NIMBYism harms the farms
Rural Canadians suffer when urban dwellers fight housing projects.
In all my past ramblings about transit, housing, and land use, I think I’ve mentioned farming only once. I probably speak for a lot of urbanists when I say that agricultural issues were never really something to which I paid much attention.
I regret overlooking the importance of agriculture — especially the hidden value that farmland has for city dwellers. If you’re as concerned as I am about housing affordability and sustainable communities, you should care about farms too.
Last weekend, CBC reported that Ontario lost a staggering 319 acres of farmland per day between 2016 and 2021. This number was established in a release from the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) that looked at the differences in the province’s total farmland areas between the 2016 and 2021 censuses. The difference between these periods was then divided by the approximate number of days in a five-year period (1825).
Having tuned out of Ontario’s political debates since moving to PEI, my first impression was that this had to do with highway expansions or some other niche province-specific issue that seeps into the national spotlight. But then I looked at the nationwide data myself, and my jaw dropped.
Not only are other provinces losing proportionally more farmland per day than Canada’s largest province, but Ontario’s loss is also somehow one of the lower provincial statistics when you look at total land area within each jurisdiction.
The loss of farmland was most heavily pronounced in agriculture-heavy regions like the Prairies and the Maritimes. My current home province of PEI saw the largest proportional loss in farmland over the same period, losing almost 40 acres a day on an island with a total land area of 1.4 million acres. At first glance, that number doesn’t sound big. But if PEI had the same land area as Ontario, the farmland loss would be an unfathomable 6,000 acres a day!
But what do these scary numbers mean? For starters, it’s indicative of poor land use rules both within urban centres and their surrounding rural areas. Zoning rules within many of our communities mean that denser housing options, like multiplexes and midrise apartments, are impossible or illegal to build. The Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) opposition to denser housing in cities doesn’t stop development outright. Rather, the housing just gets built elsewhere — and usually on cheaper, undeveloped lands like greenspaces and farms.
Much in the same way that gentrification is caused by housing development being pushed out of wealthier neighbourhoods and into poorer ones (see this excellent piece), a similar sort of gentrifying effect occurs in farming communities through the creation of massive sprawling neighbourhoods. Opposition to higher-density development in cities generally gives way to lower-density suburbs on what was previously greenfield or farmland. There are examples of agricultural land being transformed into denser and more sustainable communities like a recently proposed project on the outskirts of Saskatoon, but they are generally the exception to the rule.
It’s also indicative of the need for provinces to implement better land use practices. The OFA called for the Ontario government to better reflect the need for agricultural land in its growth plans. The group also recommended the creation of more rigid urban boundaries to ensure that growth occurs “through redevelopment of vacant and underused lands, and higher density development.”
On PEI, where farmland loss has been most pronounced, much of that degradation can be attributed not only to restrictive zoning in urban centres, but a lack of land use rules in rural communities. Prince Edward Island has one of the highest proportions of its population living in unincorporated areas — rural parts of the province outside of municipal boundaries. As these communities grow without local governments, they generally do so in the absence of any sort of municipal property tax or land use framework.
The Federation of PEI Municipalities (FPEIM) noted in January 2021 that Prince Edward Island did not yet have a province-wide land use plan, despite a half century of reports and royal commissions calling for such a measure. A direct consequence of this issue is that much of the province’s commercial and residential construction has clustered along rural roads in sprawling patterns of ribbon development. The absence of local government and provincial oversight has meant high per capita service costs for the provincial government (especially in spending on highways and roads), limited public transit for rural communities, and the degradation of critical agricultural land. Farms are responsible for much of PEI’s economic output and touristic appeal. In the long run, ceding this land to sprawling, low-density development is both self-defeating and irreversible.
As we think critically about housing affordability and sustainability within cities, farmland will play a huge part in our approach going forward. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) stated bluntly in a report last Thursday that by 2030, Canada needs an additional 3.5 million housing units beyond current projections to restore affordability. The report also stated that “housing supply has to increase in density and be more energy efficient to lower emissions … as we adjust to a zero-carbon future.” If Canada is to meet this new target for housing, while also trying to hit existing emissions and growth goals, protecting green space and farmland should be a keystone of strategies within all orders of government.
If we let cities grow up rather than out, we can protect one of our nation’s most valuable economic assets. But if we let NIMBYism force development outwards, Canada risks buying the farm in more ways than one.
