A municipality of Milton's current population should have its own community college and an expanded hospital to serve its rapidly growing and family oriented demographics.
The population of Milton, a municipality in the northern part of Halton Region, has grown a whopping 71.4 per cent in just the past five years.
According to Statistics Canada census data released last week, the number of people living there was 53,939 last year, a jump from 31,471 in 2001.
When I moved to Toronto in 1997, Milton was still one of several mostly rural communities along Highway 401 on the way to Guelph. In fact, its population went down 2 per cent between 1996 and 2001, according to Statscan.
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Highway 407, the privately owned toll road built in the mid-1990s, changed the face of Milton forever. Snaking its way between Milton on the north and Oakville on the south, the 407 meets up with both Highway 401 and Highway 403. And all those highways can only mean one thing: subdivisions.
A municipality of Milton's current population should have its own community college and an expanded hospital to serve its rapidly growing and family oriented demographics. Even though its politicians are lobbying hard for these community upgrades,
Miltonians will likely have to make use of those conveniently located highways to get down to Oakville if they need surgery or want to take a course (at Sheridan College).
"Power centres" that bring together big-box retailers are being built, however; for instance, the Milton Crossroads Shopping Centre just northwest of the interchange of highways 401 and 407. Whatever the conveniences they offer, they also take the charm out of Milton's rural roots. At this moment, the smaller shops on Main Street in Milton's traditional town centre are taking a beating as a result.
This is nothing new. Long-time residents of Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Oshawa, Markham and Burlington experienced the same unstoppable pull toward poor suburban planning. Many are now seeing the wisdom of integrated public transit and pedestrian-scale, mixed-use development in the hopes of counteracting some of the wrongs.
West of Tremaine Road in Milton sits the Niagara Escarpment, the ecologically sensitive cliff formation. Encircling the town are lands designated by the Greenbelt Protection Act passed by the province in 2005 to keep a swath of land in Southern Ontario free of development.
Both of these facts will severely limit Milton to grow at its current pace in the future, but for the time being there is ample space to build traditional subdivisions.
Milton planners issued permits to build between 1,200 and 1,900 homes over the past five years, but housing starts were down 32 per cent in 2006 from 2005, to 1,247 from 1,833.
The municipality also offers the most affordable new-home market in Halton Region, with an average single-detached price of $363,257 in 2006. This is up only 5 per cent from $345,875 reported in 2005, according to data collected by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.
The average new-home price in Milton is also significantly lower than in its more rural neighbour to the north, Halton Hills ($388,408), middle-class Burlington to the southwest ($498,963), and upscale Oakville in the south ($655,362).
The new-housing data, revealing the municipality's price advantages, may indicate why Milton has faced such a hard growth curve upward. In many ways, it is among the last of Greater Toronto's communities at the crossroads of good location and affordability.
But what about the developments? Next week, we'll check out some of Milton's more talked-about communities and what they bring to the table, for better or worse, in Canada's fastest-growing municipality.
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