16 April, 2008
For the Welland Tribune
By Adam Shoalts
Country fields stretched as far as the eye could see, punctuated here and there by thick stands of deciduous woodlots. It was a quiet, sleepy little out of the way rural town. Creeks flowed through the fields, and in spring teemed with spawning northern pike. Deer and coyotes would pass through the woods and over the rich agricultural lands.
Then, seemingly overnight, all this changed.
What was once a rural paradise and small farming community, was rapidly transformed into a massive, impersonal, monotonous, sprawling sea of suburban housing.
I am referring to Binbrook, once known locally for Lake Niapenco, and now notorious for being a prime example of the worse sort of unmanaged urban sprawl.
The town is simply no longer recognizable as Binbrook: in fact, it is virtually indistinguishable from a Toronto suburb or any other mega-city suburb.
All sense of distinctness, of the individual character of a particular place, has given way in recent times to the massive, impersonal subdivisions that are constructed as cheaply as possible and with as little variation in home design as possible.
These sprawling subdivisions radiate outwards from major cities, inexorably swallowing up more and more of the rural lands that once dominated southern Ontario.
The result is Binbrook: a place where what was once field and forest is now a sea of suburbia that engulfs a mind-staggering swath of countryside.
But readers need not drive to Binbrook in order to view this spectacle for themselves: if our politicians and municipal planners have it their way, it will be possible to view this incredible magic trick, in which countryside is turned into Toronto suburbia practically overnight, right here in Niagara.
Actually, to be fair, there are already many examples across Niagara of rampant, uncontrolled urban sprawl having engulfed whole tracks of forests and farmland.
For example, in St. Catharines just north of the Niagara Escarpment, one can find the same urban sprawl of near-identical residential development.
The future, however, seems to hold even bigger transformations that will make the village of Fenwick and the rural community of Wainfleet into the “next Binbrook.”
Local developers recently announced plans to double the population of Fenwick by means of a massive subdivision housing project in a currently rural area that contains significant wetlands, forest, and agricultural lands.
Meanwhile, in Wainfleet, the battle over the Region’s proposed municipal water and sewer pipeline continues to rage. Of course, the water and sewer pipeline is a thinly veiled attempt to open the door for future development along the Lake Erie shoreline.
(It was the same story in Binbrook, when the big pipe came down highway 56.)
A preview of what is to come has already been put in motion at the former Easter Seals camp along Lake Erie, where crowded development is underway.
None of this bodes well for the future of Welland. Instead of redeveloping the unused industrial lands of the Rose City, which could help revitalize the downtown core by infusing desperately needed consumers for the local shops and businesses, the major housing projects are being built away from Welland’s urban area.
Indeed, it remains a mystery why with so much potential to construct new homes in areas that are already urban or zoned industrial but unused, city and town planners are still directing develop outwards rather than inwards.
Both big cities and small rural communities suffer as a result.
Former Ontario premier Mike Harris, a man who by anyone’s standards was a friend to business, said in 2001 that, “…Inefficient and unplanned growth could lead to higher infrastructure costs, higher taxes, more pollution and less green space.”
Indeed it does.
The rural areas are losing not only prime farmlands; residents are almost unanimously dismayed by the transformation of their quiet rural communities into the giant subdivisions many of them moved to the countryside to escape from.
Wildlife are losing already scarce habitat and the fight against global warming is dealt a blow by making walking to work impractical and re-entrenching society’s dependence on the car.
Thanks to sprawl local taxpayers and homeowners typically see their taxes increase in order to cover the heavy cost of new municipal water and sewer pipelines.
Moreover, the destruction of wetlands often leads to flooding and water runoff problems.
Whereas wetlands once provided local flood and pollution control for free, by destroying these wetlands it inevitably necessitates expensive infrastructure projects to deal with the resulting overflow and runoff troubles. Such problems have already occurred in Fenwick around the new and still expanding Cherry Ridge subdivision.
Urban sprawl may not even benefit the new homeowners that move into the expanding suburbs. An American study conducted by Smart Growth America found strong evidence to link obesity and sprawl. The underlying factors are clear: people who live in sprawling, car-dependent subdivisions are likely to walk less, weigh more, and have high blood pressure.
In fact, it is difficult to perceive whom exactly all this rampant urban sprawl actually benefits: except, perhaps, the developers themselves.
