handles land-use planning appeals for the province and that critics have long said takes planning control away from municipalities.

“Almost by definition those are piecemeal planning decisions and not part of a broader vision,” Joy said.

The OMB is currently undergoing reforms aimed at addressing those concerns — proposals will go instead to local planning tribunals, mandated to adhere to municipal plans.

“The big question is, is the new planning approvals regime, the post-OMB environment, going to allow a better, more comprehensive macro- to micro-planning culture in the city that has otherwise been on its hind heels?” said Joy.

As Joy pointed out, the reforms will involve “an adjustment period that will require individual city councillors and of course the planning department to own far more responsibility when it comes to planning density,” including councillors being willing to say “yes in my backyard.”

“This new system will require far more front end consultation, far more consensus-building in order to work,” he said.

That’s one major change to the planning regime that may help align density with city plans. Another is an update to the province’s growth plan in 2017.

“If you think about the provincial framework, Metrolinx and municipal plans all existing under this, we should all be rowing in the same direction,” said Larry Clay, assistant deputy minister of Ontario Growth Secretariat, in an interview with the Star.

He admitted that the 2006 growth plan didn’t align “as robustly” with other provincial plans like the Metrolinx’s “Big Move” document as it should have. As of the 2017 update to the plan though, the Big Move, and the province’s infrastructure plan, will have to adhere to the growth plan.

Clay believes the challenge that remains, factoring in the updated growth plan and the post-OMB regime, is to get communities and developers on the same page.

“Usually when people think about planning it goes emotional really quick,” Clay said. “It is a challenge I think for municipalities to really open up and engage.”

That’s something Cherise Burda, executive director of Ryerson University’s City Building Institute, has given a lot of thought.

Burda believes the city, developers, and neighbourhood associations all have a role to play in coming to the table at the front end of development applications to negotiate and brainstorm what’s best for proposed developments. That’s how you end up with a planned complete community like Mirvish Village, instead of “piecemeal” planning by the OMB (or the threat of it).

Still, the expectation that a greater level of engagement begets more complete communities will not necessarily convince developers or neighbours to opt for that route.

“Most of the units that are being built in the city are being built for investors, not end users,” Burda said. “Fifty-five per cent of what’s coming down the pipe in the next five years is one-bedrooms.”

That’s not the ideal housing stock for people looking for family homes. But they get scooped up by investors, maintaining an incentive for developers to build high with many units.

Meanwhile, some neighbourhoods are disposed to resist development at all costs, which Burda sees as a mistake.

“I think there’s a fear that all condo development is going to end up looking like downtown Toronto,” she said, “A really nice ground level community experience might actually be better than what was there before.”

To bring everyone to that table, Burda said, “I think that councillors need to take leadership on this and need to embrace our density because we don’t have a choice.”