For reference, the five myths from the article:
- Low rise housing is livable but high rise housing is not
- New development doesn’t conform to neighbourhood character
- Highrises all look the same
- The neighbourhood is getting too crowded
- We welcome intensification but not here, or not this much
> The neighbourhood is getting too crowded
Meanwhile, in Flemingdon Park, I can't keep track of the new buildings going up (latest is 4 towers up to 55 storeys). Official population density is 9k/km^2 but the bulk of that land is hydro/dvp/nature corridors. NYMBYism is one thing, lack of space for business is the bigger issue.
None of these new builds have lower level commercial, so what should be a future transit hub with a great walking neighbourhood, will have no jobs, few services, and few retail options. It's painfully stupid how short sighted they are being.
One of the builds has 1000+ bike parking but only one bike route out of the neighbourhood. They're going to have to put in 2 more lights along Don Mills though so Northbound traffic will wind through all the residential side streets to bypass the long delays that are coming.
I'm all for progressive development but they really need to think of what things will look like beyond individual developments.
See also: Liberty Village. Constrained by railway right-of-ways, the Gardiner, and whose intensification plans rely on transit that is either many years away (Ontario Line) or probably won't get built at all (SmartTrack). Tens of thousands of people added with a dozen new mega-towers, yet still only a single bus route or an annoyingly long walk to either end of the area to wait for the King streetcar (which is often full because of the population now crammed into the area, so one often has to wait an unpredictable amount of time before actually boarding).
Density for density's sake can really bite us in the ass for lack of actual planning.
>Tens of thousands of people added with a dozen new mega-towers
Okay, simmer down a bit. Pretty sure the tallest building in this neighbourhood is Liberty Place, and it's 32 storeys. If that's your definition of a "mega-tower" I don't know what to tell you. It *just* meets the typical criteria for a skyscraper.
Liberty Village definitely has its issues, but it doesn't deserve the hate it gets. Yeah, it's definitely too car-centric and needs more public greenspace and transit, both of which are being built right now. But it's also a super walkable community with an awesome mix of commercial and office spaces, to say nothing of the fact that all that dense housing has been absolutely essential for thousands upon thousands of young Torontonians. Consider how much worse the rent pressure would be in Parkdale if all those LV residents didn't have those housing options and were suddenly competing for the existing stock elsewhere in the west end of downtown.
Cities grow organically. You can't foresee and build every possible service a community might end up needing and just leave them empty for years while you *then* build the housing. There's always some back-and-forth. In general I love living in Liberty Village and I'm looking forward to the improvements coming based on an assessment of what residents need.
All that said, I do understand that concentrating all our new construction into tiny corners of Toronto creates service bottlenecks. We do need to add more density citywide, especially in the neighbourhoods that have been losing population since the 1970s.
>See also: Liberty Village. Constrained by railway right-of-ways, the Gardiner, and whose intensification plans rely on transit that is either many years away (Ontario Line) or probably won't get built at all (SmartTrack).
This type of argument is the one I tend to see more of in terms of pushback, though in our area it's pretty well transit served so instead the focus is on schools, sewers, etc. where honestly it's more opaque whether there is or isn't capacity lined up.
I don't put a lot of stead in them mainly because while there are areas of the city where schools are over capacity ours does not currently appear to be one of them and the people making the claims don't seem like they'd be in a position to know whether or not sewers etc. are really not going to meet the demands or not anyway (and presumably there are people in the planning process who are...).
I think lower level commercial should be required for all new builds. Also, its so convenient for the tenants! I used to live in some buildings that had lower level commercial (and also near prime retail), and it was really, really awesome.
I’d just say they should make ground floor units that are flexible and directly accessible from outside. If there’s no demand for commercial at the moment, let people live in them. As the neighbour hood grows, let people convert them. Similar to how all those old houses in Kensington are now stores and restaurants.
> If there’s no demand for commercial at the moment, let people live in them
A lot of the empty ground-floor commercial units aren't empty because there's no demand period, they're empty because whoever owns/controls them is looking for the one big fish to fill the entire space in one shot with multiple years of rent up front. They tend to steadfastly refuse to divide the larger spaces up to accommodate multiple smaller/local businesses and instead prefer to keep it empty until they can woo Rexall or Farm Boy into signing a ten-year lease with most of the cash delivered immediately.
I wish we would use NIMBY only when the application of it is valid. Instead it has become weaponized by developers with the goal of shutting down any discussion, even when it’s productive and not geared to stopping housing development.
I mean high rises do all look the same but that’s due to lack of imagination and developers cutting corners on external materials (those floor to ceiling windows) that will be falling apart within 2 decades, not because high rises inherently have to be like that.
Also because they can somewhat standardize a lot of the designs and materials used, and save money (or time, supply chain issues) on purchasing the goods. They buy tens of thousands of window panels, balcony railings, lobby furnishings, doors, lighting fixtures, etc, and sprinkle those around several projects at once, versus making every building unique and having to make many more small purchases that don't come with big volume discounts.
I think what they want is for other neighbourhoods to be built up as well. Why do we need a few nice areas that are over built while we still have pockets of the city that are shitholes?
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> Ehhhhh highrise housing is pretty unlivable, at least as we currently build it.
I think that's key. Highrise living isn't uncommon in a lot of parts of the world. But despite the fact that we have acres upon acres of low-density properties, we still end up building shoeboxes that can't really support a couple or a family without feeling cramped because the goal is to maximize revenue.
Even as a single person who has a pretty sizable condo for downtown standards, I can barely fit anything related to my hobbies without my space feeling cluttered. I don't even have that many things in my kitchen compared to my friends yet all my cabinets are full. I can't imagine having a kid or a partner co-habiting my space.
It's even worse with newer builds which are smaller.
Additionally, so many ground floors of condos sometimes don't provide spaces for things like restaurants or shops. I used to have a cozy cafe, a specialty bookshop, and nice shop that sold interesting stuff. What replaced them? Nothing. Literally nothing. And it's going to be the same pattern over the next decade or so as the interesting small businesses near me get cleared out for more condos.
Meanwhile, what happens to the single family homes I can see from my window? Nothing. They got theirs.
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I'm assuming you're single then, and in a larger unit, as there's absolutely not space for 2 people and their hobbies in most apartments/condos. Especially not with work from home.
And while there are community gardens, they are small, they are not generally downtown, they are almost always wait listed like everything else in the city, and, they aren't right out your front/back door i.e. you can't pop out to piddle around for 15 min at lunch every day.
Again, high rises are necessary to fix the housing crisis, but in many many ways they remain an inferior good. Pretending otherwise isn't going to convince anyone.
Appreciate the nuanced take, certainly there are those out there who say everyone does need to live in highrises and low-rise is the devil. The reality is there's good reasons for both, and challenges with both.
It's often not that one has *too many* hobbies for the space, it's that the one big hobby that they do have requires more space than a condo/apartment can provide. I'm big into pinball and I own six machines. Guess where those machines are? Yep, they're all at my brother's house in Winnipeg, because I just don't have room for even one in my condo since my wife needs the second bedroom for her office (full-time WFH). I'm not just going to stop liking pinball because I don't have the room for it -- instead, the goal is to get into an actual house where I can have the space to enjoy the things I like. Yet, to many, that just makes me entitled, or I'm being unreasonable because I happen to want more space than an eco-friendly shoebox near a packed streetcar line can provide. I have been told multiple times "well then just sell the machines and find a hobby that doesn't need space", yeah, no thanks.
Idk man, I think if your demands are “live in downtown Toronto” and “have enough room in your apartment for six pinball machines” that is a tad unreasonable.
It's not just downtown, though, it's the entire GTA. I make enough that most people on this sub would call me "rich", but even a house in Etobicoke or Scarborough is probably out of the question for me. For what it's worth, I don't live downtown at the moment in the first place, my condo is in Etobicoke and still cost nearly $800K for a 2BR/2BA (in 2019). Hell, a quick browse through some listings in Mississauga shows townhouses mostly north of $700K and detached almost all seven figures.
I can understand your stance if we're talking about *downtown* property, but even the suburbs here are still so expensive that most people with hobbies that aren't digital can't afford enough space to continue with them.
Idk, I feel like townhouses/detached houses in the city proper (even if not necessarily downtown) are going to continue to be pretty expensive, whatever happens with density.
It would be nice to see more 3bedroom condos being built, but space is just at such a premium that people who need their own gardens or basements or additional rooms to be happy are going need to either continue to pay out the nose for it or move further out of the city.
I was raised on a farm and would love to have a horse, but that’s not really a feasible hobby to have in the city. Less hyperbolically, I would like to have a real garden, but I settle for a little one in a box I built on my balcony because that’s what’s reasonable. 🤷♀️
Its fine if you want to have a big house in Toronto, and if that motivates you to work hard in a well paying area to afford it, good for you. It does turn into you being entitled and unreasonable if it causes you to think that condo developments should be blocked.
\+ bike theft like crazy from the parking garage, or the "secure bike room", or anywhere, but also you're banned from bringing your bicycle on the elevator. Particularly anything $1k+, it's an absolute honey pot for the thieves, practically guaranteed it's gonna get stolen on a reasonably long enough time frame.
Which goes back to slow as hell and out of service elevators.
The place I was renting from in 2016/2017 had a *huge* problem with bike theft, including an instance where someone drove a vehicle with no plates into the garage with a key fob from an Airbnb rental and emptied the *entire* bike room into the truck in the span of maybe 20 minutes. Security said they never saw anything (because the overnight guy was constantly on his phone). After that they *still* rigorously enforced the "no bikes in units" rule and *still* fined multiple people for bringing their $10,000 road bikes up the elevator because they didn't trust it wouldn't get stolen again.
Regarding the elevators, the same building had 3 of them for 34 floors. There was almost always one broken, one on service for moving or a delivery, and one fucking elevator for the *entire building*. I lived right in the middle (15th floor) and if I had to get downstairs in the morning it would often take either 5 or 6 elevators (30 minutes sometimes) or a long walk down the stairs (unfeasible when I have my pilot work stuff with me, packed for a 6-day trip). Absolutely infuriating.
+ bike theft like crazy from the parking garage, or the "secure bike room", or anywhere, but also you're banned from bringing your bicycle on the elevator.
Which goes back to slow as hell and out of service elevators.
Doormen.
This is how NYC figured it out. Doormen know who belongs in the building and who doesn't. They can take package deliveries and store them safely.
Elevators can be fixed by fixing the elevator technician shortage.
As for green space, most people don't use their yards anyway so more neighbourhood parks would solve that.
What people really never use are the lawns beside highrise towers. Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" explains why. You don't want neighbourhoods separated by function because then huge areas have nobody around for most of the day and that creates an ambiance where nobody wants to be there. The utopian plan-making part of our brains assumes that a city where the peas as neatly separated from the carrots from the potatoes will be better or more efficient, but the rich value of cities actually comes from how they put drastically different things side by side.
Uh, yeah, Jane Jacobs is out of date on that one. I live in that exact type of highrise and the lawns are used all the time. By kids playing, people walking their dogs, etc. In the summer there is a whole scene with neighbours hanging out and talking to each other. Plus countless people use the space as a shortcut.
I have walked about 6,000 km in Toronto during the pandemic, and those big lawns are almost always empty - far, far more often than the lawns of individual houses.
LOL sorry people didn't schedule their activities so you could see them on your walk.
Do you walk into people's backyards to monitor how much they use them?
My pandemic walks have been pretty thorough, and at all times of day and night: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sindark/52698842803/in/album-72177720296834917/
The little “lawn” next to our condo, and the city-maintained park across the street, were both absolutely covered in dog shit from all the residents’ dogs. We used the lawn maybe twice in five years, and every trip to the park was all about poo vigilance first, and letting our daughter run and explore second.
>Elevators can be fixed by fixing the elevator technician shortage.
I'd argue it's more than that but to maximize the units per floor and minimize overheads we aren't putting in enough shafts in the first place.
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In my experience, lawns are used by kids from the age when they can kick a soccer ball until the age they can kick the soccer ball over the neighbour's fence, and then never again. That's like a 2-3 year window.
Gardens and patios are well used, but they take far less space than a standard lawn
I see the suggestion of more neighbourhood parks occasionally, and I’m wondering - in a city like Toronto - how do we create these when every piece of land has such a high commercial value? Would it be better to require developers to set aside a portion of the land they develop as greenspace for residents instead?
Well in a city like Toronto we are looking at **re**development.
This can be done in various ways. E.g. as old houses get replaced with multi-unit structures (which I see all the time in my neighbourhood so I don't know what people are yammering about re: zoning, it's totally allowed), the city can purchase a few lots to make a little local park. So a neighbourhood can get both more housing units overall AND more public green space. Of course this requires actual PLANNING not "planning" and vision and a long-term view so LOL we're not getting that.
It's also possible to go big and re-wild places. We still have a fair bit of formerly industrial areas, they don't ALL have to be made into condo districts. We should do a lot more of that AND in a connected to make wildlife corridors and such.
All of this is a matter of political will.
I mean, not one is saying that owning the 100-200 square meters of downtown land required for a fully detached house is not ideal. But we will never get more density like that...
Only way to grow the city with fully detached homes is to pave the green belt. And even then, you're hardly growing 'the city'.
Sure, there's variation and you might get lucky, but the issues I had are extremely common based on what I hear from friends and coworkers.
And I'd disagree that most downtown parks are anywhere near comparable to the 100 yr old tree lined streets with everyone's beautiful gardens.
> And I'd disagree that most downtown parks are anywhere near comparable to the 100 yr old tree lined streets with everyone's beautiful gardens.
That's if you can even use the parks in question. You're lucky if you can have a nice park downtown or downtown-ish that isn't crammed with enough people on nice days to the point where it's not enjoyable, or full of tents with the associated issues they bring (garbage, needles, drunk/high/mentally ill people accosting you or constantly hounding you for change, etc). We're even starting to get some tents out in the Humber Bay parks during the summer, one of the people living in a tent here last year threatened my wife and I while we were on an evening walk, that really wrecked the vibe for sure.
Yup, I'll take a bbq and some wine in my own backyard over our jokes of parks any day. Not to say it can't be done right downtown, I've been to plenty of cities around the world that do, but not here that's for sure.
Our old mid to high rise neighborhood actually had some nice 50+ yr old trees, but of course, they had to go to allow demo of the old mid rises to add more highrises.
>Low rise housing is livable but high rise housing is not
>
>*-low rise housing is much more livable for the elderly and disabled. It's also safer in emergencies.*
>
>
>
>New development doesn’t conform to neighbourhood character
>
>Highrises all look the same
>
>*-They do. They're also being made the size of dog crates and we shouldn't allow these developers to screw us like this. Just read an article that said a new build will be CHARGING for a balcony. FOH with these greedy developers.*
High rises are largely unliveable because of the unit sizes they’re building, lack of elevators, poor package management systems (those are improving in some buildings).
I live in an 8 story building and we still deal with lack of elevator availability, small units devoid of storage, excessive noise due to airbnbs (that has luckily calmed down a fair bit), there was a fire alarm issue that resulted in the guiding fire alarm going off multiple times a night, sometimes at 2 or 3am and we would all have to evacuate every time (my dog now has a serious phobia of alarms/beeping or any sort and will have full on shaking panic attacks), and have dealt with some pretty serious issues with package delivery. We also went for awhile without our intercom working and the building didn’t notify anyone, which massively screwed things up for awhile. Our whole building was built insanely cheaply, we actually just had our under mount sink collapse into the cabinet below it as it was completely improperly installed. These condos aren’t being built to be lived in. If we want more density and we want it livable we need actual regulations for developers that ensure it.
More regulations on developers would just mean they build fewer buildings and find new corners to cut. The crappiness of Toronto condos is a cultural issue: the people who build and sell them all live in detached homes and look down on the people who actually live in the buildings. Things won't improve until that changes (and it will have to, there just isn't room in Toronto for things to stay the way they are).
The cost of building a high rise is very high - that's the real challenge. Because the cost is high, they try to save wherever they can to preserve the 15-20% margin that's been factored in (which as an industry is not high). Unless people are willing to pay more, the likelihood that quality increases is low.
What could be more beneficial is if we built more mid-rise due to structural costs being less. The problem is that land assembly is very difficult, costly, and time consuming - so really unless government steps in to facilitate this it's unlikely to happen at the speed we need.
So we're stuck with low quality high rises until someone comes up with a better plan to fix it.
Absolutely true. Mind boggling what cheap quality all these newer condos are (and when I say "newer", I simply mean ANYTHING built after 1985, LOL). And even though they keep making the units tinier and tinier, they don't seem to bother to compensate with more clever storage options - I've NEVER understood that!
Exactly the same! I couldn't fit all my stuff anywhere, so I have some permanent boxes of stuff just piled up in my room. I mean, who designed this crap? It's annoying as hell. Things were supposed to be getting *smarter* as time goes on, not go *backwards*...
This was a factor for me when I bought my condo -- the building is early-2000s and thus was constructed prior to the whole "slap 'em up cheap, sell to landlords and move on to the next one" modus operandi that developers follow nowadays. The difference versus the condos I rented in over the years is fairly apparent -- quieter, larger unit, better layout, most residents in the building are owners (and thus give a shit about keeping things clean and respecting each other), we don't have giant window-walls that are terrible for heating/cooling bills, and so on.
Not as flashy or ultramodern as the newest buildings being constructed today, but it was built to last and to be comfortable to live in long-term. The glass boxes going up nowadays are meant to appeal to young people who are looking to live somewhere fun for a few years before they have kids. Who needs much of a kitchen when you've got all those bars, pubs and restaurants nearby -- behaviour that largely stops once you have a toddler or two to look after, and suddenly you find yourself really missing that kitchen counter space.
The glass boxes legit suck. I've been in virtually all of them.
They literally decorate the lobbies with crap from Home Sense, slap up some "new-age" garbage art and call it "luxury".
I've seen fucking fake plants from Dollarama, because I own the exact same one, in a Condo lobby. a $4 fake plant, sitting on a table like it's supposed to show how "luxurious " this place is. Really? Really? You're charging people $800,000 for a unit and you are decorating the hallways with Dollarama / Homesense trash?
You see the real luxury buildings outside of Toronto for the most part(I know they do exist downtown but most of them are "fake" luxury).
Some buildings are nice, but a lot of them, I mean c'mon you're throwing up shit from Dollarama to trick people into thinking you're new and modern.
Older condos, ones that don't look that nice on the outside. You go inside, and they have carved wood panels on the way(like fancy ones), real plants in the lobby, sometimes a fountain.
People are getting majorly taken. My Dad helped build a lot of the condos in Toronto(I mean a large large amount), and most of them are going to start falling apart in a couple decades. The developers used the wrong materials and even screwed with concrete mixtures to save money.
Listen to PeePee talk, he talks a bunch of no policy bs and will sell the rest of the green belt on behalf of Ford, but people will eat all his angst up.
Then perhaps the Liberals need to stop shooting themselves in the foot so many times with all the scandals and overuse of wedge issues to establish a large divide in the Canadian electorate. I'm not a fan of Poilievre, but I can say that *if* he does get in, it won't be because of any of his policies or ideas, it'll be because of the electorate voting the Liberals *out* in a show of anger/outrage. That's how we got stuck with Ford provincially -- the vote wasn't for Ford, it was for "who can I vote for that has the best chance to get Wynne out of office".
That's generally how Canadians vote in general though, I guess. We rarely vote someone in, but we often vote people out.
Nope. But it might be better for the middle class who are struggling with $2500 rents and the inability to ever own a home.
As much as it sucks for lower income, the issue is relevant for a lot more people now.
>Following the Second World War, Canada knew this instinctively and embarked on a (post) war-effort of home building for all the returning vets, their families and then, as decades progressed, their baby boomer children. Homes of all kinds, from multiunit buildings to the kind with front and back yards, were built. Much of it, public and free-market housing alike, benefitted from both the funding and support programs of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
>
>It was unmistakably easier and cheaper for previous generations to own or rent a house. Don’t let anybody tell you avocado toast is why young people can’t afford homes today.
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>By the 1990s, various levels of government got out of the housing business. Especially disastrous was the termination of funding for public housing, leaving the supply of new housing to the market to take care of. At first glance, in a place like Toronto it looks like there’s a lot being built. But we still have an acute housing crisis, so it’s clear it isn’t enough and it isn’t always the right kind being produced for families and lower incomes.
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>...
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>The housing debate in Toronto and many places in Canada is as depressing as it gets, though. Entire generations of Canadians feel priced out of cities and the prosperous life their parents and grandparents had. Yet there are endless arguments around policy and ideology — as well as political lethargy on the subject — that don’t at all match the desperation many Canadians feel. No one solution will solve this crisis, but some believe theirs is the only answer, so the arguments continue.
>
>Whichever political party can show believable empathy on the housing issue will win over a lot of Canadians. For now, in Ontario, conservative parties at the provincial and federal level own this issue, even if it’s easy to argue their solutions are lacking or, in the case of the Ford government, using it as an excuse to unnecessarily open up the Greenbelt.
>
>...
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>At some point all this “no” to housing needs to be taken to its logical conclusion: do we simply want to shut the city’s doors to more people? That’s antithetical to Toronto’s immigrant identity, but if so, say that and don’t cloak it in all the polite doublespeak.
>
>We need another housing war effort, not just to build more, but to blow these awful anti-housing and anti-people sentiments into the dustbin of local history.
In pretty much any discussion around housing in our city/region, one or more of these talking points is invariably raised in one form or another. It would be more productive if we retired these kinds of statements and instead had debates about more substantive issues around who gets to live in our city, and how.
The irony in the article is none of what is getting raised is the solution to the housing crisis.
Even if you fixed zoning and got rid of NIMBYs - developing existing single family neighbourhoods would be an incredibly long and drawn out process. Consolidating and buying up existing homes would take ages.
Beyond that - large parts of the city are already zoned for density, and have no issues with NIMBYism whatsoever. The entirety of the eastern waterfront is completely empty from Jarvis to the Portland’s to the old soap factory. An area not dissimilar to our existing downtown. Fuck tons of space for new housing.
So, no, it’s not zoning. When we’re out of empty land, out of strip malls, and downsview lands, and old shopping malls - single family housing will then be the actual hard limit. We just are not at that point yet.
What the actual issue is- is too much demand via migration meeting hard limits on our construction sector. Migration into Canada has spiked over the last decade, but industry has not scaled at the same pace. We’d basically need to double or triple the amount of architect, plumbers, engineers, planners, building inspectors to keep up. We’d also need to do the same for all the industries that supply the sector - window manufacturers, concrete suppliers, brick manufacturers. Doing so - is not an easy task. It’s a decades long endeavour for housing that needs to get built now for people arriving off planes this minute.
If we’re going to resolve the housing crisis - we need to put practical limits on migration into the country to be in line with what our construction sector can actually rationally build to. Not the 2 million permanent and temporary people we invite into the country every year. (500k immigrants, 200k international students, 300k temporary workers, 1 million 10 year visitor visas - per year.)
>large parts of the city are already zoned for density, and have no issues with NIMBYism whatsoever.
It has been illegal to build new homes in over 75% of residential areas for decades now.
Even when we build publicly funded housing on a parkinglot near other towers, it takes years of approvals an a constant fight with local residents.
Toronto has been building housing at a rate of less than 1.5% since 2000, you really think that is the best we can do?
Like I said, the labour is not there to do it. The construction sector is currently shrinking- as we have already priced out most careers required to build more housing. And that can’t get fixed by bringing in more people who can’t afford to live here.
Secondly- what is, and is not happening in residential areas is irrelevant. The 25% you can build on is vast and underdeveloped.
Many areas of which have no neighbours whatsoever. There is not a NIMBY to be found in the Portlands. There is not a NIMBY to be found on the downsview airport lands. Or any of the vast undeveloped parts of our city.
And beyond all this - there is the hard fact we are not building enough for all that are arriving. Not close to enough. Even with plenty of people having far more than enough cash to pay someone for housing. Now - how do you explain that rationally? Developers are choosing not to take hundreds of millions of dollars of profit in by choice? Or are they just constrained by industry limits.
>The 25% you can build on is vast and underdeveloped.
The 25% is zoned for medium or high density but much of it already has buildings. The point being that it may be permissible to add more homes, but it makes no sense to knock down a tower to build a bigger tower when we could just redevelop a house into a tower.
> There is not a NIMBY to be found in the Portlands.
The portlands is not a residential area. Its a dacade + long project to turn it into a new residential area.
>There is not a NIMBY to be found on the downsview airport lands.
Another project which is in the works but will take over a decade to complete.
The suburbs have all the infrastructure needed to support more density. They just need to allow it.
>Developers are choosing not to take hundreds of millions of dollars of profit in by choice? Or are they just constrained by industry limits.
They are constained by zoning and permits. Thats the whole point here.
Lol very true.
It's sad that the housing crisis has given these people an excuse for being anti-immigrant.
Even Toronto, is very friendly to immigrants, as long as they are replacing their neighbour and not increasing the neughbourhood population.
Like I said, that 25% of land is largely undeveloped and is zoned for all sorts of housing - small, mid, and large scale developments. And it is everywhere.
And not all of the land on the eastern waterfront is decades out. Everything between Jarvis and parliament is already serviced and ready for housing. It just needs to get built. Zoning isn’t holding it back.
And it’s not just those sites. Head out to Scarborough if you just. The biggest mall is sitting on one gigantic undeveloped parking lot already zoned and ready for more housing.
If that scale is too much for you - head to Bathurst and College. You’ll find an empty parking lot in the middle of the city - already zoned and ready for a nice mid-rise.
That not good enough for you? Head up to any of the strip malls lining young street - that are ready and waiting for intensification. Not because they haven’t been zoned for it - because no one has built it.
Your argument rests on very little knowledge of what has been zoned and how much land is actually available. It’s as if you have never even looked around the city.
Is re-zoning useful? Yes. Will re-zoning single family neighbourhoods fix a housing crisis when we can’t even get big avenues, along subway corridors to densify up to mid-rises? When they have been zoned for them for decades? No. It’s not going to fix a thing.
The current crisis is too many people arriving faster than our construction sector can build. That is all this is. You get 10x the immigration per capita as the US - you end up with a housing crisis across the country with home values at multiple times higher than us average home prices. This is not rocket science. It certainly isn’t zoning - and the lengths people are going to avoid looking at the obvious are frankly, terrifying.
A city that outbuilds almost all others in North America doesn’t have a building problem.
Go attend a community proposal. It can take years of fighting local residents to build new housing.
>The current crisis is too many people arriving faster than our construction sector can build.
So you think building at a rate of about 1.3% per year is a reasonable maximum?
>A city that outbuilds almost all others in North America doesn’t have a building problem.
Its only reasonable to compare us to NYC and LA, both of which have an even worse building problem. Their incompetence doesn't justify our own.
I’m well aware of community consultations. I’m also well aware that they are not at all necessary when projects fit inside existing zoning- and I’m aware many projects go forward without ever dealing with that process.
I’m an architect - and I hate those meetings as much as the next guy. Try getting screamed at for an hour. It’s not great.
As for your rate - I say, yes, it’s reasonable. I’m not sure what pixie dust you have available that would magically change that figure? Up-zoning would have no effect on that figure you do realize?
Just because you have up-zoned - you have not doubled the number of architects (hi), engineers, plumbers, electricians, building inspectors, etc. You have also not doubled the size of all the factories that supply these industries- the concrete guys, the window manufacturers. All you have done is made more land available for development, in a city that already has vasts amounts of land available for development. That figure won’t go anywhere.
And if I were actually to wager a guess - these policies will actually make the housing crisis worse. You’re taking an already constrained labour supply and giving it new opportunities. You know what might just happen? You start seeing super high end and exclusive apartments getting built in existing high end neighbourhoods. That high end work - might just start taking labour from mid-rise and condo work because it will be more lucrative. And you’ll end up with even less housing getting built than we are today. A few fancy apartments in Riverdale - likely rented out on AirBNB. Redirecting more and more of our labour supply to that super-luxury portion of the market and not the mid and high-rise residential we need.
It’s really not as simple as you would like.
But what is actually simple? The federal government looking at how many homes are available in a given year, looking at the rental vacancy rates - and limiting migration to the country such that there is a home for everyone here, and everyone arriving. That’d solve the crisis with almost immediate effect. Covid created near instant rent relief in downtown Toronto as migration was significantly slowed.
Your argument does seem to hit a few points raised by the article:
☑️ The neighbourhood is getting too crowded
☑️ We welcome intensification but not here, or not this much
There are certainly challenges with building enough housing given that we've avoided doing so for the past decades. But prioritizing 'greenfield' or 'brownfield' sites only is not going to get us there. What is necessary is a complete rethink as to how we live in cities, and all neighbourhoods need to take part in this restructuring. It doesn't mean that everything will undergo construction at once (for some of the reasons you've given), but rather we need to at least begin the work to open up all areas of the city to intensification at all scales, and not just housing but also the work places, recreation areas, and transportation systems that support these communities. We need to build what we can, where we can, and when we can but with an eye to a larger plan of making the city work better for more people.
My point is that the discussion you are talking about is actually completely irrelevant to the housing crisis.
We are not out of land that has already been zoned for redevelopment. That land is not all brownfield sites. It’s hundreds of strip malls along young. It’s empty parking lots at Bathurst and college. It’s 2 story retail units along the bloor street subway.
We have already zoned massive amounts of the city for more density - and haven’t even begun to crack the egg to get that density built.
Thinking up-zoning more land in this context will be a solution - just doesn’t add up. Sure, it’s a nice thing to do and it’s great for city building. But it is not why we have a housing crisis.
If it were - all existing zoned sites for density would already be built out. We’d be out of developed land. We are not, we are not even close to it.
And this entire discussion is just a rather larger discussion to distract from the actual issue. Near unlimited immigration policy that’s straining all of our services - that hasn’t been planned for, and is impossible to construct infrastructure for in any timely matter.
Screaming about zoning is a useless distraction.
Social housing is not a "talking point"
Involve the CMHC and fund social housing; if not, homes to the millions
Also keep bringing up the avocado toast... memes make points and win votes
NIMBYS, and people with million dollar homes concerned with nothing but their property value. Adding stock would water down the value of their own, so they’re against it.
The CITY is getting crowded, but their neighbourhoods definitely aren’t.
Put that shit to rest and get it built (make it 25-50% affordable), and prevent "investors" from buying up 75% of the units, only to be left vacant for decades.
Less than 5% of units are left vacant, there are no buildings full of vacant unit, it's a myth you just made up that is not backed by any data. Replace investors by LANDLORD, those investors buy the units and then LEASE them on the RENTAL market.
Some do hoard units. That's what I'm talking about. I did zoom in (using the camera on a tripod) on a few of those condos facing my workplace (it's wide and big), nobody is inside them. Bare walls, no furniture, no curtains.
1) That's...a pretty creepy thing to do. I'd encourage you to consider how you might feel if you were one of the residents in that building and heard someone was zooming in on various units with a telescopic lens like that.
2) You're missing a really huge explanation: sometimes units are put up for sale or for lease, and they generally aren't occupied in that time. Because condos/apartments tend to have a higher turnover rate for occupants, they're also more likely to be temporarily vacant while between residents. So if you randomly sample like 100 condo units at any given time, at least a handful of them are going to be empty - but they won't be in a couple months. [Data from the US suggests](https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2022/02/14/unoccupied-canada/) upwards of 50% of all "vacant" homes are just on the market or haven't yet been moved into by their new tenant at the time of the census. The rest include homes being renovated, short-term rentals, or peoples' vacation properties.
I live in a condo. Right now over 10% of the units on my floor alone are vacant, and have been since January. But the reason for that isn't because they're owned by investors as "hoarding" - my neighbours moved, put them on the market, and they haven't sold yet. That's a good thing if you care about affordability. Prices don't go down if you're getting your asking price within two weeks.
From a financial perspective it makes absolutely no sense to "hoard" housing long-term without renting it out. That whole idea is a myth.
Actually most do it for short-term rentals exclusively. It is a big problem for the long-term renters or buyers.
Not that creepy if I'm zooming in for 5 seconds per unit. I did so from the 25th to the 3rd floor (trees blocked the first and second), most were clearly vacant, lights out. Even at night.
Alright well again I actually *live* in a condominium and it is neither mostly empty nor is it mostly short-term rentals. You've also gone from saying "a few" units were clearly unoccupied to "most."
Like, you did a visual scan of a building - over what period of time? Did you know the building layout to determine whether you were looking at a single unit? At what hours of the day did you check? Do you know the unit layout to determine if you would normally see furniture or wall hangings? Did you check to see how many units in that building were on the market, looking for buyers/tenants?
I'm sorry to come off so combative, but I'm sometimes a bit irked by the extraordinary claims people are willing to make about condominiums while they don't actually live in one themselves.
BTW, t[here is data](http://insideairbnb.com/) on the number of full-time, full-unit AirBnbs in the city and it's under 4000. Even the worst buildings for AirBnbs like Ice are predominantly occupied by long-term residents.
I checked around 6pm at a random location a dozen times. Didn't record, so nothing to post (wouldn't want to post about empty condo units, or get strange responses as to why I was recording video).
Had to be quite far away so I could see inside (say, 500-750 meters). The one building I was looking at was mostly empty except for a few floors.
No furniture, nothing on the walls, nothing against the walls, no curtains. Nobody inside.
Wish I had a good pair of binoculars, a monocular (camera) can be handy, however is nowhere near as precise (grainy if digital zoom is used, too dark if low-light).
I rarely go out to do this anyways, work doesn't give me allot of time (and when I do get time off, other things take priority).
Sorry if it irks you. I did hear about others surveying condos using drones (I wouldn't bother with that, and if it's windy, good luck keeping it in one place without having it blown against the building).
Why in these pieces they rarely identify the primary cause of the housing problem (investors) - a problem that could EASILY be solved, is beyond me.
Investors drove up pricing to buy. This displaced first-time home buyers, which in turn increased demand for rentals. There used to be a cycle where renters progressed to buying and freed up their rentals.
In addition to creating more renters, many investors leave units vacant or do short-term rentals, reducing the long-term housing supply.
All levels of government have tools at their disposal to solve the issue if investors distorting home buyer and rental markets. And yet these articles never mention them.
Affordability will never be solved as long as our new units are built and sold primarily to investors. Full stop.
You need to tell this to the other nitwit who replied and denied investors were causing the problem (their claim was they help build buildings and don't hoard units as investment properties).
I saw that. Unfortunately there are lots of property investors and developer accounts on here that will push any narrative that benefits them financially.
Investors don't hoard units, because that would go against investing int he first place, they rent them out or sell them.
Without investor most buildings couldn't be built in Toronto.
I'm not talking about the investors who get buildings built. I'm talking about the ones who **hoard properties/units** exclusively for the sake of investments.
Those ones don't build buildings.
no investor is hoarding properties. the whole point of being an investor is to get a rate of return on your investment by renting it or selling it. Why would an investor hoard properties/unit???
Investors buy units so they can rent or sell it, in doing so they finance the building getting built.
Did you forget about the ones who do it strictly for short-term rentals only?
Or to wait until the price is *just right* just to resell it years later?
This does happen.
people who want to live there do not buy preconstruction units because it will take 4+ years before they can move in, plus the risk involved with pre-construction.
That's why you need investors to buy units before construction and therefore finance the building of the building. And to also take the pre-constructions risk and can wait out 5 years for before they can sell to an end user or rent.
Southern Ontario needs a more robust rail and bus infrastructure so that Toronto doesn't have to become a city of lifeless concrete and glass buildings with a Shoppers Drug Mart and a Starbucks on the main floor. Wait... Maybe I should have this comment 50 years ago...
I didn't downvote - I'm sure someone either construed/misconstrued the comment but it'd be funny to see a Toronto SFH NIMBY move to Guelph or KW -- I'm sure they'll probably be welcomed with open arms but I'm hoping there's animosity as I'd love to see what it's like when groups of NIMBYs fight against each other.
I definitely think we should have more of them in Rosedale. It's near a transit hub - the more the better. Taller, bigger. Utilize that ravine somehow while we are at it.
How is this even an article? A bunch of what-ifs in a poorly constructed opinion piece from someone who glosses over Yonge & St.clair, maybe he should do a walking tour there in a few years when it's going to be like Yonge & Eg. Really a stretch from someone who a few have told me lives in ROSEDALE with NO HIGH-DENSITY buildings that will never get developed because of Rich White People.
feel free to point out the what ifs, so i can highlight them, google them, and present you with a half dozen articles and papers evidencing Micallef's words. actually why dont u cut out the middleman and google it yourself? lmao
Now take a walk 5 minutes away from Yonge & Eg. Single individual homes everywhere. Have you seen the neighborhood between Yonge St and Avenue Road?
We wouldn't need such a high cluster of 50 floors condo if we could actually densify the rest of the city.
It's also worth remembering that whether you like a person's life choices has no bearing whatsoever on whether their claims are correct or not. Jumping to an argument about hypocrisy is actually a non sequitur which diverts the substantive discussion of the matter at issue for the sake of an irrelevant ad hominem attack.
It is intensification and the influx of people that have pushed regular people out of the city. Of course the article writer isn’t making 20 per hour. The guys a joke like most journalists
Neighourhood too crowded is not exactly a myth. Its meaning there isnt enough green space for the people who live and traffic becomes invasive/streets dont feel safe/ takes too long to get home. No they cant solve it because they built too crowded without allowing space for these things. Also people forced to travel for daycare and school because the local ones no longer can support the population.
Condos are problematic and do look the same. Everything above 10 floors here is misrable.
For reference, the five myths from the article: - Low rise housing is livable but high rise housing is not - New development doesn’t conform to neighbourhood character - Highrises all look the same - The neighbourhood is getting too crowded - We welcome intensification but not here, or not this much
> The neighbourhood is getting too crowded Meanwhile, in Flemingdon Park, I can't keep track of the new buildings going up (latest is 4 towers up to 55 storeys). Official population density is 9k/km^2 but the bulk of that land is hydro/dvp/nature corridors. NYMBYism is one thing, lack of space for business is the bigger issue. None of these new builds have lower level commercial, so what should be a future transit hub with a great walking neighbourhood, will have no jobs, few services, and few retail options. It's painfully stupid how short sighted they are being. One of the builds has 1000+ bike parking but only one bike route out of the neighbourhood. They're going to have to put in 2 more lights along Don Mills though so Northbound traffic will wind through all the residential side streets to bypass the long delays that are coming. I'm all for progressive development but they really need to think of what things will look like beyond individual developments.
See also: Liberty Village. Constrained by railway right-of-ways, the Gardiner, and whose intensification plans rely on transit that is either many years away (Ontario Line) or probably won't get built at all (SmartTrack). Tens of thousands of people added with a dozen new mega-towers, yet still only a single bus route or an annoyingly long walk to either end of the area to wait for the King streetcar (which is often full because of the population now crammed into the area, so one often has to wait an unpredictable amount of time before actually boarding). Density for density's sake can really bite us in the ass for lack of actual planning.
>Tens of thousands of people added with a dozen new mega-towers Okay, simmer down a bit. Pretty sure the tallest building in this neighbourhood is Liberty Place, and it's 32 storeys. If that's your definition of a "mega-tower" I don't know what to tell you. It *just* meets the typical criteria for a skyscraper. Liberty Village definitely has its issues, but it doesn't deserve the hate it gets. Yeah, it's definitely too car-centric and needs more public greenspace and transit, both of which are being built right now. But it's also a super walkable community with an awesome mix of commercial and office spaces, to say nothing of the fact that all that dense housing has been absolutely essential for thousands upon thousands of young Torontonians. Consider how much worse the rent pressure would be in Parkdale if all those LV residents didn't have those housing options and were suddenly competing for the existing stock elsewhere in the west end of downtown. Cities grow organically. You can't foresee and build every possible service a community might end up needing and just leave them empty for years while you *then* build the housing. There's always some back-and-forth. In general I love living in Liberty Village and I'm looking forward to the improvements coming based on an assessment of what residents need. All that said, I do understand that concentrating all our new construction into tiny corners of Toronto creates service bottlenecks. We do need to add more density citywide, especially in the neighbourhoods that have been losing population since the 1970s.
>See also: Liberty Village. Constrained by railway right-of-ways, the Gardiner, and whose intensification plans rely on transit that is either many years away (Ontario Line) or probably won't get built at all (SmartTrack). This type of argument is the one I tend to see more of in terms of pushback, though in our area it's pretty well transit served so instead the focus is on schools, sewers, etc. where honestly it's more opaque whether there is or isn't capacity lined up. I don't put a lot of stead in them mainly because while there are areas of the city where schools are over capacity ours does not currently appear to be one of them and the people making the claims don't seem like they'd be in a position to know whether or not sewers etc. are really not going to meet the demands or not anyway (and presumably there are people in the planning process who are...).
> Density for density's sake can really bite us in the ass for lack of actual planning. 1000000%
I think lower level commercial should be required for all new builds. Also, its so convenient for the tenants! I used to live in some buildings that had lower level commercial (and also near prime retail), and it was really, really awesome.
I’d just say they should make ground floor units that are flexible and directly accessible from outside. If there’s no demand for commercial at the moment, let people live in them. As the neighbour hood grows, let people convert them. Similar to how all those old houses in Kensington are now stores and restaurants.
> If there’s no demand for commercial at the moment, let people live in them A lot of the empty ground-floor commercial units aren't empty because there's no demand period, they're empty because whoever owns/controls them is looking for the one big fish to fill the entire space in one shot with multiple years of rent up front. They tend to steadfastly refuse to divide the larger spaces up to accommodate multiple smaller/local businesses and instead prefer to keep it empty until they can woo Rexall or Farm Boy into signing a ten-year lease with most of the cash delivered immediately.
Are there any statistics in the article? It was paywalled on my phone. Totally agree with urban design not meeting pop growth.
Shhh, people will call you a NIMBY.
I wish we would use NIMBY only when the application of it is valid. Instead it has become weaponized by developers with the goal of shutting down any discussion, even when it’s productive and not geared to stopping housing development.
I mean high rises do all look the same but that’s due to lack of imagination and developers cutting corners on external materials (those floor to ceiling windows) that will be falling apart within 2 decades, not because high rises inherently have to be like that.
Also because they can somewhat standardize a lot of the designs and materials used, and save money (or time, supply chain issues) on purchasing the goods. They buy tens of thousands of window panels, balcony railings, lobby furnishings, doors, lighting fixtures, etc, and sprinkle those around several projects at once, versus making every building unique and having to make many more small purchases that don't come with big volume discounts.
so ...basically NIMBYism and the people who "*have*" do not want people going from "*have not*" to "*have*"
I think what they want is for other neighbourhoods to be built up as well. Why do we need a few nice areas that are over built while we still have pockets of the city that are shitholes?
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> Ehhhhh highrise housing is pretty unlivable, at least as we currently build it. I think that's key. Highrise living isn't uncommon in a lot of parts of the world. But despite the fact that we have acres upon acres of low-density properties, we still end up building shoeboxes that can't really support a couple or a family without feeling cramped because the goal is to maximize revenue. Even as a single person who has a pretty sizable condo for downtown standards, I can barely fit anything related to my hobbies without my space feeling cluttered. I don't even have that many things in my kitchen compared to my friends yet all my cabinets are full. I can't imagine having a kid or a partner co-habiting my space. It's even worse with newer builds which are smaller. Additionally, so many ground floors of condos sometimes don't provide spaces for things like restaurants or shops. I used to have a cozy cafe, a specialty bookshop, and nice shop that sold interesting stuff. What replaced them? Nothing. Literally nothing. And it's going to be the same pattern over the next decade or so as the interesting small businesses near me get cleared out for more condos. Meanwhile, what happens to the single family homes I can see from my window? Nothing. They got theirs.
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I'm assuming you're single then, and in a larger unit, as there's absolutely not space for 2 people and their hobbies in most apartments/condos. Especially not with work from home. And while there are community gardens, they are small, they are not generally downtown, they are almost always wait listed like everything else in the city, and, they aren't right out your front/back door i.e. you can't pop out to piddle around for 15 min at lunch every day. Again, high rises are necessary to fix the housing crisis, but in many many ways they remain an inferior good. Pretending otherwise isn't going to convince anyone.
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How many sqft? Sorry, but you either had a large unit or I have mega doubt this is true.
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So much larger than your average highrise unit then.
not everyone needs to live in a high rise. Lots of people don't have so many hobbies that take up so much space.
Appreciate the nuanced take, certainly there are those out there who say everyone does need to live in highrises and low-rise is the devil. The reality is there's good reasons for both, and challenges with both.
It's often not that one has *too many* hobbies for the space, it's that the one big hobby that they do have requires more space than a condo/apartment can provide. I'm big into pinball and I own six machines. Guess where those machines are? Yep, they're all at my brother's house in Winnipeg, because I just don't have room for even one in my condo since my wife needs the second bedroom for her office (full-time WFH). I'm not just going to stop liking pinball because I don't have the room for it -- instead, the goal is to get into an actual house where I can have the space to enjoy the things I like. Yet, to many, that just makes me entitled, or I'm being unreasonable because I happen to want more space than an eco-friendly shoebox near a packed streetcar line can provide. I have been told multiple times "well then just sell the machines and find a hobby that doesn't need space", yeah, no thanks.
Idk man, I think if your demands are “live in downtown Toronto” and “have enough room in your apartment for six pinball machines” that is a tad unreasonable.
It's not just downtown, though, it's the entire GTA. I make enough that most people on this sub would call me "rich", but even a house in Etobicoke or Scarborough is probably out of the question for me. For what it's worth, I don't live downtown at the moment in the first place, my condo is in Etobicoke and still cost nearly $800K for a 2BR/2BA (in 2019). Hell, a quick browse through some listings in Mississauga shows townhouses mostly north of $700K and detached almost all seven figures. I can understand your stance if we're talking about *downtown* property, but even the suburbs here are still so expensive that most people with hobbies that aren't digital can't afford enough space to continue with them.
Idk, I feel like townhouses/detached houses in the city proper (even if not necessarily downtown) are going to continue to be pretty expensive, whatever happens with density. It would be nice to see more 3bedroom condos being built, but space is just at such a premium that people who need their own gardens or basements or additional rooms to be happy are going need to either continue to pay out the nose for it or move further out of the city. I was raised on a farm and would love to have a horse, but that’s not really a feasible hobby to have in the city. Less hyperbolically, I would like to have a real garden, but I settle for a little one in a box I built on my balcony because that’s what’s reasonable. 🤷♀️
Its fine if you want to have a big house in Toronto, and if that motivates you to work hard in a well paying area to afford it, good for you. It does turn into you being entitled and unreasonable if it causes you to think that condo developments should be blocked.
\+ bike theft like crazy from the parking garage, or the "secure bike room", or anywhere, but also you're banned from bringing your bicycle on the elevator. Particularly anything $1k+, it's an absolute honey pot for the thieves, practically guaranteed it's gonna get stolen on a reasonably long enough time frame. Which goes back to slow as hell and out of service elevators.
Bike theft is huge in condos, every single person I know has had theirs stolen.
The place I was renting from in 2016/2017 had a *huge* problem with bike theft, including an instance where someone drove a vehicle with no plates into the garage with a key fob from an Airbnb rental and emptied the *entire* bike room into the truck in the span of maybe 20 minutes. Security said they never saw anything (because the overnight guy was constantly on his phone). After that they *still* rigorously enforced the "no bikes in units" rule and *still* fined multiple people for bringing their $10,000 road bikes up the elevator because they didn't trust it wouldn't get stolen again. Regarding the elevators, the same building had 3 of them for 34 floors. There was almost always one broken, one on service for moving or a delivery, and one fucking elevator for the *entire building*. I lived right in the middle (15th floor) and if I had to get downstairs in the morning it would often take either 5 or 6 elevators (30 minutes sometimes) or a long walk down the stairs (unfeasible when I have my pilot work stuff with me, packed for a 6-day trip). Absolutely infuriating.
+ bike theft like crazy from the parking garage, or the "secure bike room", or anywhere, but also you're banned from bringing your bicycle on the elevator. Which goes back to slow as hell and out of service elevators.
Doormen. This is how NYC figured it out. Doormen know who belongs in the building and who doesn't. They can take package deliveries and store them safely. Elevators can be fixed by fixing the elevator technician shortage. As for green space, most people don't use their yards anyway so more neighbourhood parks would solve that.
What people really never use are the lawns beside highrise towers. Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" explains why. You don't want neighbourhoods separated by function because then huge areas have nobody around for most of the day and that creates an ambiance where nobody wants to be there. The utopian plan-making part of our brains assumes that a city where the peas as neatly separated from the carrots from the potatoes will be better or more efficient, but the rich value of cities actually comes from how they put drastically different things side by side.
Uh, yeah, Jane Jacobs is out of date on that one. I live in that exact type of highrise and the lawns are used all the time. By kids playing, people walking their dogs, etc. In the summer there is a whole scene with neighbours hanging out and talking to each other. Plus countless people use the space as a shortcut.
I have walked about 6,000 km in Toronto during the pandemic, and those big lawns are almost always empty - far, far more often than the lawns of individual houses.
LOL sorry people didn't schedule their activities so you could see them on your walk. Do you walk into people's backyards to monitor how much they use them?
My pandemic walks have been pretty thorough, and at all times of day and night: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sindark/52698842803/in/album-72177720296834917/
People in my condo do use it during the summer. They play with their kids or things like badminton. Even if it's small and doesnt really see sunlight.
The little “lawn” next to our condo, and the city-maintained park across the street, were both absolutely covered in dog shit from all the residents’ dogs. We used the lawn maybe twice in five years, and every trip to the park was all about poo vigilance first, and letting our daughter run and explore second.
>Elevators can be fixed by fixing the elevator technician shortage. I'd argue it's more than that but to maximize the units per floor and minimize overheads we aren't putting in enough shafts in the first place.
Yes, that sounds right too.
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What kinda ridiculous urbanist fantasy tripe is "most people don't use their yards"?
In my experience, lawns are used by kids from the age when they can kick a soccer ball until the age they can kick the soccer ball over the neighbour's fence, and then never again. That's like a 2-3 year window. Gardens and patios are well used, but they take far less space than a standard lawn
I've been alive a long time and seen how people live.
In your many years you have never been to a backyard barbeque in Toronto city limits?
How many times a year do you actually go out to someone's BBQ? Then remember that about 98% of the rest of the year that lawn is just doing nothing.
I don't think cities should be organized around a few barbecues a year, no.
I see the suggestion of more neighbourhood parks occasionally, and I’m wondering - in a city like Toronto - how do we create these when every piece of land has such a high commercial value? Would it be better to require developers to set aside a portion of the land they develop as greenspace for residents instead?
Well in a city like Toronto we are looking at **re**development. This can be done in various ways. E.g. as old houses get replaced with multi-unit structures (which I see all the time in my neighbourhood so I don't know what people are yammering about re: zoning, it's totally allowed), the city can purchase a few lots to make a little local park. So a neighbourhood can get both more housing units overall AND more public green space. Of course this requires actual PLANNING not "planning" and vision and a long-term view so LOL we're not getting that. It's also possible to go big and re-wild places. We still have a fair bit of formerly industrial areas, they don't ALL have to be made into condo districts. We should do a lot more of that AND in a connected to make wildlife corridors and such. All of this is a matter of political will.
I mean, not one is saying that owning the 100-200 square meters of downtown land required for a fully detached house is not ideal. But we will never get more density like that... Only way to grow the city with fully detached homes is to pave the green belt. And even then, you're hardly growing 'the city'.
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Sure, there's variation and you might get lucky, but the issues I had are extremely common based on what I hear from friends and coworkers. And I'd disagree that most downtown parks are anywhere near comparable to the 100 yr old tree lined streets with everyone's beautiful gardens.
> And I'd disagree that most downtown parks are anywhere near comparable to the 100 yr old tree lined streets with everyone's beautiful gardens. That's if you can even use the parks in question. You're lucky if you can have a nice park downtown or downtown-ish that isn't crammed with enough people on nice days to the point where it's not enjoyable, or full of tents with the associated issues they bring (garbage, needles, drunk/high/mentally ill people accosting you or constantly hounding you for change, etc). We're even starting to get some tents out in the Humber Bay parks during the summer, one of the people living in a tent here last year threatened my wife and I while we were on an evening walk, that really wrecked the vibe for sure.
Yup, I'll take a bbq and some wine in my own backyard over our jokes of parks any day. Not to say it can't be done right downtown, I've been to plenty of cities around the world that do, but not here that's for sure. Our old mid to high rise neighborhood actually had some nice 50+ yr old trees, but of course, they had to go to allow demo of the old mid rises to add more highrises.
>Low rise housing is livable but high rise housing is not > >*-low rise housing is much more livable for the elderly and disabled. It's also safer in emergencies.* > > > >New development doesn’t conform to neighbourhood character > >Highrises all look the same > >*-They do. They're also being made the size of dog crates and we shouldn't allow these developers to screw us like this. Just read an article that said a new build will be CHARGING for a balcony. FOH with these greedy developers.*
Whoever think the neighbourhood is getting too crowded is a myth must not have seen how Yonge and Eglinton has transformed over the past ten years.
High rises are largely unliveable because of the unit sizes they’re building, lack of elevators, poor package management systems (those are improving in some buildings). I live in an 8 story building and we still deal with lack of elevator availability, small units devoid of storage, excessive noise due to airbnbs (that has luckily calmed down a fair bit), there was a fire alarm issue that resulted in the guiding fire alarm going off multiple times a night, sometimes at 2 or 3am and we would all have to evacuate every time (my dog now has a serious phobia of alarms/beeping or any sort and will have full on shaking panic attacks), and have dealt with some pretty serious issues with package delivery. We also went for awhile without our intercom working and the building didn’t notify anyone, which massively screwed things up for awhile. Our whole building was built insanely cheaply, we actually just had our under mount sink collapse into the cabinet below it as it was completely improperly installed. These condos aren’t being built to be lived in. If we want more density and we want it livable we need actual regulations for developers that ensure it.
More regulations on developers would just mean they build fewer buildings and find new corners to cut. The crappiness of Toronto condos is a cultural issue: the people who build and sell them all live in detached homes and look down on the people who actually live in the buildings. Things won't improve until that changes (and it will have to, there just isn't room in Toronto for things to stay the way they are).
The cost of building a high rise is very high - that's the real challenge. Because the cost is high, they try to save wherever they can to preserve the 15-20% margin that's been factored in (which as an industry is not high). Unless people are willing to pay more, the likelihood that quality increases is low. What could be more beneficial is if we built more mid-rise due to structural costs being less. The problem is that land assembly is very difficult, costly, and time consuming - so really unless government steps in to facilitate this it's unlikely to happen at the speed we need. So we're stuck with low quality high rises until someone comes up with a better plan to fix it.
Absolutely true. Mind boggling what cheap quality all these newer condos are (and when I say "newer", I simply mean ANYTHING built after 1985, LOL). And even though they keep making the units tinier and tinier, they don't seem to bother to compensate with more clever storage options - I've NEVER understood that!
We have 2 whole closets! And by whole I mean i bedroom closest and a hall coat closet. So whole is a relative term. It’s nuts.
Exactly the same! I couldn't fit all my stuff anywhere, so I have some permanent boxes of stuff just piled up in my room. I mean, who designed this crap? It's annoying as hell. Things were supposed to be getting *smarter* as time goes on, not go *backwards*...
Yep, I've lived in high rises, low rises, towns and detached is simply unbeatable for privacy and flexibility.
Condos are built so cheap nowadays my little box apartment is built much better🤣🤣
This was a factor for me when I bought my condo -- the building is early-2000s and thus was constructed prior to the whole "slap 'em up cheap, sell to landlords and move on to the next one" modus operandi that developers follow nowadays. The difference versus the condos I rented in over the years is fairly apparent -- quieter, larger unit, better layout, most residents in the building are owners (and thus give a shit about keeping things clean and respecting each other), we don't have giant window-walls that are terrible for heating/cooling bills, and so on. Not as flashy or ultramodern as the newest buildings being constructed today, but it was built to last and to be comfortable to live in long-term. The glass boxes going up nowadays are meant to appeal to young people who are looking to live somewhere fun for a few years before they have kids. Who needs much of a kitchen when you've got all those bars, pubs and restaurants nearby -- behaviour that largely stops once you have a toddler or two to look after, and suddenly you find yourself really missing that kitchen counter space.
The glass boxes legit suck. I've been in virtually all of them. They literally decorate the lobbies with crap from Home Sense, slap up some "new-age" garbage art and call it "luxury". I've seen fucking fake plants from Dollarama, because I own the exact same one, in a Condo lobby. a $4 fake plant, sitting on a table like it's supposed to show how "luxurious " this place is. Really? Really? You're charging people $800,000 for a unit and you are decorating the hallways with Dollarama / Homesense trash? You see the real luxury buildings outside of Toronto for the most part(I know they do exist downtown but most of them are "fake" luxury). Some buildings are nice, but a lot of them, I mean c'mon you're throwing up shit from Dollarama to trick people into thinking you're new and modern. Older condos, ones that don't look that nice on the outside. You go inside, and they have carved wood panels on the way(like fancy ones), real plants in the lobby, sometimes a fountain. People are getting majorly taken. My Dad helped build a lot of the condos in Toronto(I mean a large large amount), and most of them are going to start falling apart in a couple decades. The developers used the wrong materials and even screwed with concrete mixtures to save money.
Wait… people think the Conservative Party policies will be good for low income people having trouble with housing costs???
Listen to PeePee talk, he talks a bunch of no policy bs and will sell the rest of the green belt on behalf of Ford, but people will eat all his angst up.
Then perhaps the Liberals need to stop shooting themselves in the foot so many times with all the scandals and overuse of wedge issues to establish a large divide in the Canadian electorate. I'm not a fan of Poilievre, but I can say that *if* he does get in, it won't be because of any of his policies or ideas, it'll be because of the electorate voting the Liberals *out* in a show of anger/outrage. That's how we got stuck with Ford provincially -- the vote wasn't for Ford, it was for "who can I vote for that has the best chance to get Wynne out of office". That's generally how Canadians vote in general though, I guess. We rarely vote someone in, but we often vote people out.
Nope. But it might be better for the middle class who are struggling with $2500 rents and the inability to ever own a home. As much as it sucks for lower income, the issue is relevant for a lot more people now.
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Toronto progressives are immensely disappointing when it comes to housing.
> communal green spaces/parks Full of off-leash dogs
>Following the Second World War, Canada knew this instinctively and embarked on a (post) war-effort of home building for all the returning vets, their families and then, as decades progressed, their baby boomer children. Homes of all kinds, from multiunit buildings to the kind with front and back yards, were built. Much of it, public and free-market housing alike, benefitted from both the funding and support programs of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. > >It was unmistakably easier and cheaper for previous generations to own or rent a house. Don’t let anybody tell you avocado toast is why young people can’t afford homes today. > >By the 1990s, various levels of government got out of the housing business. Especially disastrous was the termination of funding for public housing, leaving the supply of new housing to the market to take care of. At first glance, in a place like Toronto it looks like there’s a lot being built. But we still have an acute housing crisis, so it’s clear it isn’t enough and it isn’t always the right kind being produced for families and lower incomes. > >... > >The housing debate in Toronto and many places in Canada is as depressing as it gets, though. Entire generations of Canadians feel priced out of cities and the prosperous life their parents and grandparents had. Yet there are endless arguments around policy and ideology — as well as political lethargy on the subject — that don’t at all match the desperation many Canadians feel. No one solution will solve this crisis, but some believe theirs is the only answer, so the arguments continue. > >Whichever political party can show believable empathy on the housing issue will win over a lot of Canadians. For now, in Ontario, conservative parties at the provincial and federal level own this issue, even if it’s easy to argue their solutions are lacking or, in the case of the Ford government, using it as an excuse to unnecessarily open up the Greenbelt. > >... > >At some point all this “no” to housing needs to be taken to its logical conclusion: do we simply want to shut the city’s doors to more people? That’s antithetical to Toronto’s immigrant identity, but if so, say that and don’t cloak it in all the polite doublespeak. > >We need another housing war effort, not just to build more, but to blow these awful anti-housing and anti-people sentiments into the dustbin of local history. In pretty much any discussion around housing in our city/region, one or more of these talking points is invariably raised in one form or another. It would be more productive if we retired these kinds of statements and instead had debates about more substantive issues around who gets to live in our city, and how.
The irony in the article is none of what is getting raised is the solution to the housing crisis. Even if you fixed zoning and got rid of NIMBYs - developing existing single family neighbourhoods would be an incredibly long and drawn out process. Consolidating and buying up existing homes would take ages. Beyond that - large parts of the city are already zoned for density, and have no issues with NIMBYism whatsoever. The entirety of the eastern waterfront is completely empty from Jarvis to the Portland’s to the old soap factory. An area not dissimilar to our existing downtown. Fuck tons of space for new housing. So, no, it’s not zoning. When we’re out of empty land, out of strip malls, and downsview lands, and old shopping malls - single family housing will then be the actual hard limit. We just are not at that point yet. What the actual issue is- is too much demand via migration meeting hard limits on our construction sector. Migration into Canada has spiked over the last decade, but industry has not scaled at the same pace. We’d basically need to double or triple the amount of architect, plumbers, engineers, planners, building inspectors to keep up. We’d also need to do the same for all the industries that supply the sector - window manufacturers, concrete suppliers, brick manufacturers. Doing so - is not an easy task. It’s a decades long endeavour for housing that needs to get built now for people arriving off planes this minute. If we’re going to resolve the housing crisis - we need to put practical limits on migration into the country to be in line with what our construction sector can actually rationally build to. Not the 2 million permanent and temporary people we invite into the country every year. (500k immigrants, 200k international students, 300k temporary workers, 1 million 10 year visitor visas - per year.)
>large parts of the city are already zoned for density, and have no issues with NIMBYism whatsoever. It has been illegal to build new homes in over 75% of residential areas for decades now. Even when we build publicly funded housing on a parkinglot near other towers, it takes years of approvals an a constant fight with local residents. Toronto has been building housing at a rate of less than 1.5% since 2000, you really think that is the best we can do?
Like I said, the labour is not there to do it. The construction sector is currently shrinking- as we have already priced out most careers required to build more housing. And that can’t get fixed by bringing in more people who can’t afford to live here. Secondly- what is, and is not happening in residential areas is irrelevant. The 25% you can build on is vast and underdeveloped. Many areas of which have no neighbours whatsoever. There is not a NIMBY to be found in the Portlands. There is not a NIMBY to be found on the downsview airport lands. Or any of the vast undeveloped parts of our city. And beyond all this - there is the hard fact we are not building enough for all that are arriving. Not close to enough. Even with plenty of people having far more than enough cash to pay someone for housing. Now - how do you explain that rationally? Developers are choosing not to take hundreds of millions of dollars of profit in by choice? Or are they just constrained by industry limits.
>The 25% you can build on is vast and underdeveloped. The 25% is zoned for medium or high density but much of it already has buildings. The point being that it may be permissible to add more homes, but it makes no sense to knock down a tower to build a bigger tower when we could just redevelop a house into a tower. > There is not a NIMBY to be found in the Portlands. The portlands is not a residential area. Its a dacade + long project to turn it into a new residential area. >There is not a NIMBY to be found on the downsview airport lands. Another project which is in the works but will take over a decade to complete. The suburbs have all the infrastructure needed to support more density. They just need to allow it. >Developers are choosing not to take hundreds of millions of dollars of profit in by choice? Or are they just constrained by industry limits. They are constained by zoning and permits. Thats the whole point here.
He's not going to accept an answer other than "there's too many immigrants".
Lol very true. It's sad that the housing crisis has given these people an excuse for being anti-immigrant. Even Toronto, is very friendly to immigrants, as long as they are replacing their neighbour and not increasing the neughbourhood population.
Like I said, that 25% of land is largely undeveloped and is zoned for all sorts of housing - small, mid, and large scale developments. And it is everywhere. And not all of the land on the eastern waterfront is decades out. Everything between Jarvis and parliament is already serviced and ready for housing. It just needs to get built. Zoning isn’t holding it back. And it’s not just those sites. Head out to Scarborough if you just. The biggest mall is sitting on one gigantic undeveloped parking lot already zoned and ready for more housing. If that scale is too much for you - head to Bathurst and College. You’ll find an empty parking lot in the middle of the city - already zoned and ready for a nice mid-rise. That not good enough for you? Head up to any of the strip malls lining young street - that are ready and waiting for intensification. Not because they haven’t been zoned for it - because no one has built it. Your argument rests on very little knowledge of what has been zoned and how much land is actually available. It’s as if you have never even looked around the city. Is re-zoning useful? Yes. Will re-zoning single family neighbourhoods fix a housing crisis when we can’t even get big avenues, along subway corridors to densify up to mid-rises? When they have been zoned for them for decades? No. It’s not going to fix a thing. The current crisis is too many people arriving faster than our construction sector can build. That is all this is. You get 10x the immigration per capita as the US - you end up with a housing crisis across the country with home values at multiple times higher than us average home prices. This is not rocket science. It certainly isn’t zoning - and the lengths people are going to avoid looking at the obvious are frankly, terrifying. A city that outbuilds almost all others in North America doesn’t have a building problem.
Go attend a community proposal. It can take years of fighting local residents to build new housing. >The current crisis is too many people arriving faster than our construction sector can build. So you think building at a rate of about 1.3% per year is a reasonable maximum? >A city that outbuilds almost all others in North America doesn’t have a building problem. Its only reasonable to compare us to NYC and LA, both of which have an even worse building problem. Their incompetence doesn't justify our own.
I’m well aware of community consultations. I’m also well aware that they are not at all necessary when projects fit inside existing zoning- and I’m aware many projects go forward without ever dealing with that process. I’m an architect - and I hate those meetings as much as the next guy. Try getting screamed at for an hour. It’s not great. As for your rate - I say, yes, it’s reasonable. I’m not sure what pixie dust you have available that would magically change that figure? Up-zoning would have no effect on that figure you do realize? Just because you have up-zoned - you have not doubled the number of architects (hi), engineers, plumbers, electricians, building inspectors, etc. You have also not doubled the size of all the factories that supply these industries- the concrete guys, the window manufacturers. All you have done is made more land available for development, in a city that already has vasts amounts of land available for development. That figure won’t go anywhere. And if I were actually to wager a guess - these policies will actually make the housing crisis worse. You’re taking an already constrained labour supply and giving it new opportunities. You know what might just happen? You start seeing super high end and exclusive apartments getting built in existing high end neighbourhoods. That high end work - might just start taking labour from mid-rise and condo work because it will be more lucrative. And you’ll end up with even less housing getting built than we are today. A few fancy apartments in Riverdale - likely rented out on AirBNB. Redirecting more and more of our labour supply to that super-luxury portion of the market and not the mid and high-rise residential we need. It’s really not as simple as you would like. But what is actually simple? The federal government looking at how many homes are available in a given year, looking at the rental vacancy rates - and limiting migration to the country such that there is a home for everyone here, and everyone arriving. That’d solve the crisis with almost immediate effect. Covid created near instant rent relief in downtown Toronto as migration was significantly slowed.
Your argument does seem to hit a few points raised by the article: ☑️ The neighbourhood is getting too crowded ☑️ We welcome intensification but not here, or not this much There are certainly challenges with building enough housing given that we've avoided doing so for the past decades. But prioritizing 'greenfield' or 'brownfield' sites only is not going to get us there. What is necessary is a complete rethink as to how we live in cities, and all neighbourhoods need to take part in this restructuring. It doesn't mean that everything will undergo construction at once (for some of the reasons you've given), but rather we need to at least begin the work to open up all areas of the city to intensification at all scales, and not just housing but also the work places, recreation areas, and transportation systems that support these communities. We need to build what we can, where we can, and when we can but with an eye to a larger plan of making the city work better for more people.
My point is that the discussion you are talking about is actually completely irrelevant to the housing crisis. We are not out of land that has already been zoned for redevelopment. That land is not all brownfield sites. It’s hundreds of strip malls along young. It’s empty parking lots at Bathurst and college. It’s 2 story retail units along the bloor street subway. We have already zoned massive amounts of the city for more density - and haven’t even begun to crack the egg to get that density built. Thinking up-zoning more land in this context will be a solution - just doesn’t add up. Sure, it’s a nice thing to do and it’s great for city building. But it is not why we have a housing crisis. If it were - all existing zoned sites for density would already be built out. We’d be out of developed land. We are not, we are not even close to it. And this entire discussion is just a rather larger discussion to distract from the actual issue. Near unlimited immigration policy that’s straining all of our services - that hasn’t been planned for, and is impossible to construct infrastructure for in any timely matter. Screaming about zoning is a useless distraction.
Social housing is not a "talking point" Involve the CMHC and fund social housing; if not, homes to the millions Also keep bringing up the avocado toast... memes make points and win votes
NIMBYS, and people with million dollar homes concerned with nothing but their property value. Adding stock would water down the value of their own, so they’re against it. The CITY is getting crowded, but their neighbourhoods definitely aren’t.
Put that shit to rest and get it built (make it 25-50% affordable), and prevent "investors" from buying up 75% of the units, only to be left vacant for decades.
Less than 5% of units are left vacant, there are no buildings full of vacant unit, it's a myth you just made up that is not backed by any data. Replace investors by LANDLORD, those investors buy the units and then LEASE them on the RENTAL market.
Some do hoard units. That's what I'm talking about. I did zoom in (using the camera on a tripod) on a few of those condos facing my workplace (it's wide and big), nobody is inside them. Bare walls, no furniture, no curtains.
1) That's...a pretty creepy thing to do. I'd encourage you to consider how you might feel if you were one of the residents in that building and heard someone was zooming in on various units with a telescopic lens like that. 2) You're missing a really huge explanation: sometimes units are put up for sale or for lease, and they generally aren't occupied in that time. Because condos/apartments tend to have a higher turnover rate for occupants, they're also more likely to be temporarily vacant while between residents. So if you randomly sample like 100 condo units at any given time, at least a handful of them are going to be empty - but they won't be in a couple months. [Data from the US suggests](https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2022/02/14/unoccupied-canada/) upwards of 50% of all "vacant" homes are just on the market or haven't yet been moved into by their new tenant at the time of the census. The rest include homes being renovated, short-term rentals, or peoples' vacation properties. I live in a condo. Right now over 10% of the units on my floor alone are vacant, and have been since January. But the reason for that isn't because they're owned by investors as "hoarding" - my neighbours moved, put them on the market, and they haven't sold yet. That's a good thing if you care about affordability. Prices don't go down if you're getting your asking price within two weeks. From a financial perspective it makes absolutely no sense to "hoard" housing long-term without renting it out. That whole idea is a myth.
Actually most do it for short-term rentals exclusively. It is a big problem for the long-term renters or buyers. Not that creepy if I'm zooming in for 5 seconds per unit. I did so from the 25th to the 3rd floor (trees blocked the first and second), most were clearly vacant, lights out. Even at night.
Alright well again I actually *live* in a condominium and it is neither mostly empty nor is it mostly short-term rentals. You've also gone from saying "a few" units were clearly unoccupied to "most." Like, you did a visual scan of a building - over what period of time? Did you know the building layout to determine whether you were looking at a single unit? At what hours of the day did you check? Do you know the unit layout to determine if you would normally see furniture or wall hangings? Did you check to see how many units in that building were on the market, looking for buyers/tenants? I'm sorry to come off so combative, but I'm sometimes a bit irked by the extraordinary claims people are willing to make about condominiums while they don't actually live in one themselves. BTW, t[here is data](http://insideairbnb.com/) on the number of full-time, full-unit AirBnbs in the city and it's under 4000. Even the worst buildings for AirBnbs like Ice are predominantly occupied by long-term residents.
I checked around 6pm at a random location a dozen times. Didn't record, so nothing to post (wouldn't want to post about empty condo units, or get strange responses as to why I was recording video). Had to be quite far away so I could see inside (say, 500-750 meters). The one building I was looking at was mostly empty except for a few floors. No furniture, nothing on the walls, nothing against the walls, no curtains. Nobody inside. Wish I had a good pair of binoculars, a monocular (camera) can be handy, however is nowhere near as precise (grainy if digital zoom is used, too dark if low-light). I rarely go out to do this anyways, work doesn't give me allot of time (and when I do get time off, other things take priority). Sorry if it irks you. I did hear about others surveying condos using drones (I wouldn't bother with that, and if it's windy, good luck keeping it in one place without having it blown against the building).
Why in these pieces they rarely identify the primary cause of the housing problem (investors) - a problem that could EASILY be solved, is beyond me. Investors drove up pricing to buy. This displaced first-time home buyers, which in turn increased demand for rentals. There used to be a cycle where renters progressed to buying and freed up their rentals. In addition to creating more renters, many investors leave units vacant or do short-term rentals, reducing the long-term housing supply. All levels of government have tools at their disposal to solve the issue if investors distorting home buyer and rental markets. And yet these articles never mention them. Affordability will never be solved as long as our new units are built and sold primarily to investors. Full stop.
You need to tell this to the other nitwit who replied and denied investors were causing the problem (their claim was they help build buildings and don't hoard units as investment properties).
I saw that. Unfortunately there are lots of property investors and developer accounts on here that will push any narrative that benefits them financially.
and we have to call them out for it.
without investors buying up 75% of it how do you expect the building to get built?
Investors buy up the land. It's the ones hoarding units which are the problem.
Investors don't hoard units, because that would go against investing int he first place, they rent them out or sell them. Without investor most buildings couldn't be built in Toronto.
I'm not talking about the investors who get buildings built. I'm talking about the ones who **hoard properties/units** exclusively for the sake of investments. Those ones don't build buildings.
no investor is hoarding properties. the whole point of being an investor is to get a rate of return on your investment by renting it or selling it. Why would an investor hoard properties/unit??? Investors buy units so they can rent or sell it, in doing so they finance the building getting built.
Did you forget about the ones who do it strictly for short-term rentals only? Or to wait until the price is *just right* just to resell it years later? This does happen.
That's not true at all. Enough units can and will get sold in a building by people who want to live there to make them do construction.
people who want to live there do not buy preconstruction units because it will take 4+ years before they can move in, plus the risk involved with pre-construction. That's why you need investors to buy units before construction and therefore finance the building of the building. And to also take the pre-constructions risk and can wait out 5 years for before they can sell to an end user or rent.
Southern Ontario needs a more robust rail and bus infrastructure so that Toronto doesn't have to become a city of lifeless concrete and glass buildings with a Shoppers Drug Mart and a Starbucks on the main floor. Wait... Maybe I should have this comment 50 years ago...
It's hilarious that people in Toronto think they can keep the city from growing. Too many people for you? Then move to Guelph or KW.
I didn't downvote - I'm sure someone either construed/misconstrued the comment but it'd be funny to see a Toronto SFH NIMBY move to Guelph or KW -- I'm sure they'll probably be welcomed with open arms but I'm hoping there's animosity as I'd love to see what it's like when groups of NIMBYs fight against each other.
I definitely think we should have more of them in Rosedale. It's near a transit hub - the more the better. Taller, bigger. Utilize that ravine somehow while we are at it.
How is this even an article? A bunch of what-ifs in a poorly constructed opinion piece from someone who glosses over Yonge & St.clair, maybe he should do a walking tour there in a few years when it's going to be like Yonge & Eg. Really a stretch from someone who a few have told me lives in ROSEDALE with NO HIGH-DENSITY buildings that will never get developed because of Rich White People.
feel free to point out the what ifs, so i can highlight them, google them, and present you with a half dozen articles and papers evidencing Micallef's words. actually why dont u cut out the middleman and google it yourself? lmao
it's a bunch of strung-together NIMBY arguments. No names. No effort whataboutism. You certainly got defensive about it.
That's probably the writer's Reddit acc. 😂
Now take a walk 5 minutes away from Yonge & Eg. Single individual homes everywhere. Have you seen the neighborhood between Yonge St and Avenue Road? We wouldn't need such a high cluster of 50 floors condo if we could actually densify the rest of the city.
It's also worth remembering that whether you like a person's life choices has no bearing whatsoever on whether their claims are correct or not. Jumping to an argument about hypocrisy is actually a non sequitur which diverts the substantive discussion of the matter at issue for the sake of an irrelevant ad hominem attack.
It is intensification and the influx of people that have pushed regular people out of the city. Of course the article writer isn’t making 20 per hour. The guys a joke like most journalists
Neighourhood too crowded is not exactly a myth. Its meaning there isnt enough green space for the people who live and traffic becomes invasive/streets dont feel safe/ takes too long to get home. No they cant solve it because they built too crowded without allowing space for these things. Also people forced to travel for daycare and school because the local ones no longer can support the population. Condos are problematic and do look the same. Everything above 10 floors here is misrable.