Planners and the Public Interest ​​

Cities in Ontario, most notably Toronto, are experiencing worsening housing and transportation crises, all while struggling to adapt to a changing climate. With average rent increasing by over 20% since 2022; continuous delays in opening critical transit infrastructure, like the Eglinton Crosstown LRT; and a predicted increase of extreme weather events, Toronto is grappling with a series of pressing issues that threaten to further erode its livability and weaken its economic outlook. While these issues are often viewed as political questions first and foremost, city planners have an increasingly important role to play in developing and advancing effective solutions to them.

City planners, and specifically municipal land-use planners, are one of several different professional cohorts that guide the evolution of our cities. Planners help direct and facilitate the orderly and efficient use of land and the development of complete communities based in contemporary planning best practices and in accordance with a range of policy objectives around housing, climate change, transportation, and many other areas, from various levels of government. Moreover, they are professionally obliged to serve the public interest as they do so. Just about every city in the province employs a team of planners to assist in managing and directing growth and change.

In ascertaining what constitutes the public interest, a professional planner is trained to seek to balance a range of interests — those of individuals, institutions, and community groups — with policy objectives and best practices. While planners are generally employed by governments or private sector clients (I’ve worked in both capacities in my career), their responsibility to the public interest supersedes their obligations to their client and employer.

Professional planners have, in my view, the necessary skills and legislative tools to effectively manage challenges around housing, homelessness, mobility, the environment, and economic resilience. However, they are often prevented from deploying these tools effectively by forces outside of their control: outdated policy, organizational hierarchies in government offices, and abundant political influence. Because of these constraints, planners in both the public and private sectors may not always be able to give their best professional advice to decision-makers, leaving major challenges unaddressed, doing a disservice to the public interest, and undermining confidence in the planning profession. The profession needs to find ways to overcome these constraints and speak up about challenging but necessary process and policy reforms.

A city’s primary document for guiding local planning decision-making is its official plan — every city in the province has one. The official plan lays out policy objectives; bylaws and guidelines are used to implement those objectives. Together, these documents form a large part of what planners consider when making recommendations regarding growth and change on a property-specific, area-wide, or city-wide basis.

But what happens when substantial parts of an official plan (and therefore the bylaws and guidelines) reflect outdated perspectives or a value system that may no longer represent a city’s best interests?

Many municipalities’ plans predate the current housing and climate crises, for instance; the more aggressive measures needed to address or mitigate those crises may be at odds with existing policies. Official plans are often greatly influenced by political forces invested in maintaining the status quo: change is not always popular. But cities are, at their core, dynamic places where growth and change are both healthy and necessary to ensure that communities remain resilient and successful over time.

One of the reasons the plans include outdated policies is that the plans themselves are very hard to change. Toronto’s Official Plan has been around in more or less its current form for over two decades, with some policies in secondary plans (a secondary plan is a group of policies contained in the official plan that applies to a specific area) dating back even earlier. For instance, the Highland Creek Community Secondary Plan contains polices that allow only single detached homes on lots with a minimum size of 450 square metres within the plan’s broadly defined neighbourhood areas. This policy is completely at odds with the Official Plan, which explicitly calls for a range of housing types across the city.

Developers sometimes make applications to amend the plan on a site-specific basis, and the municipal government makes area-wide policy changes from time to time (usually in areas that are experiencing development interest) as well as (less frequently) changes to the main polices within the plan, which apply city-wide. While planners draft the changes to the Official Plan, often after lengthy review and consultation, it is elected officials —City Council and, in some cases, the provincial minister of municipal affairs and housing — who are responsible for making the final decisions. In some cases, policies in the current plan were approved by a council that reflected a very different set of voters and priorities than the one that sits today. 

When change does occur, it tends to be incremental and not always effective, especially in the short term. The extent and breadth of policy changes necessary to address the current crises are likely politically untenable. 

In practice, problems can arise when planners base their opinion on a narrow interpretation of an official plan. A strict adherence to following a plan’s policies can prevent planning professionals from realizing novel, context-specific solutions or contemporary best practices. When policies, bylaws, guidelines, procedures, and/or practices start to become clearly at odds with the public interest, planners, both public sector and private sector, need to actively challenge and update these rules and not just wait for a city council to ask them to do so.

The City of Toronto’s Official Plan has several examples of policies that, in my opinion, make it much harder for planners to respond to the challenges facing the city. In its introductory chapter, the plan describes “a city where people of all ages and abilities can enjoy a good quality of life” and in which “housing choices are available for all people in their communities at all stages of their lives.” Despite this, subsequent policies limit broad swaths of Toronto to the construction of only single detached housing, primarily to protect “neighbourhood character” and “stability.” These neighbourhood-character policies have had demonstrably exclusionary results, specifically by creating large areas of low-rise, economically gated communities, often with declining populations — an outcome clearly at odds with the plan’s stated goals of inclusion and housing choice.

Recently, new permissions for laneway suites, garden suites, and multiplexes have allowed a greater variety of housing to be built in Toronto’s neighbourhoods. Broader policies around neighbourhood stability will hopefully be updated and changed soon as well. These measures help, but their effects will likely only be truly felt in the longer term, and it took a full-blown housing crisis for them to even be tabled.

It didn’t have to take that long. Until around 15 years ago, Toronto wasn’t growing at the rapid pace it is today; for generations, planners, understandably, felt that incremental policy changes were reasonable. There was time to observe how the city responded to subtle adjustments in the growth strategy. But those days are gone. Growth continues rapidly and growth policies need to catch up. The system by which cities amend their policies to course correct and respond to the pressing needs of housing and climate, for instance, is not built for speed. That needs to change. For years, frustrated city planners have talked about the absurdity of the neighbourhood-character and stability policies and about their incompatibility with the housing policies also contained in the Official Plan, but until recently, there wasn’t sufficient political support to even consider changing these policies. Because of this, resources were not deployed to study how to change these policies, and Toronto City Council was never presented with a case for why things needed to change.

The city’s neighbourhood policies are by no means the only outdated aspects of the Official Plan or the only ones constraining the development we need to meet the growing demands on our housing supply. There are policies that continue to prioritize sunlight and sky view for low-rise homeowners over new housing in growth areas, resulting in the construction of jagged, difficult to build, and environmentally unsustainable buildings. Sunlight is preserved by, among other measures, requiring that buildings be constructed with a series of terraces stepping down as they approach ground level. This approach to construction requires more concrete and creates a less energy efficient, more costly building. Cost and financial feasibility are important considerations that planners often, unfortunately, disregarded in their recommendations.

Other policies seek to prevent any degree of shadows on parks or on main-street sidewalks for large parts of the year, effectively restricting the scale of development near these areas and, in turn, the number of people who might live next to a public green space or on a major street with transit and services. Shadow prevention seems recently to have become the primary guiding principle behind the City’s approach to urban design, effectively prioritizing direct sunlight on sidewalks and considerably limiting development in some areas targeted for growth.

 The Official Plan should be a reflection of the public interest. Sometimes it is, but in many cases, it is demonstrably not. Now, I’m not suggesting planners ignore the plan in its entirety. But  they should recognize its shortcomings and consider it alongside more contemporary inputs that inform the public interest while pushing to update and improve the plan over time as policy issues are identified and addressed.

Even once policy shortcomings in the Official Plan are identified, the hierarchical nature of most municipal planning departments can frustrate new ideas and approaches from making their way to decision-makers. Many municipal planning departments are also understaffed and under-resourced. The fear of failure, and of wasted staff time and resources, is real. Policy changes generally move forward when they have a greater chance of being supported politically, while things that are politically challenging often get tightly scoped — if they’re undertaken at all. A notable and admirable exception to this is the recent “rooming house” policy amendments, which saw Toronto planning staff repeatedly putting their best advice in front of Council until it finally changed the policy.

Proposing bold solutions and policy changes may very well result in failure at Council, sometimes repeatedly. But shying away from making bold, transformative recommendations is a far greater failure to the public interest, will erode the ability of the planning profession to do good in the long term, and may ultimately sideline the voice of planners in the conversation on how we address our urgent housing and climate issues.

If you trust someone for advice and their advice repeatedly turns out to be ineffective, when do you stop asking them? Our housing and climate objectives need to be front and centre in every planner’s practice. Addressing these challenges is undoubtedly in the public interest and is among the fundamental reasons the profession exists at all. 

All that said, I remain optimistic about the future. The planning profession is starting to rightfully bear the blame for the policy choices of previous generations (e.g., exclusionary zoning) and is speaking out about reversing the damage. Planners are framing our advice more consistently through the lenses of equity, inclusion, and climate resilience. But the profession must support and foster this recent momentum and take advantage of a political environment where people are seeking change. Planners must increasingly demonstrate the professional courage to make recommendations to decision-makers that reverse regressive policy, resist political influence, and move beyond incrementalism in policy development, or it may not be long before more bold and decisive actors step in to take their place. UP

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