Mississauga is a public policy problem

We desperately need more housing in the GTA's second biggest city

I’m pretty optimistic about the future of Southern Ontario, and the GTA in particular. We’ve got a lot of things going for us. Canada is one of the safest, most tolerant, and prosperous countries on earth. The Great Lakes is particularly well suited to adapt to climate change, and we don’t have major geological or weather risks. None of this sounds exciting, but they’re the boring things that give us a leg-up on the rest of the continent.

These advantages also come with growth challenges. People from all over the world want to move to Canada, and most of them want to be in the GTA. We haven’t planned for that growth, and it shows. We didn’t build enough transit, we didn’t allow enough density to accommodate newcomers. So we’re bursting at the seams.

I’m confident that we can overcome these, in time, and thrive. Some hard decisions will have to be made, though. We can’t keep trying to cram all of our growth into a few census tracts. We need all cities in the GTA to allow more density to meet our housing needs. Unfortunately, some cities aren’t ready to take the needed steps. That includes the region’s second biggest city, Mississauga.

The GTA has grown rapidly over the past few decades. Most of that growth, until recently, was single detached homes. That changed with the Greenbelt, which ensured that most new housing would have to take place in existing neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, zoning prevented much – if any – growth in large swaths of existing cities. Most of the residential land in cities was zoned only for detached houses, so that’s what we got. That meant that the majority of intensification in our largest cities has been on a small number of parcels. That’s how we got our “tall & sprawl” development pattern.

This development pattern is highly unusual. Traditionally, communities added a mixture of housing types and density that gradually decreased as you move further from the center. Think of the pattern like a hill, gently sloping down. Since land close to the center of the regional economy is expensive, in a relatively laissez-faire market you would expect developers to maximize their profits by building the most units near the economic center that the market would bear. That doesn’t necessarily mean rows of skyscrapers. In a liberal land-use regime where most parcels of land can host more than a detached house, land prices tend to remain subdued, meaning lower cost “missing middle” housing such as small apartments and townhouses might make more sense.

In short, tall & sprawl is unnatural. Unfortunately, it’s how we built Mississauga.

Mississauga sits on some of the most important urban land in Canada. It’s just under 300 square kilometers just outside of Toronto. There’s no better illustration of Mississauga’s role in the Canadian economy than Pearson airport. Pearson is by far the biggest airport in Canada, moving over 35 million passengers annually, employing over 50,000 people. It’s our primary connection to the rest of the world, and the entry point for many new Canadians. It’s the kind of infrastructure you’d expect to find in a big, dense city.

Mississauga is not, in fact, a big, dense city. It has served as an overflow valve for Toronto, which itself long embraced the tall & sprawl mantra. It has added around 400,000 since I was born in the early 1980s. The trouble is, they’ve run out of room to sprawl. We needed a Queens for our Manhattan. Instead we got a McMansion version of Levittown.¹

This may sound harsh. But Queens has roughly the same landmass as Mississauga (280 km² vs 292 km²). Mississauga has a population of around 720,000 compared to 2.4 million in Queens. Maybe Queens is asking too much. It’s denser than Toronto, after all. But surely the city hosting our most important logistical hub could be denser than Levittown!

The lack of density wasn’t an accident. It was planned. Seventy-one percent of residential land in Mississauga is zoned only for detached houses. Density, to put it bluntly, was mostly illegal in most of the city. So they didn’t get the variety of housing types and density that you’d see in cities like Queens or Brooklyn that absorbed overflow growth from Manhattan. It grew more like a sprawly Sunbelt city like Dallas or Phoenix (minus the sun).

Of course, we can change this. Indeed, there is movement afoot. Canada’s housing minister Sean Fraser has been using the federal government’s Housing Accelerator Fund to encourage municipalities to allow more density. I won’t get into the mechanics of the program (which I describe as the Carrot Stick, since it can be seen as either an inducement or punishment), but you can read my thoughts here and here. It looked like Mississauga was primed to be another success for Minister Fraser. Then the vote happened. Five-five. Mayor Bonnie Crombie, who is supportive in principle, wasn’t at the meeting (she’s campaigning for provincial Liberal leadership right now), so the vote failed.

I’m not sure what the path forward looks like. If they don’t find a way to quickly comply with the terms to access Housing Accelerator Funds, I hope Minister Fraser brings down the Carrot Stick like the hammer of Thor (there’s reason to believe he will). We’re in a housing crisis. The federal government can’t afford not to make an example of Mississauga. It might not be fair to residents, but that’s on City Council. If the federal government doesn’t hold them accountable, other municipalities will weasel out of commitments. We can’t let that happen.

I’ll write something about Mississauga in the future that is more in-line with the theme of this little project (there are still plenty of opportunities for the city!). But, for now, I just want to express my extreme disappointment with City Council. This is a lost opportunity for Mississauga, the GTA, and Canada.

1. Levittown’s reputation is largely undeserved. Yes, it was the prototypical post-war American suburb. But it is denser than Mississauga (2933/km² vs 2467/km²), and filled with starter homes (which are no longer especially affordable, since the New York metro area, like the GTA, has underbuilt housing). We’d probably have been better off with a Levittown than Mississauga. I’ll have more thoughts on Levittown in a future post.