The residential streets of Don Mills, Ontario function today as a time capsule for the hopes and dreams of Canada’s first nuclear families – and the far-sighted developer who made them happen. Located north of Toronto’s downtown, Don Mills is marked by many small ranch-style bungalows and box houses, most with garages and generously-sized yards that front onto winding, interconnected roadways. It was Canada’s first planned, self-contained suburban community set apart from existing urban locales.
Canada’s original postwar housing oasis was the brainchild of industrialist E.P. Taylor. A huge swath of farmland he assembled on what was then the outskirts of Toronto was originally meant for a new plant for O’Keefe Brewery, which Taylor owned. But in the postwar growth era of the early 1950s, he realized this plot of land held a much greater possibility. Developed instead as a residential community, it offered young households the opportunity to swap hectic downtown city living for a more bucolic lifestyle outside the Big Smoke. Rather than a mere collection of bedrooms, Don Mills was designed to be a miniature city with four distinct neighbourhoods linked to a central hub for shopping and employment. Taylor’s insight proved phenomenally popular and Don Mills, located within what was then the township of North York, quickly became the blueprint for countless other postwar suburbs across the country.
Today, of course, Don Mills and its many offspring are dismissed by elite 21st century urbanists as soulless examples of Earth-destroying suburban sprawl. But a closer look and an open mind offers insights revealing a potential solution to what ails Canada today. Within the serpentine crescents, terraces and trails of Don Mills lies a model of urban growth that has long enticed planners and homeowners alike – the chance to start over by creating a place for people to live free from the inertia and complications of existing locales. It has gone by many different names over the past years, including garden city, satellite city or planned community.
But it is best known as the New Town. With Canada in the grasp of a seemingly intractable housing crisis, and with other countries now embracing the New Town model, it’s time to give this idea a new look.
Starting Over, One More Time
“For more than a century the idea of building New Towns has captured the imagination of urban planners,” writes Harvard University professor Ann Forsyth in her recent book New Towns for the Twenty-First Century: A Guide to Planned Communities Worldwide. “Built from scratch, New Towns can implement new concepts about efficient and affordable development, socially balanced communities, environmentally sensitive design, innovative industrial spaces, healthy place making, and supportive services.”
Within the serpentine crescents, terraces and trails of Don Mills lies a model of urban growth that has long enticed planners and homeowners alike – the chance to start over.
As Forsyth’s explains, a New Town is any freestanding, independent urban area not directly connected to any other existing city or town. It might be a satellite community linked to some other nearby built-up centre, or it might stand completely on its own, with its own elected officials and administration. The other key characteristic is its newness. That it has been built from scratch means it is largely free from the demands of existing regulations, red tape, residents or meddling NIMBYish anti-growth activists. A New Town thus offers the enticing opportunity to begin with a completely clean slate. Her research lists 533 New Towns built around the world during the 20th century.
A clean slate: Ann Forsyth, Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University, defines a New Town as any self-contained, scratch-built development not directly connected to existing urban areas. Her book New Towns for the Twenty-First Century identifies 533 New Towns built around the world during the 20th century.
The idea was born in Great Britain at the end of the Victorian era when its largest cities were being overwhelmed by an unprecedented and uncontrolled population boom. The replacement of Britain’s agricultural economy in the Industrial Age meant hundreds of thousands of working-class Britons were forced to live in cramped and unsanitary urban slums. Frustrated by the many societal ills created by these conditions, social reformer Ebenezer Howard sought a way to get the workers out of town. He decided they should live instead in a series of new, self-sufficient, planned communities away from existing urban cesspools.
Howard called his new creation “garden cities”. They were intended to combine residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural areas all within a greenbelt or agricultural preserve. Living there would be good for both the body and spirit – each one a little Eden. “Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together,” Howard wrote in his seminal 1902 work Garden Cities of To-Morrow. Among the first examples were Letchworth, Brenthan Garden and Welwyn, all within a short distance of London. Other visionaries and reformers around the world were soon building garden cities inspired by Howard’s dream.
A second wave of British New Towns followed in the wake of the Second World War and were meant to satisfy the needs of returning soldiers and their young families. Stevenage, today with a population of 90,000, was the first to be built under the 1946 New Towns Act – one of eight created on the outskirts of London in order to slow the city’s growth. Construction of other New Towns followed in the English Northeast, the Midlands and Scotland. The best-known today is Milton Keynes, about 80 kms northwest of London, which boasts a population of more than 250,000 residents.
“Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together”: British social reformer Ebenezer Howard sought to free workers from life in urban slums. His solution was a series of newly-build “garden cities” surrounded by greenspace. At right, Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire, one of the first New Towns to be constructed. (Sources of photos: (left) Welwyn Garden City Library; (right) The Garden Cities of Tomorrow by Ebenezer Howard)
Unfortunately, Howard’s initial experiment and its subsequent iterations never fully realized the lofty goals of making British housing both idyllic and affordable. While New Towns still exist today, their presence is decidedly modest. This is partly due to their singular focus on housing the working class in monotonous row or terrace homes. Another flaw was a ponderous approval process dominated by local planning authorities, which were notoriously opposed to New Towns. Further, the entire concept was funded and controlled by the public sector and therefore incapable of keeping pace with market demand. The British New Towns movement came to a quiet end in the 1980s when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s budget-cutting and privatization policies turned over all remaining government assets to the relevant municipalities.
Get Building Again
With Canada today in the midst of an unprecedent housing crisis, many experts think a new look at New Towns could fit the bill. Frank Clayton is a senior research fellow with the Centre for Urban Research and Land Development at Metropolitan Toronto University. “We’ve got to get more housing up more quickly,” he stresses in an interview. But how best to do that? And where?
As Clayton points out, until the mid-2010s, home ownership was still an attainable dream for most middle-class Canadians. At that time, however, a constantly growing web of restrictive land use regulations and onerous red tape was already starting to suffocate new construction in most major urban centres, and even many smaller cities. Then a massive boom in immigration orchestrated by the Justin Trudeau government pushed housing demand up even further, widening the supply gap and frustrating efforts to do anything about the growing crisis. In Ontario, for example, the Doug Ford government set for itself the ambitious target of having 1.5 million new homes built in the province by 2031, which would require at least 100,000 new homes every year for the next six years. Last year, however, the province managed just 72,000 housing starts – and the trend is actually downward, with a drop of 13,000 from the previous year.
Making matters worse, Canada is not building the sort of houses residents actually want to buy. Clayton’s research shows about half of all prospective homeowners say they aspire to own a ground-level home with a yard and driveway. Yet Ontario’s official growth plan prioritizes rental apartments and discourages single-detached and semi-detached dwellings. In 2024, the number of single-detached homes built in the province was at its lowest level since 1954 – a year after Don Mills first opened for business. Such a market imbalance further skews prices.
If there is to be any hope of providing hard-working families with the affordable detached or semi-detached houses they say they want, it will need to happen outside Canada’s three biggest metropolitan areas.
Another complicating factor is the suffocating dominance by Canada’s largest metropolitan areas over the national housing market. As the C.D. Howe Institute report Making Housing More Affordable in Canada: The Need for More Large Cities explained earlier this year, what little new housing is being built in Canada is overwhelmingly located in or around the three big conurbations of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver – what the authors call “Canada’s superstar cities”.
But because free land is so scarce in these cities, growing the national housing stock there is far more expensive than it would be elsewhere. And it is necessarily focused on high-density apartment buildings that will satisfy only a minority of residents. As for looking outside these superstars, it’s not as if Canada is short on space. As Donald Wright, a former B.C. deputy minister, wrote last year in The Hub, Canada is among the world’s most rural countries: a mere 0.15 percent of our total land area is allocated to existing urban development.
This combination of red tape, a rising population, mismatched housing supply and superstar cities has conspired to deny entire generations of young Canadians the opportunity to purchase their dream home. If there is to be any hope of providing hard-working families with the affordable detached or semi-detached houses they say they want, it will need to happen outside Canada’s three biggest metropolitan areas. That means thinking imaginatively about where Canadians should live. And, says Clayton, “new satellite communities can be one option for doing this.” Other countries grappling with similar housing challenges have already come to this realization.
What are the reasons behind the Canada housing crisis?
Canada is facing a housing crisis due to a combination of factors including restrictive land use regulations, excessive red tape at the municipal level and a rapidly growing population – especially following a major immigration surge in the final years of the Trudeau government. These issues have all caused housing demand to significantly outpace the country’s ability to build new housing. The problem is particularly acute in Canada’s three largest cities of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, where land is expensive and development is focused on high-density apartments that don’t match what most Canadians want. Surveys consistently reveal that most Canadians families aspire to own a single-detached home with a driveway and backyard.
Freedom’s Just Another Word…for a New Town
Fulfilling a campaign promise from last year’s general election, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently established a New Towns Taskforce to revive Howard’s original vision and deliver masses of affordable housing for 21st century working-class Britons. Over 100 locations across England have been put forward as possibilities, from which the Taskforce will choose a dozen. Most of these proposals will be satellites to existing towns or cities, although a few will be stand-alone settlements. Each will have at least 10,000 homes alongside necessary infrastructure such as public transport and schools.
British housing analyst Anthony Breach recognizes the appeal of New Towns, but warns that the Labour government must not overlook the problems of the past. “For New Towns to succeed they have to be plugged into the most successful parts of the British economy,” says Breach, associate director of the London-based think-tank Centre for Cities, in an interview. If properly connected, however, Breach concedes New Towns could play a significant role in future urban development by providing a greater range of housing options for British homebuyers. Somewhat hopefully, the Taskforce’s progress update released in February specifically mentions it will be heeding “lessons learned from previous [New Town] programmes”. In particular, the Starmer government has vowed to greatly speed the approvals process and lean heavily on the private sector to build the homes.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, New Towns are also enjoying a revival of interest – but from the other side of the political spectrum. During his presidential nomination campaign in 2023, Donald Trump invoked America’s frontier spirit as being central to his platform for affordable housing. “Past generations of Americans pursued big dreams and daring projects that once seemed absolutely impossible,” he declared in a widely-seen campaign video. “They pushed across an unsettled continent and built new cities in the wild frontier.”
To recapture that pioneering sense of adventure, the subsequently re-elected U.S. President proposed a government-sponsored “Freedom City” contest. Ten new city charters would be awarded to the best ideas submitted for creating New Towns on undeveloped federal land. “We will actually build new cities in our country again,” Trump promised in the video. “These Freedom Cities will…give hundreds of thousands of young people…a new shot at home ownership and the American dream.” It is a theme he has returned to again and again.
Writing recently in City Journal, Mark Lutter, executive director of the Charter Cities Institute, and Nick Allen, president of the Frontier Foundation – two organizations dedicated to innovative thinking on urban issues – laud the Freedom City idea. “Freedom Cities could address two major challenges confronting the United States: a sclerotic bureaucracy and a stagnant society,” they write. While admitting that the track record for planned cities is mixed, Lutter and Allen note there are enough successes around the world to make the concept compelling. They point to Shenzhen, China, which took advantage of special regulatory dispensations to become a hugely successful global shipping hub within just a few decades.
What are New Towns?
The concept of the New Town was first developed by British social reformer Ebenezer Howard, who sought a way to rescue the British working class from urban slums. Howard’s “garden cities” were meant to be independent communities away from existing urban centres where residents could live, work and play in a natural setting. Howard’s vision was subsequently adopted in many other countries, with varying degrees of success. Today a New Town refers to any clean-slate urban or suburban development that is set apart from existing locations and is intended to be entirely or partly self-contained.
As Trump suggests, America already has a long track record of building New Towns. Research by Harvard’s Forsyth identifies more than 40 planned communities within the U.S. built during the 20th century, including Irvine, California (population: 310,000), Reston, Virginia, (66,000) and Aventura, Florida (40,000). By starting anew in places where NIMBYism may be greatly dampened thanks to the absence of existing neighbours or grand-standing local officials, and with the possibility of greatly simplified land-use rules and other regulations, the American Freedom City/New Town model looks to hold great potential.
Solano Calling Starbase, Come in Starbase
The modern New Town concept is, in fact, already in play in some places in the U.S. Solano is a planned city backed by several Silicon Valley billionaires to be located about 100 kms east of San Francisco. The goal is to create a New Town comprising up to 400,000 people and 54,000 jobs by 2040 on what is currently empty grazing land near the Travis Air Force Base.
Proposed maps of Solano show a proper downtown core as well as manufacturing and employment areas, walkable neighbourhoods and plenty of parkland and other desirable amenities meant to attract high-tech firms and their employees and families. Perhaps its biggest amenity is that residents will be close to San Francisco but not actually in San Francisco. While the City by the Bay remains at the epicentre of the global software industry, it also has a well-deserved reputation for rampant crime, homelessness and general social decay – and its housing costs are ruinously expensive.
Despite its array of apparent advantages, however, Solano still faces some steep hurdles. A local ballot initiative intended to provide the public go-ahead for the project was withdrawn before last year’s elections due to political pushback and the proposal must now endure a lengthy environmental approval. Given the delays, the owners are now pondering allowing their land-bank to be annexed by the local county, which could speed up the approval process.
‘Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space,’ Starbase’s official X account declared following the vote on incorporation.
In contrast to Solano’s slow progress, Elon Musk’s plans to build a New Town in Texas are travelling at warp speed. Last year Musk announced he was moving the corporate headquarters of SpaceX from California to the community of Starbase in the Rio Grande Valley area of Texas. While SpaceX’s famous reusable rockets, boosters and crew capsules are currently built in California, Florida and Texas, the firm’s global assembly and operations centre will be located exclusively at Starbase, in what was once mostly uninhabited desert on the Boca Chica peninsula. The site has already hosted several major rocket launches and will eventually become the epicentre of Musk’s plans for manned missions to Mars.
Like all of Musk’s endeavours, Starbase seems impossible to stop. Last week, its 300 residents voted 97 percent in favour of incorporating their area as a municipality. Incorporation will allow Starbase to set its own zoning and planning rules and oversee the construction of all the infrastructure necessary to build a modern community that could become home to the 3,400 employees and contractors currently on site, most of whom commute from Brownsville and other nearby cities. In time, it could grow much, much larger. “Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space,” Starbase’s official X account declared following the vote. “Starbase is now a real city!” Musk said, also on X, which he owns.
Welcome to Townsend, Population: Disappointing
With such attention being paid to New Towns in the U.S. and UK, it seems reasonable that Canada should be giving the idea a renewed look as well. Don Mills, after all, was an early pioneer in the suburban model, and Canada has ample other experience with one-industry New Towns aimed at extracting natural resources in remote locations. This list includes Elliot Lake, Ontario (uranium mining, incorporated 1955), Thompson, Manitoba (nickel mining, 1957) and Tumbler Ridge, B.C. (coal mining, 1981). While all three cities are still going concerns (albeit with the booms and busts associated with resource development), not every New Town in Canada can be considered a success. Among the failures that offer key lessons is Townsend, Ontario.
In the late 1960s, the Ontario government became worried that a trio of new industries – a steel mill, electricity plant and oil refinery – planned for the shores of Lake Erie south of Hamilton would overwhelm local housing capacity. “The province was afraid there would be nowhere for all these new workers to live,” says Doug Ramsey, who grew up in the area and is now a professor of rural development at Brandon University in Manitoba. In response, the Ontario government announced plans for a brand-new city of 100,000 to be called Townsend. To get the project rolling, a man-made lake was constructed at taxpayer expense, along with roads, a recreation centre and walking trails.
“It was beautiful,” Ramsey says of the initial work. “And it was to be a true New Town experience, with separate neighbourhoods and other amenities.” Despite the high hopes and ample budget, however, Townsend was a bust. “People just didn’t want to move there,” observes Ramsey. Today, fewer than 1,000 people call Townsend home.
The biggest issue, Ramsey explains in an interview, was that Townsend lacked proper transportation links to the rest of the province. “No one ever built a four-lane highway. That was crazy. If you want to attract housing and industry, you need highways to get around,” he says. Another problem was the lack of infrastructure. Despite the pretty little lake and trails, there were “no schools, no hospital” or other major institutions or features potential home buyers might expect.
‘There is so much pressure on our large urban areas that the idea of starting fresh with a blank canvas is really attractive,’ Ramsey explains.
Townsend was also the victim of bad timing. Just as it was opening, the stagflation era of the mid-1970s began, sending interest rates soaring, flattening housing demand and delaying the three planned industrial projects. This exacerbated another complication: Townsend was almost entirely a public-sector endeavour. The province assembled all the land and installed the infrastructure; only once home buyers came flocking was the private sector expected to participate. But the politicians lost interest once the costs mounted, and abandoned the idea. “In the end, no one was in control,” laments Ramsey, who worked as a civic planner in Townsend at the beginning of his career; at university, his thesis was entitled A Failed New Town Development.
A Fresh Start
Despite the dire example of Townsend, Ramsey figures the New Town idea demands a close look today, especially amidst the current housing crisis. “There is so much pressure on our large urban areas that the idea of starting fresh with a blank canvas is really attractive,” he explains. Relying on a few major metropolitan centres to solve the country’s housing crisis is simply not workable, especially considering the housing preferences of young families. “What can they do but build up?” Ramsey asks of construction efforts in Canada’s three superstar cities. “Not everyone wants to live in an apartment. People want a yard and space.” Townsend, he points out, was to be comprised almost entirely of single-detached homes.
In fact, the New Town urge is already making quiet strides in Canada. In 2017, for example, construction began on Seaton Community, a satellite town adjacent to Pickering, Ontario that will eventually entail six neighbourhoods with a broad range of housing intended for up to 70,000 residents. It will not be a pure New Town, since it will be governed as part of the existing municipality. But is new and largely self-contained. There will be plenty of open spaces and a comprehensive bike trail system along with 14 elementary schools, three high schools, a police station and two recreation complexes. Employment lands are designated along the major Highway 407 corridor.
Seaton Community, currently under construction near Pickering, Ontario, is evidence of renewed interest in the New Town concept in Canada. (Sources: (map) Infrastructure Ontario; (photo) Sabrina Byrnes/Torstar)Activity of this sort suggests to Ramsey that the New Town concept still has plenty of life left in it. But all the old problems regarding land use regulations, delays and red tape remain. He notes with concern that the plan for Seaton was first discussed in the 1960s, coincident with the faster-moving (if ultimately doomed) plans for Townsend. The fact it is only now coming to fruition is yet another sign of the much larger problems bedevilling the housing market, he warns.
New Towns on the Horizon?
Given the admittedly mixed experience with New Towns, how should Canada proceed? The prospect of fulfilling the dreams of so many young Canadian families caught in the clutches of a terrible housing crisis is simply too compelling to dismiss the New Town concept outright. But it must be done properly and based on solid evidence.
The biggest takeaway is that government involvement should be as limited as possible. The most successful New Towns have all been marked by a singular entrepreneurial vision. This includes Taylor’s model suburb of Don Mills, as well as remote resource communities such as Elliot Lake, Thompson and Tumbler Ridge – all of which were built by the mining firms involved. The same is true for the much smaller coal mining community of Nordegg, Alberta – staked out, surveyed, planned and overseen as a model town by the namesake German explorer Martin Nordegg.
The astonishing progress of Musk’s Starbase also cannot be overlooked. While some level of public involvement is no doubt necessary, bureaucrats or politicians must not be left in charge. Even the UK’s current Labour government seems to recognize this. With that in mind, Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent campaign vow to “get the federal government back in the business of building homes” is pointed in the entirely wrong direction. It would make far more sense for Carney to throw his weight behind encouraging New Town development, copying Starmer’s New Town Taskforce, for example, or Trump’s Freedom City competition.
Assuming political acceptance and private sector interest in the concept, the next step lies in identifying promising locales. As the tale of Townsend reveals, transportation links and timely infrastructure are crucial. While New Towns are set apart from existing locales as a matter of definition, they cannot be completely isolated from the rest of society. Highways, at minimum, remain vital to success. Airports, rail links and shipping terminals should also be considered further advantages. As are schools, hospitals and all the other amenities that home buyers expect.
Less tangibly but just as important, promises cannot be allowed to rush ahead of delivery. The underlying attraction of a New Town is the prospect that families will be able to find and afford the sort of home they actually want to live in. And this can only be accomplished if the development is free from NIMBYism, stifling regulations and all the other irritants and obstructions that have produced Canada’s current housing crisis. What makes New Towns special is that they are truly a blank slate.
With this in mind, there are ample opportunities to create more New Towns all around Canada. The area near Peterborough in Eastern Ontario looks attractive, for example. With a population of 90,000 and situated on the outskirts of the Greater Toronto Area, it is well-connected to the rest of the province by Highway 407. “It’s a good example,” says rural development expert Ramsey, adding that since Peterborough is located on the Canadian Shield, “they’re mostly farming rocks, so there’s no concern about losing prime agricultural land.”
Does Canada have any experience with New Towns?
The Prairies also offer plenty of land that could be repurposed for new urban centres along major transportation corridors such as the Trans-Canada Highway and existing rail lines. Moosomin, Saskatchewan and his own home of Brandon, Manitoba offer attractive locales for New Towns, Ramsey suggests, as along as there are sufficient employment opportunities. The same holds true for much of picturesque Atlantic Canada. With high-skilled workers and their families priced out of big-city living and open to more affordable and lower-stress options, the vision of a high-tech, remote-work New Town in the vein of Solano could be an attractive option almost anywhere in Canada. Ramsey even suggests Townsend, with its man-made lake and existing main street area less than an hour’s drive from Hamilton, could still make sense to a developer prepared to put the effort in. If Canada has anything, it’s got room for lots of new cities.
“The pitch of the New Town is ‘Let’s do it right,’” explains Ramsey. “New Town planning allows you to talk about an effective and affordable community where you can live, work and play and enjoy a high quality of life. That still means something to people,” he says. The sort of people who find the current housing situation intolerable.
John Roe is a Kitchener, Ontario-based freelance writer, and formerly the editorial and opinion page editor of the Waterloo Region Record.
With files from Peter Shawn Taylor.
Source of main image: vencreations.com.
