‘Downtown has not kept up at all’: Pressure on Toronto parks grows as population climbs

For a long time, the parks, parkettes and ravines scattered around Toronto were regarded as “nice to have” and as “frills,” advocate Dave Harvey says, but now he believes people have come to see them as vital infrastructure akin to schools, roads and hospitals.

Harvey, the co-executive director of Park People, told Global News the pandemic was a key moment for many in the city, who went from appreciating their local green spaces to categorizing them as one of the most important things in their lives.

“We heard those stories during the pandemic of people saying that parks literally were their lifesavers,” he said.

But access to those lifesavers in Toronto is slowly dripping away.

The city is all but built up, with a slew of new towers growing across the city, particularly in the downtown. Those new buildings are increasing Toronto’s population and reducing the average amount of parkland available to each resident.

Data shows that, while the total amount of parkland in Toronto grew marginally in the past decade, the city’s population grew much faster.

Between 2011 and 2021, the census shows around 180,000 new people came to call Toronto home. At the same time, data from the city shows it added roughly 19 hectares of parkland. Over the past decade, the amount of parkland per 10,000 people dropped from 31 to 29 hectares — and it could get worse.

“My ward is full, there’s no vacant unused land or almost none, so to get new parks we have to buy and tear down buildings, that’s where we are now,” downtown Ward 11 Coun. Dianne Saxe told Global News.

The creation of new parks in the city’s core is a costly exercise with no space left to build. To build a new park or new parkland, the city generally has to find existing buildings, buy them at market rates and bulldoze them.

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“The new extension to Yorkville Park is going to be by tearing down an office building,” Saxe said. “I am working at having an important, again, small new park by tearing down another office building. There are places we can expand parks by buying and tearing down houses but there isn’t anywhere else.”

The majority of new homes in Toronto also don’t have backyards. Census data shows that between 2016 and 2021, roughly 48,000 new homes were occupied in Toronto — 49,000 were new units in apartment buildings over five storeys, while the city lost a number of apartments in buildings under five storeys in that time and added just over 1,000-row houses.

The City of Toronto admits that a growing population means more people using existing green space.

“Toronto is experiencing significant population growth, which places pressure on the parks system to provide adequate space for active recreation uses and access to green space,” a spokesperson said.

Harvey said the “downtown has not kept up at all” with its park needs as new towers have sprung up.

Some believe changes in how developers fund parkland brought in by the provincial government will have a devastating effect on green space and will make the problem worse.

Through a series of housing laws — known to the province as Housing Supply Action Plans — the Ford government has changed the parkland developers need to offer to cities, or how much cash they need to offer in lieu of land. The amount of land condo buildings have to offer, in particular, was reduced.

“Our parks are under enormous pressure — a couple of things have happened in the last two years that have made it much worse,” Saxe said.

“The first is for Doug Ford; he has slashed the amount of parkland that new developers are required to give to the city, which is horrendous because we desperately need that parkland. He has slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars a year the amount of money that the city gets from developers for infrastructure of all kinds…. We need that money to build new parks.”

Similarly, the City of Toronto said changes from the Ford government have “negatively affected” how much land it receives to build new parks.

A spokesperson for the minister of municipal affairs and housing said an overhaul of the rules was made to “increase transparency and accountability of these parkland dedication requirements” and suggested that adding the cost of parkland to developers could worsen house prices.

“We also know that the province is in the midst of a housing supply crisis which can only be solved by building more homes,” the spokesperson said.

“This is why the government has made changes to parkland dedication requirements to reduce home-building costs and encourage the construction of more homes.”

Harvey from Park People said green space in a city is “way more than just a bit of grass and some trees” and is among the most important things that can be provided.

“Parks have become absolutely essential urban infrastructure,” he said. “It’s where we go to get a break from things, it’s essential for our physical and mental health. So they serve so many different functions.”

He said Toronto is “quite lucky” with the amount of parkland it has, particularly compared with other cities in North America. Along the mouth of the Don River, for example, he lauded ongoing efforts to build acres of new parkland as part of the ambitious Portlands naturalization project.

Both Saxe and Harvey also raised concerns about access to the parks Toronto already has.

“We have an incredible ravine system in Toronto … but for many communities, particularly in equity-deserving areas, they’re quite close to the ravines, they could be in tower communities overlooking a beautiful ravine but it’s really hard to get down there,” he said.

Saxe said encampments for people experiencing homelessness in the downtown had also dramatically reduced access to existing green space.

“(One) big challenge to our parks is the encampments — we’ve done a very poor job of defending and looking after our parks and taking them back for the majority of people,” she said.

“Almost all the people in my ward are terribly park-deficient and a number of the parks and public spaces that we do have have been taken over so that people like me aren’t safe there.”