40,000 new homes gets settlement approval in Brampton

The development of 40,000 new homes in Brampton’s planned Heritage Heights community has been unlocked now that a settlement has been reached, the city says.

With plans to bring up to 134,000 residents to northwest Brampton, the city wants to turn the area of Mayfield Road to the Credit River Valley and from Winston Churchill Boulevard to Mississauga Road into “a vibrant, mixed-use, walkable, and transit-supported community.”

Touted as Brampton’s “last undeveloped area,” the city says it has now reached a settlement around land use and other concerns that will allow for “a sustainable and complete community.”

Earlier this year, the Heritage Heights proposal had at least 30 separate appeals to the Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT). The majority of those appeals related to land use and infrastructure issues, according to a report by the Globe and Mail.

But those concerns have now been quashed according to the city, which says the settlements avoid “a lengthy OLT hearing and associated costs to taxpayers.”

“The revised Heritage Heights Secondary Plan continues to focus on creating a complete community with full-service, mixed-use amenities, accommodating up to 134,000 residents,” the city said in a release.

The city says fully developing Heritage Heights will create over 54,000 new jobs and bring “a mix of innovative office, retail, prestige industrial, modern recreational facilities, quality public spaces and new parkland” to Brampton.

Heritage Heights includes a mix of large blocks divided into smaller parcels, parks, lots that will “provide a range of built form options and development scaled to the size of the parcels,” the secondary plan reads.

Larger buildings and highrises would have a pedestrian-scale building at ground level to “transition to lower-scale areas” with lowrise townhouses, apartments, and street-level units. There are also incentives for developers to build affordable housing units like triplexes, fourplexes, eightplexes, and small lot subdivisions.

The community is also in the transportation corridor for Ontario’s controversial Highway 413 project that the city says will be “necessary to support the employment uses proposed for this designation.” The secondary plan includes provisions that parts of the transportation corridor lands will be zoned for mixed-use if the highway is not operational as of 2035.

The planned development area for Heritage Heights is mostly rural land and makes up one-16th of Brampton’s total land area, the city says

Brampton is expected to see more than 52,520 new households built with 147,860 new residents by 2031, with growth continuing to 195,697 residents and 76,693 new homes by 2041.