The Globe and Mail: Ontario orders greenbelts...and HOAs

The 10 million people who are expected to live in the Greater Toronto Area in the next couple of decades will increasingly find it difficult to find an affordable house and will be concentrated more in condominiums and townhouses under a sweeping plan to protect another one million acres as a greenbelt around urban areas.
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So now we have yet another incentive driving the CID revolution--cramming people into high-density living arrangements with private governments so that lots of land can be left undeveloped. Why? Because some planners think that's how we should live. This is, of course, many an urban planner's idea of utopia--they design, we obey. Portland is the main example of this sort of thing in the USA. Seems that Ontario is using the same model. Says Premier Dalton McGuinty, ”This means no new subdivision paving over our valuable farmland. It means no new shopping malls carved out of our forests.” The only problem with this approach is that those troublesome, individualistic home-buyers don't understand what is good for them, to wit: Mark Parsons, president of the Greater Toronto Home Builders Association, said developers will co-operate with the government but warned that the plan runs counter to the basic desires of homeowners. ”Sixty-five per cent of Toronto and suburban GATE residents polled [by the association] said they would like to move into a single-family home,” he said. Well, they'll just have to get used to living in condos, because the government, acting on the advice of planners, won't allow SFH construction to meet that demand. It's all for the greater good, don't you see?

Thanks to Fred Pilot for pointing me to this story.