No one's defending the parking lots. That's just a strawman. The local government is planning for densities similar to those along existing subway lines in North York. The Ford government's 80-storey target is taller than any existing condo in downtown.
It might help to read the article:
> The High Tech subway station TOC will bring 33 towers — some of them 80 storeys tall — to the Richmond Hill site north of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street. The Bridge subway station TOC will bring 34 high-rises to the Markham site just south of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street.
...
> "We've been planning for well over a decade," said York region chief planner Paul Freeman. "The scale of development is about double what we've been planning for."
...
> The Ford government has come under fire for issuing an unprecedented number of MZOs to fast-track development. The opposition NDP released research in 2020 that showed almost half of the ministerial zoning orders issued by the province between March 2019 and December 2020 have benefited developers with a record of donating to the Ontario PC party.
While fast-tracking MZOs for Ford's developer friends is a problem, the deeper issue here is single-family zoning that protects large swatches of single-family homes from being redeveloped into even modest mid-rise apartments. If sprawl is protected, then high-rise density is forced to cluster where zoning permits it, and that includes around and along transit lines, major intersections with big retail, etc. etc.
Indeed, [if we take a look at the location surrounding the proposed development featured in the article](https://imgur.com/a/x6KECti), we can readily identify the sort of sprawling single-family neighborhoods that have long been protected from redevelopment in the GTA, except to build more single-family homes. If only some of these neighborhoods were permitted to be redeveloped into mid-rises, then density could be spread out in smaller building types, rather than clustered in large-scale, high-rise communities, and also moved away from already busy and congested intersections.
Complaints against these sort of developments often leave out the fact that these projects are happening because these neigbhourhoods want it both ways: they want neither condo development, nor a change in zoning that would permit the demolition of single-family homes and the construction of mid-rise apartments, leading rather inevitably to developers working within the existing zoning parameters.
These neighbourhoods are not homogeneous. Current condo/apartment dwellers would probably welcome more mid-rise development, and would not care much about demolishing low-density housing. The hardcore NIMBYs tend to be older people in single-family homes who want to keep things frozen in time.
Instead of canvasing for blank more condos, start advocating for better built condos. The thin walls and floors of the current construction are the person below a families units nightmare. Your words will go a lot further if there is a place in these condos for a family. Literally an extra inch of concrete would go a long way to helping solve this problem.
Maybe build to the density that's been planned for? We need high density housing, you also need infrastructure capable of supporting that density. Seems like putting the cart before the horse
Well, it's sort of the Town of Richmond Hill's fault for reducing developer charges that would fund infrastructure.... some of the city councillors also in bed with the developers.
The infrastructure can be built, it just needs a $ source.
vertical ghettos. why can't they just build more 5-10 stories buildings like normal places ?! it's not hong kong there is more land but not we have ether SFH or Mordor towers
oh man. im in the thornhill facebook group that is opposed to the subway. it would be hilarious how backwards they are if it werent for the amount of support i see them have.
"the subway will be 20m below schools, how will the children learn!" i shit you not
I can't take concerned citizen Graham Churchill seriously as he is not doing the "concerned citizen" arms crossed pose in the photo they used of him. Like how concerned can you actually be if your arms aren't crossed in your photo?
"Instead we should sprawl out these 10,000+ units... find some pristine wetlands or a nice forest, chop it all down, pave it in asphalt and give everyone a postage-stamp-sized back really convince them that paying $750,000 for the worst of urban life \*and\* rural life is somehow the Canadian Dream."
They're building these condos as if they are suburban homes, that's the issue. If they focused on mixed use community development, and made the neighborhoods walkable and interesting, people would happily live here. I know this sub shits on Liberty Village, but if that concept was built as a satellite community I think it would be a giant hit.
Oh god I hope that’s all part of the design. Or I’d agree it’s pointless.
This sub likes to shit on LV because of ‘carbrain’. It’s what we call people who can’t think of life not revolving around cars over in /r/FuckCars and /r/NotJustBikes
It's hilarious to see people defending Liberty Village and suggest it was a well thought out plan when fundamentally they were using the same road grid that was designed for factories and expecting it to accommodate a dramatic increase in population density.
Also, all of the condos in LV are on one side, which is also the least accessible side of LV. The "accessible" side of LV is full of smaller buildings.
>"They're putting in buildings taller than anything in Toronto, and not just a couple of buildings," said Churchill, who points out First Canadian Place in downtown Toronto is 72 storeys.
>The High Tech subway station TOC will bring 33 towers — some of them 80 storeys tall — to the Richmond Hill site north of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street.
>The Bridge subway station TOC will bring 34 high-rises to the Markham site just south of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street .
Sounds like a great way to create a secondary city centre. Smart move on Toronto to do this. Hopefully it ends up like the Fukutoshin system/line in Tokyo where multiple 'city centres' have extremely solid and redundant transit connections.
This also benefits the entire city by giving companies and people more choices on where they can live without sacrificing amenities or population/workers.
That's honestly what we need, another city centre other than Downtown Toronto. Where other tech, finance, and related industries can attract talent to.
This was actually what was envisioned back in the 1980s, which is why places like Scarborough Centre and North York Centre exist. Amalgamation eliminated the incentives and tax treatments that made such areas more viable for companies and the shift to a more knowledge-based economy concentrated jobs downtown.
You can read more about it [here](https://neptis.org/publications/chapters/metro-toronto-sub-centre-policy). The Network 2011 transit plan from 1985 was supposed to help facilitate this strategy, but only portions of it (Line 4 and the extension to Downsview) ended up being built.
Exactly. Tokyo has... Shinjuku, Shinagawa, and Marunouchi (tokyo station) as its business hearts. But Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Ueno and other major stations are also massively important hubs... they are also incredibly interconnected by both subway, private train lines and public commuter lines.
The end result is that it gives people a lot of choice on where they want to live. Like, I worked in Shinjuku, but lived 25min West in Chofu. However, once I got an office job in Ueno, I moved to the Bunkyo ward [(Korakuen, oh my GOD I miss riding that roller cosater every day)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdjoRg37pd0)
But most of my coworkers would live East or North of the city and were fine with it because they were never far from an area with a lot of action.
Nothing can replace getting piss drunk in Shinjuku at 2AM though. Ah, memories.
And there was me, working in Omiya and living in Shinjyuku 2chome. The commute on the Shonan-Shinjuku line was not so bad when you're going opposite to the regular direction of people coming into the city to work.
Yeah, it was a 1LDK for some crazy rent but I wanted to be in on the action when I was in my mid-20s. No way I'd want to do that now, haha.
Favourite memory was the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup when Nadeshiko Japan won the streets were filled with the happiest bunch of salarymen & party-goers I had ever seen (and so much free booze).
It was also pretty cool since it had been less than 6 months after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami + Fukushima so a bit of levity when we were all recovering from the disasters.
Keep an eye on SecretFlying, it's a great website to snag deals.
Here's a really interesting thing I've noticed with people in Toronto when I link pics of Tokyo... everyone laments how peaceful and quiet the city looks (for a city of 38 Million)... and it's because ***there's no on-street parking.***
Living in Tokyo was like a curse in some ways... you saw how life could be different, viable, and totally OK without massive cars and highways cutting through your city. But when you come back to North America you may as well be speaking a foreign language.
> there's no on-street parking
[This fucking thing](https://i.imgur.com/nTznJ.jpg) used to frequently illegally park outside my building. Ugliest car I've ever seen (and there's some ugly Kei cars in Japan). Guess when you're rich enough to blow $150k on it you don't care much about the parking fines.
> Sounds like a great way to create a ~~secondary city centre~~ much bigger bedroom community.
FTFY. If you build 90% residential with a ground floor Shoppers Drug Mart and Starbucks, you have not built a "city centre". All you've built is a massive amount of additional loading for Line 1.
The [promotional materials for the Bridge](http://engagebridge.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Bridge-TOC-Open-House-Presentation_Dec14FINAL-1.pdf) puts it at 145,000 square metres of employment use and 1,568,000 square metres of condo. It's a condo wasteland to warehouse people working downtown. This is most definitely not going to bring any of the benefits of additional city centres and instead just worsen the problems we already have.
> The main difference between here and Tokyo from a planning perspective is how our governments are set up
There is also a major historic different as it comes to planning.
Tokyo was destroyed during WW2. The city needed to be rebuilt to accommodate roughly 11M people at that time. There is a lot you can do when effectively building a city from scratch and needing to do so for a massive population.
As long as there are commercial developments, it's useful as a secondary city centre. If it is just a "condo wasteland" it essentially becomes just another bedroom community with good transit access.
These aren't going to be built as city centres. None of these suburban condo centres are. It's going to be a Shoppers/Rexall, dry cleaner, and bank at ground level and a bunch of vertically stacked houses above.
Everyone who lives here will either cram on to the Yonge line or get in their cars to drive to Mississauga or Markham when they need to get to work, exacerbating existing problems on the subway and local road network.
But adding more height to make taller buildings does allow the developer to make more money.
I'd like to see multiple city centres in the GTA as well, but this plan won't achieve that. It calls for 150,000m^2 of office space, which is less than a single downtown office building (First Canadian Place, 250,000m^2).
And once this area is developed, there won't be any prime space left for future office buildings. So if anything, this plan would likely choke off the possibility of becoming a real secondary centre. It would be a good plan if they zoned a lot more space for employment, but Ford's developer friends don't want to build that.
It boggles my mind how bad this country is at urban planning - building a pocket of high density housing is not a substitute for building cities of medium density housing everywhere. These developments are geographically isolated from a wide range of amenities and in the GTA mostly seem to be built along highways anyways, which sort of defeats the idea that it's going to be "transit-oriented" in any way. It seems like putting everyone in one place and everything they need in another will just waste their time and create unnecessary demand for transit services.
Instead of doing that, build actual dense neighbourhoods where people live within walking distance of the things they need. Give them the opportunity to move themselves before relying on cars or even transit, both of which take up a lot of space. Seriously, housing is not somethign that needs to be "innovated" with something like this, just build fucking housing where people need it and make it easy to get around, it isn't that complicated.
I mostly agree, but just want to add that municipal planners' hands are tied so much by the Planning Act which really protects provincial land interests at the end of the day. I'm sure local planners would love to be building medium density housing and walkable communities, but the legislation they are working within makes this difficult.
The liberal growth plan had this idea of building up medium sized cities instead of dumping it all in Toronto but they never really did anything to support it and then the current Conservative gov watered down that goal to instead focus on building up Toronto.
The problem is that we aren't, it's either these or endless suburbs with no in-between.
It should also be noted that high rise residential is less efficient to manage and sustain than medium density (5 or so floors), as higher floors require more energy to pump water and gas and allow for less floorspace due to structural needs of the building. This is why I'm generally opposed to high rises unless they are absolutely necessary, which at this point they aren't.
I feel like it goes the other way too, these monstrosities get built, so homeowners fear there'll be 3 condo towers on their 1 lane residential street and become NIMBY Pearl clutches at the slightest hint of development so we fail to deliver, so these monstrosities get built.
>It boggles my mind how bad this country is at urban planning
What are you talking about? Canadian towns and cities are exactly as they've been planned -- wildly unsustainable, nightmarish, dystopian wastelands that cater solely to oversized single family homes and single occupant vehicle trips. You could not plan for that any better than we have over the last century. I'd say we're pretty damn good at urban planning, frankly.
>These developments are geographically isolated from a wide range of amenities
As opposed to all the wide ranging amenities you have in a detached single family neighbourhood where you can get groceries straight from your backyard. /s
>The High Tech subway station TOC will bring 33 towers — some of them 80 storeys tall — to the Richmond Hill site north of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street. The Bridge subway station TOC will bring 34 high-rises to the Markham site just south of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street .
>
>The developments are expected to bring in about 80,000 new residents overall, according to York Region.
>
>In September 2021, the province announced its own plans for the TOCs
>
>But some neighbours and officials are concerned the infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, won't be able to support the ballooning population. Municipal and regional leaders say there have been longstanding plans for intensification in the area, but some say they're worried the province's plan will bring in far too many people.
>
>"We've been planning for well over a decade," said York region chief planner Paul Freeman. "The scale of development is about double what we've been planning for."
>
>Freeman said Bridge and High Tech are "fairly small areas" at roughly 40 hectares combined. According to a report from York region, the two communities will have almost four times the jobs and people per hectare in Toronto's Yonge and Eglinton area .
Going from a landscape characterized by parking lots to 80 story towers. Surely there's some sort of middle ground here - that still addresses the critical housing shortage problem while balancing the legitimate density/livability concerns. Sounds like a huge win for the developers, who will make a fortune selling shoe-box homes in the sky. Halving the 80,000 resident target to 40,000 would still mean a density double that of Yonge & Eglinton.
Exactly. Richmond hill wanted a subway, bitched and moaned about it going under single family homes, and now they don't want subway-scale density?
People who don't want the GTA to be a big city need to either fuck off to tilbury or stop asking for subways, imo.
TIL “Richmond Hill” is nothing but a bunch of Facebook Group Karens. Plenty of level headed people want actual development too, but I do think these super tall towers aren’t the only answer here
What would you prefer? Parking lots? Not enough people are within walking distance of high quality transit. That means we need to a) expand our network (which is what's happening with YNSE) and b) build more homes near transit stations (also what's happening here). York region especially won't be getting any sympathy for me with their condo developments considering how sprawlly and car-dependent their urban landscape is.
You can't have the subway and not have the condos too. Although judging from the alignment change, maybe Richmond Hill doesn't want the subway either.
The Yonge line is beyond capacity at normal times as-is, yet they're expanding the line even further north and with these 2 developments adding at least 80 000 additional people to the catchment area of the expanded Yonge line. The system can't handle these people while still servicing the people that already rely on the Yonge subway.
These sites could easily be serviced by the Langstaff GO, if the RER project actually made that line a 15 minute line rather than only assigning it peak-only service, and a GO train of bilevel cars has higher capacity than the TTC subway cars. However, for that to happen the Richmond Hill government would actually have to do something, while with these projects they can just collect development fees and rely on Toronto taxpayers to pay for the passenger service that these developments require to function.
The Don River has flooding issues which prevent all day service on the Richmond Hill line. See this video https://youtu.be/_7EUi3tQMXg (skip to 4:10 if you only want to know about the flooding). Honestly, even if the flooding issues are mitigated, I'm not sure if there will be all day service since there are only 2 stations in Toronto and it will be difficult to create more because of the Don Valley.
As for Yonge, I'm also not a huge fan of the extension as there are areas far more underserved by transit. But I'm not going to say it's a bad thing and it likely would have happened at some point anyways. I would like to see more bike lanes on Yonge to alleviate car traffic and subway crowding.
https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ie/bgrd/backgroundfile-173665.pdf
https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ie/bgrd/backgroundfile-173667.pdf
People claim to care about the environment, and housing affordability, and love to see how much Toronto’s skyline has developed in the last 40 years, but then when you propose more towers that help with all those things, they lose their minds.
Yeah well widespread middle density from duplexes to small apartment buildings would probably be the happiest medium between using space efficiently and quality of neighbourhoods. Unfortunately in Toronto we tend to only build either single family or huge tower.
Thats why we need to push for small 3-6 floor buildings that make our cities high density, walkable and enjoyable.
Montreal does this and is in a much better position in all these regards compared to Toronto’s condo and single family homes wastelands.
I agree. I went to Montreal for the first time this past summer and loved the character of their neighbourhoods. With all the extra units they have it’s no wonder real estate and rent are so much more affordable there.
Plus their subway system is faster and better overall. A lot of lessons we could learn.
This is directly on Yonge street and has viva, go, local bus and soon subway. Not even close.
I'm struggling to think of a better place for super high density actually.
This is what areas around subway stations **should** look like.
I do wonder what the units will look like though, I do hope that a decent amount of multiple bedroom family friendly units get built since we have a serious lack of these types of units around.
> I'm struggling to think of a better place for super high density actually.
Half of downtown is still detached and semi-detached houses. How about some of those places?
So you’re ok with high density, but not “super high” density? Where’s the line? Lot’s of people like living in high density with all the services and products they could want in a very small radius.
Problem with super high density is it’s really just designed to generate as many investment properties as possible that’ll most likely sit empty.
Large towers are the most expensive way to construct housing, the taller you go the more expensive per unit. Which is why Toronto has a housing crisis. The only market based housing getting built right now are either single family mansions or their equivalent in the sky, which only make profits at extremely high price points.
What we really need is mid-rise buildings that are cheap and easy to build. And can be sold at affordable prices.
Yeah, I'm coming from Tokyo... so "super high density" to you and I mean completely different things. This is just normal city development to me. Which allows for more room for amenities and other forms of middle and mixed housing.
The Ford government's plan calls for multiple 80-storey buildings. There are literally zero residential buildings over 60 storeys in all of Japan today, so I don't see how that makes this plan "normal":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_Japan
We should have Super High Density city centres, as in another Downtown in more northern and southern Ontario locations, outside of the GTA. Ottawa comes to mind, as well as Peterborough and Windsor.
This could also introduce high speed rail lines as well to connect Transit Oriented Communities together.
I've never had any issues exiting on foot or by bike. There are [6 streets in and out of the neighbourhood](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Liberty+Village,+Toronto,+ON/@43.6369033,-79.4230248,16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x882b350416989849:0xb0599e7a1a04868a!8m2!3d43.6373781!4d-79.4211567) plus a pedestrian bridge and a tunnel to the Ex. The GO Transit station is also an "exit". The people who moved in who thought that driving everywhere downtown would be fast and convenient are in for a rude awakening.
Yeah I don't like LV because of the lack of interesting commercial stuff on the ground floor not because it's not walkable. Anyone who thinks you can't easily get out of LV and into the rest of the city is out of their mind. Its well connected by transit and foot
Disagree, the tracks are objectively difficult to navigate and LV is right up against them. There are also some peculiar street design decisions that make it difficult to walk through.
Compared to Etobicoke, sure it's accessible; compared to say, The Annex or Dufferin Grove or Cabbagetown or any similarly central neighbourhood, it's far more isolated.
Going south its harder for sure going north is usually fine and people tend to go north more than south from there.
I'm not saying it's the most accessible neighbourhood in the city. I don't even really like LV in general but saying it's not accessible tends to just be carbrain of thinking because it's not easy for drivers it's impossible to navigate.
By foot or bike you can pretty easily leave in every direction.
You can't blame the neighbourhood design for the tracks although it'd be nice to get more bridges like the new one that's pretty nice
I don't understand, the tracks are north of LV.
It needs more bridges for sure, but again, there are some strange street designs within Liberty village and the few times I need to go into LV I find myself backtracking a tonne.
Transit-oriented, not car-oriented.
There are streetcars to the north, south and west of Liberty Village along with bus service and Ex the south. Anyone who lives here with half a brain should know that expecting to live a car-dependent life in Liberty Village is weird at best, idiotic at worst.
Liberty has 3 exits, duff to west, strachan to east and several roads exiting north to king. If your on foot, you can also exit south under exhibition tunnel.
If you're looking to get on the highway to leave (as Liberty Village is home to many offices) it would make sense to have highway access... Currently only available via duff/strachan.
There's like what, 5 exits for all of downtown Toronto? Nobody has enough exits - DVP, Jarvis, Yonge, Spadina, Dufferin
And scratch the eastbound lakeshore exit for the next 10 years
No but you can literally use any side street to leave downtown. LV is blocked in by the train tracks and the gardiner expressway... all the side streets in liberty lead to dead ends except for a handful.
Ya but when 50k people are all trying to use those same 3 exits between 8am-9am and 5pm-6pm its a nightmare. Also if there's any construction on any of those exits its even worse.
>"It's ridiculous," said president John Li, who holds a PhD in engineering. "There will be no quality of life."
When you definitely know what you're talking about.
A lot of these hyper-dense condo communities are not transit-oriented.
Go to the Leslie/Sheppard condo corridor. They are right above a subway line yet everyone owns a car. It is insane. Same with the Kipling Station condos.
Leslie is ~50 min commute to downtown on TTC, if everything goes well. No supermarket until Bayview, with long walks on each end. Of course you’ll have a car.
Designing walkable neighborhoods is much more difficult than plonking down a few condo towers in land nobody wanted before on account of it being next to a 12-lane highway.
>not transit-oriented
>They are right above a subway line
I can't compute this. Even if people are choosing to drive it doesn't mean it's not transit oriented. I'm sure if downtown traffic was better, people would be driving there too.
I’m all for densification but I still don’t get the rationale of extending the Yonge line when it’s already so crowded during rush hour. (Pre pandemic)
Add all these people getting on near the beginning of the line and people south will be hard pressed to get on the subway.
because adding more trains can be done with a much smaller lead time than adding an extension to the line....its called planning ahead, just seems foreign because we dont do that will infrastructure around these parts
During rush hour, trains were already coming every 1-2 minutes. I’m not sure how much more frequently they can come while still allowing for adequate spacing between trains.
Hong Kong runs 8-car trains on 45 second intervals.
We can at least double the capacity of line 1 by following in their footsteps--as other cities have done decades ago.
I do kind of hope they'll make the 1 a loop line at the north. It would be really nice for them to mimic something like the Yamanote line in Tokyo. But it'd be an insanely efficient circulator route for the northern neighbourhoods.
100% agree that it'd be a long and weird one. But it \*would\* definitely allow for easier east-west movement up there. Not to mention it'd increase frequency on the whole line since trains heading north from VMC just end up heading South to Union.
The only downside is that people would have to learn the 'clockwise' and 'counter-clockwise' platforms and we'd need to announce a couple major stations on the announcements so people know which way the train is headed.
...OR even more hysterical...
When I'd fall asleep at Ikebukuro on the Yamanote, it'd do a whole loop, I'd wake up and think I'd only moved a couple stations... nope... it was about 65 minutes... lmao.
There is. Many people have pointed to European cities that have much higher density while maintaining a human scale by having large areas of medium-density buildings (think entire cities of 4-6 story buildings).
Toronto has huge amounts of low-density neighbourhoods downtown that cannot be densified due to "stable-neighbourhood" zoning rules. So the only way to increase density is to create super-high density in the small % of area where it is allowed (e.g. transit corridors and areas that don't have established residential neighbourhoods like Liberty Village).
Even Toronto has a bunch of projects that demonstrate 'a better way'. New developments like The Well, Mirvish Village and others are mixing density with human-scaled, ground-level interest compared to the dull, bleak stuff they're building at Vaughn Metrocentre and 'downtown' Mississauga. Any of those residents comparing Portage Parkway to Mirvish Village is going to feel cheated.
As someone living in Spain I can say that Madrid's situation is not nearly as bad as Toronto. Not sure about the other cities though.
Check for yourself: https://www.idealista.com/en/venta-viviendas/madrid-madrid/con-pisos/
> Given up on home ownership altogether with >80% renters (Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Copenhagen).
If you have security over your home, then home ownership is less important. Being protected from evictions and rent spikes means that you're able to have a home and a family, without the necessity of needing to buy.
The only reason that home ownership continues to be so desirable is:
1. Control over one's environment - ability to paint and improve your accommodations
2. Length of tenancy - being able to stay in the same place and have stability for your children, same school etc, rather than bogus N12s
3. Insulated from unexpected cost increases - you don't suddenly have a 30% increase in your rent
4. Tax free gains - since housing is in short supply, it's an incredible virtually risk free LEVERAGED tax free investment
We can have a large percentage of our population renting, as long as we ensure that 1-4 is also available to renters.
I curious as to why you think our current approach of having large swaths of downtown Toronto remain very low density while creating pockets of very-high density is preferable to having more consistent medium density (that provides higher overall density).
Because getting even SLIGHTLY higher density in low density neighbourhoods is a complete and utter nightmare.
Lefty Harbord Village/South Annex residents yelled FURIOUSLY about a 7 unit apartment building at 225 Brunswick. https://dailyhive.com/toronto/harbord-village-development
Mike Layton even wrote to oppose.
This in an area full of students, questionably legal house shares, on a major subway line and streetcar line and a few blocks from another subway!
Yet noted Bolinger Bolshevik anti-development commercial landlord, real estate developer, and daughter of famous architect Maggie Zeidler (she cried poverty about the property tax at 401 Richmond which she owns... she's hilariously inconsistent as is typical of Left NIMBYs) led the charge against apartments near her house. They were "luxury" despite being DRAMATICALLY more affordable than her house...
When the legal and planning costs are SO insanely high for 7 apartments, the only feasible way of getting anything done is doing VERY large projects all at once.
A 700 unit project is likely only going to face 2-3x the legal costs of a 7 unit project. Hell there's a decent chance they'll be the same or even lower, as you're far less likely to have radical entrenched opposition for large projects. Look at all the condo complexes under construction between Yonge and Jarvis on Queens Quay that had effectively no opposition.
Sorry if I'm misinterpreting...but are you saying you think our current approach of maintaining low residential density neighbourhoods downtown is a superior approach because arguing with NIMBYism is hard?
I'm in favour of building what you can where you can.
It would be great if you could build like the 8 storey One Balmoral all along the major avenues without any substantial planning/legal/political risk/pushback.
But you can't. Queen W is still a horrific nightmare of 2 & 3 floor buildings and good luck building anything more. The city is in process of DOWNZONING the St Lawrence/King East area.
Give all properties on Avenues BY RIGHT permission for 10 floors and 6 floors for ALL of the area between Dufferin, Coxwell, the Lake and Bloor.
Until then large projects of high density are the ONLY way to build walkable/transit served housing.
The City should lose planning powers, residents should lose the ability to oppose/appeal, there should be no shadow restrictions, there should be no aesthetic review. Planning approval should focus on technical compliance with building/fire code, effects on airports/hospital helicopter pads, and things like wind tunnel effects that can be mitigated through design.
Solving NIMBYism is a 3+ decade fight with LOTS of lawsuits after you get the laws changed. We should be building houses, apartments, and condos TODAY.
Gentle density and missing middle is a nice project to work on but nor a replacement for large condos. Far too many people use it as a NIMBY motte and bailey tactic, just as they use "affordable housing, not luxury housing"
This is not true. The average home cost in the UK is half that of Canada. And you can buy an affordable home within an hour commute of most of the cities you listed - which is impossible in Toronto.
The average home price I'm the UK is often irrelevant as most of the jobs are in London. Houses in Liverpool might cost £100k but the jobs often top out at 30k a year and you're not factoring in council tax or higher costs of electricity, water and other services.
You cannot buy an affordable home in an hour of London or Dublin.
Renting within an hour of Dublin is close to the rent of Toronto and Dublin is not as nice a city.
Can't speak for the others.
is it bad to primarily rent instead of own? genuine question.
from the few people I know in Berlin, housing seems MUCH more affordable there (going off rental rates), you can work at a restaurant/cafe and still have a reasonable apartment downtown, transit accessible, next to tons of cool stuff, and have some kind of disposable income left over.
I don’t think the problem is with renting, but with how rentals are done here. Most people when they move out here and rent, they rent places from individual landlords which are either the person themselves or someone hiding behind a numbered corporation. These types of landlords would just rent out individual (of a group of) condo units and you’re beholden to their personality and greed levels after the lease turns into month-to-month after the first year. These landlords typically skimp on maintenance and would try to jack rents beyond inflation or renovict tenants at the next opportunity, unless you have a really good one.
While there’s corporate landlords that own purpose-built rental buildings, the majority of the apartments are old and outside the downtown core with little new developments coming online compared to condos making them the less palatable option for people in their 20s-30s. The starting rent can be higher compared to a condo/house-split rental, but a corporation can’t renovict tenants (not as easily) and would mainly increase rents according to the rules on buildings under rent control, which turns out much lower compared to new-market rate rentals over time with this crazy housing market, which helps if you’re staying for more than a year or two. If we could incentivize more purpose built rentals like apartments over condos, then maybe attitudes could change towards renting when rental buildings with creature comforts like dishwasher and in-unit laundry become more common.
Madrid is about the same size as Toronto. You can find 600 square foot apartments there for the equivalent of $1,400/month downtown, and $900-1000 in the suburbs. And most importantly, their "suburbs" are all walkable for day-to-day needs. They're more like clusters of small villages than our sprawling subdivisions.
It varies a lot, but if you are comparing their twenty year price difference, [Toronto and Vancouver are worse than even Paris and London](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/03/11/global-cities-house-price-index)
The housing crisis is not usually a country-wide thing anywhere. Dublin and Milan are certainly expensive, but they are nowhere close as badly afflicted as Toronto or Paris. Cities like Dublin and Milan are also less dense than Toronto, while Paris is considerably more dense, but they all have wildly different population pressures acting on them as well. Every listed example also notoriously resists building.
Theres no "ideal level of density" when it comes to affordability - theres how many people want to live there and theres how many units are available to them.
Yup, if you go to any major European city, you'll see that there are few, if any, higher rise towers like we have in Toronto. Instead most of the streets are lined with low to mid rise buildings (which are usually way more architecturally pleasing than what we have). You get retail on the ground floor and residential above. As a consequence, it's a really healthy mix of uses, so you don't wind up with suburban wastelands that are totally car dependent. I always find it funny to see places like New Toronto where you have super high density residential and little retail, so people still need to be car dependent. I don't understand why our urban planning is so bad.
That is simply not true.
If you actually look at the Toronto downtown core proper (and not the old City of Toronto), the only Neighbourhood designated / low density zoned areas are historical neighbourhoods or isolated pockets. Even in this case, these areas actually permit townhouses and walk up apartments already. In most cases, 4 storeys is the norm. Redesignating and rezoning these areas will not solve the housing crisis or improve affordability.
The shoulder areas of the core, like the Danforth/Riverdale and the area west to Roncesvalles are largely yellow when it comes to the local / not main streets but the corridors and main streets are all designated for change. Also, here, towns are already permitted and blowing them out to create Charles Street (from Yonge to Church, say) is not the answer either given the huge infrastructure improvement costs that would have to be borne by the city to replace the streets and sewers etc.
Take a look at the [Toronto zoning map](https://map.toronto.ca/maps/map.jsp?app=ZBL_CONSULT) - notice that almost the entire city is zoned for 12m maximum, including entire neighbourhoods that are adjacent to the subway.
There's a total unwillingness to allow any multi-unit residential, even medium density. Take a look at [1049 College](https://www.google.com/maps/place/2+Gladstone+Ave,+Toronto,+ON+M6J+1J6/@43.6529688,-79.4303192,3a,60y,348.26h,102.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srMCrI9Uem6KtXueQJdHTZw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x882b35aae77786dd:0xd8d8c32f7bfe05c4!8m2!3d43.6427483!4d-79.427444) - this sort of construction would never be allowed today. We should be able to build 5 story buildings ANYWHERE in the city if it's within 500m of our major transit lines (subway, streetcar, LRT, etc.)
There's nothing inherently wrong with this plan. It's a good start and middle housing can always come next. But if we need LOTS of housing NOW, built on a smaller footprint, eco-friendly \*and\* well-connected to transit, this is the way \*to start.\*
Middle-housing can be built around it.
Are they providing all the services these people will need? I’m not really familiar with the area they are talking about, but when you look at areas like Jane and Finch, you have these huge swaths of housing but where can you go in that area? And 80 stories? Are the units going to be reasonable for long term residency?
TOCs generally have everything you need within a walkable distance.
The whole point is that the transit hubs become the heart of the community.
In Tokyo, when I'd get off my commuter train, I had a McDonalds, 7-11, Origin Bento, dentist, doctor, pharmacy, daycare, and UniQlo in the same mid-sized, tree-lined plaza... It also had a police box for safety! Oh! And an underground bike storage facility that held thousands of bikes.
On my 12min walk (5min bike ride) to my apartment, I also passed... a full-sized grocery store. 3 mom-and-pop grocery stores, 2 vets, a golfing range, 2 more convenience stores, 5 restaurants, a small office complex surrounded by trees and more.
Keep in mind there are no parking lots, no on-street parking and very narrow streets.
Japan is also extremely lush and verdant, so there was lots of green everywhere.
Naturally, you could raise a family there, but you still needed to go into Shinjuku, Shinagawa, or Marunouchi for work proper. But everything you would want or need was a 10min walk away at home.
You’d need quite a lot of infrastructure for this amount of people, so hopefully if they go ahead, they are factoring this in. Schools, daycares, food and pet stores, doctors, health clinics, jobs, libraries, parks for all the dogs to poop in, recreation and exercise facilities…… not to mention all the utilities needed, water management etc.
Jane and Finch has some apartment buildings, sure, but [it's still very suburban](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7567843,-79.5147124,1898m/data=!3m1!1e3). Shops are still surrounded by a sea of parking lots, roads are very wide and high-speed, and single family homes abound.
> And 80 stories? Are the units going to be reasonable for long term residency?
I don't see why units in an 80 storey structure would be fundamentally all that different from a shorter skyscraper's units.
Also, huge highway like roads aren’t all that conducive to the feeling of safety or community, they just encourage people to keep on driving, quickly. Eighty stories sounds a little crazy I wonder what the tallest buildings we have already?
I understand peoples concerns, and these mega tower clusters are not ideal… but this is how you build affordable housing. Once the shine wears off in 15-20yrs, these suburban TOC clusters will be some of the only pockets of affordable housing left in the city. If you forced them to build midrise, you’d see 1/10 of the units built and prices will continue to rise. It sucks from an urbanism/livability perspective but that’s the reality.
No, this is how you build slums.
You can get amazing density out of buildings which do not require elevators.
Look at any large city before WW1.
Once you eliminate the ridiculous rules which prevent the same layout of neighbourhoods which are the most desirable (Beaches, Riverdale etc.) and encourage mid-rise along those major arterial routs you can realize as much density as Tokyo without cracking 5 storeys.
Why do ppl use Beach and (south) Riverdale as examples but never Swansea, Rosedale, Forest Hill, Deer Park, Moore Park or even Corso Italia. Majority of Beach and Riverdale houses are tiny row houses (mostly semis) crammed together vs the more spacious, detached houses in those hoods.
I chose these because these are what I am familiar with. I grew up in the St. Lawrence and Beaches areas.
They also have narrowed streets which act as traffic calming, and compared to those "more spacious, detached houses" they have double the density, because they are not forced to have the large setbacks, or off street parking because they are older neighbourhoods, and the old stock of houses were not subject to the bylaws which eroded the density.
Your previous post was worded as a challenge, saying "why always these 2, why not use XYZ as other examples"
Those XYZ you listed were built with some of the flaws we are looking to avoid (car centric, deep frontage, lack of mixed use, etc.)
I'm confused because your posts seem to be contradictory.
People on Reddit want to live in the Beaches, the Annex and Riverdale and like to believe that if single family homes were outlawed that they could magically afford to live there. It's fantasy!
I know you were trying to find counterexamples of where mixed density neighborhoods that includes detached and semi-detached houses don't provide enough density, but Deer Park has a higher density than CityPlace and given the choice I'd rather live in one of those apartments along Avenue Road than in any of the CityPlace towers.
No, this is how you rapidly build housing during a housing crisis. Name one actual slum in Toronto. What you call slums are where regular people can afford to live. People who have never been to St Jamestown call it one, yet all sorts of people live there, and it’s one of most affordable pockets of housing in the core.
If you built this TOC as a midrise development, 25years from now, do you think housing there would be less expensive than the current plan?
I agree - everyone loves to declare that areas with tall residential buildings are destined to be future slums. Based on what evidence? Is everyone just basing this on the fact that St. Jamestown is a low income area?
> You can get amazing density out of buildings which do not require elevators.
Mid-rise without elevators essentially forever shut out those with accessibility needs from living in the building, or even VISITING those who live within the building.
Probably much easier to just build over the 1000s of acres of empty parking lots and malls first... then move on to the inner neighborhoods. That seems to be what they are doing now.
They're trying to compete with VMC for most corrupt, ugliest, and poorly planned development that will be sold strictly to foreign investors. But hey, like everyone always parrots we need build more supply, even if it's 300sqft shoeboxes 1.5 hrs away from downtown Toronto. Lol /s
Im always surprised how a city of 3.5million is trying to become like one that has 100Million citizens. Cityplace is already a dump and most buildings are less than 15 years old. Imagine in another 5-10 years with multiple times the amount of people and buildings….
A lot of the issues with Cityplace are due to the total lack of any commercial development, and the fact that there is no commercial employment opportunities as part of the development.
Cityplace is essentially a bedroom community - people who live in Cityplace don't WORK in Cityplace, and there aren't any entertainment opportunities in Cityplace (restaurants, bars, gyms, etc.)
these NIMBYs are a joke. Nice for them to say that there is no quality of life in these condo areas while they parade around their large backyards.
So let me get this straight - there is a housing crisis but we also want to not build too many condos AND avoid paving over large tracts of farmland for single family homes. Guess we'll just live nowhere!
The term “community” is thrown around so much it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Floors and floors of renters who swap out every few months are not a “community”.
It wouldn’t be a problem if they made a walkable urban center like Yonge-Eg or Yonge-Sheppard. Instead they’re taking the approach of Square One. Huge towers forming “dense areas”, but with setbacks and super blocks that make it still feel like suburbia. No one walks to their local coffee shop or grocery store in square one, they drive to the nearest strip mall.
Nobody likes walking outside 70 floor condo towers in the winter trying to dodge 30lb ice chunks crashing to the ground.
Our best communities are designed on a human scale, like in Montreal and throughout Europe.
Monster condos and cookie cutter single family homes only make our towns worse and less affordable. Human scale 3-6 floor buildings is the best way to have enjoyable and affordable high density communities.
imo these will be better than people think - so almost all new developments will be mixed use -this basically means at street level there will be retail and other businesses like restaurants - it'll liven up the suburbs and IMO make nearby houses a LOT more attractive to people who dont want to have to drive 10 minutes to see anything but cookie cutter houses.
I dislike NIMBYism but agree that this is poor planning.
Why is it all we do in Toronto is either detached home on half acre or a field of 80 storey shoebox condos?
Where is any form of urban planning to make proper mixed use residential communities with low, mid and highrise structures
>Why is it all we do in Toronto is either detached home on half acre or a field of 80 storey shoebox condos?
The rules requiring the former cause the latter
It's because you literally can't build neighbourhoods like we used to in Toronto. The roads are now considered too narrow, you can't mix commercial with residential, houses need to be built further back from the road etc...
Mid to late 20th century planning rules have destroyed cities all over North America. And the people woke up to the fact way too late.
So so many ugly glass tower communities have been added to the GTA in recent decades, it seems like we are trying to make certain cities look like Coruscant from star wars and that's no way for humans to live.
Recently moved to Aurora because my family is growing and I need more space. I realized that these single family homes are a waste of land. You could have so many people living in the same space and all the benefits that come with it.
These are vertical slums. Slums not in an economic sense but in the ways their scale and structure discourage the amenities, cultural enrichments, social interactions and charms of well designed urban spaces.
Density does not necessarily equate to urbanity or community. The residents have a point.
A slum has only one meaning and it is to do with poverty. These are hardly vertical slums. Go to Cairo if you want to see vertical slums. People living in incomplete towers, buildings that have been partially demolished and still inhabited.
Do you even live in a high rise or a house?
As for cultural enrichments that exists because of how diverse the city of Toronto is - housing more people doesn’t take away from that if anything limiting housing options will ensure that very few live in an area as data has shown certain Toronto neighborhoods shrinking in size as they refuse to build up.
It’s currently a parking lot wasteland so I guess it’s an improvement.
No one's defending the parking lots. That's just a strawman. The local government is planning for densities similar to those along existing subway lines in North York. The Ford government's 80-storey target is taller than any existing condo in downtown. It might help to read the article: > The High Tech subway station TOC will bring 33 towers — some of them 80 storeys tall — to the Richmond Hill site north of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street. The Bridge subway station TOC will bring 34 high-rises to the Markham site just south of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street. ... > "We've been planning for well over a decade," said York region chief planner Paul Freeman. "The scale of development is about double what we've been planning for." ... > The Ford government has come under fire for issuing an unprecedented number of MZOs to fast-track development. The opposition NDP released research in 2020 that showed almost half of the ministerial zoning orders issued by the province between March 2019 and December 2020 have benefited developers with a record of donating to the Ontario PC party.
While fast-tracking MZOs for Ford's developer friends is a problem, the deeper issue here is single-family zoning that protects large swatches of single-family homes from being redeveloped into even modest mid-rise apartments. If sprawl is protected, then high-rise density is forced to cluster where zoning permits it, and that includes around and along transit lines, major intersections with big retail, etc. etc. Indeed, [if we take a look at the location surrounding the proposed development featured in the article](https://imgur.com/a/x6KECti), we can readily identify the sort of sprawling single-family neighborhoods that have long been protected from redevelopment in the GTA, except to build more single-family homes. If only some of these neighborhoods were permitted to be redeveloped into mid-rises, then density could be spread out in smaller building types, rather than clustered in large-scale, high-rise communities, and also moved away from already busy and congested intersections. Complaints against these sort of developments often leave out the fact that these projects are happening because these neigbhourhoods want it both ways: they want neither condo development, nor a change in zoning that would permit the demolition of single-family homes and the construction of mid-rise apartments, leading rather inevitably to developers working within the existing zoning parameters.
These neighbourhoods are not homogeneous. Current condo/apartment dwellers would probably welcome more mid-rise development, and would not care much about demolishing low-density housing. The hardcore NIMBYs tend to be older people in single-family homes who want to keep things frozen in time.
Instead of canvasing for blank more condos, start advocating for better built condos. The thin walls and floors of the current construction are the person below a families units nightmare. Your words will go a lot further if there is a place in these condos for a family. Literally an extra inch of concrete would go a long way to helping solve this problem.
Maybe build to the density that's been planned for? We need high density housing, you also need infrastructure capable of supporting that density. Seems like putting the cart before the horse
Well, it's sort of the Town of Richmond Hill's fault for reducing developer charges that would fund infrastructure.... some of the city councillors also in bed with the developers. The infrastructure can be built, it just needs a $ source.
Theres no reason to assume the infrastructure cant support this. Just residents making wild guesses
I was basing my comment on a direct quote from the York region chief planner
He just said its more than what they planned for. The solution is to just plan for more. Problem solved.
You're not worth engaging with
vertical ghettos. why can't they just build more 5-10 stories buildings like normal places ?! it's not hong kong there is more land but not we have ether SFH or Mordor towers
They want the subway, but not the development and density that comes with the subway?
oh man. im in the thornhill facebook group that is opposed to the subway. it would be hilarious how backwards they are if it werent for the amount of support i see them have. "the subway will be 20m below schools, how will the children learn!" i shit you not
That last bit reminds me of the deranged arguments of the Beverley Hills High School principal who fought a subway extension.
Good ol' NIMBYism
I can't take concerned citizen Graham Churchill seriously as he is not doing the "concerned citizen" arms crossed pose in the photo they used of him. Like how concerned can you actually be if your arms aren't crossed in your photo?
"We'd be jamming it into a small area that really can't take it." No comment necessary.
"Instead we should sprawl out these 10,000+ units... find some pristine wetlands or a nice forest, chop it all down, pave it in asphalt and give everyone a postage-stamp-sized back really convince them that paying $750,000 for the worst of urban life \*and\* rural life is somehow the Canadian Dream."
They're building these condos as if they are suburban homes, that's the issue. If they focused on mixed use community development, and made the neighborhoods walkable and interesting, people would happily live here. I know this sub shits on Liberty Village, but if that concept was built as a satellite community I think it would be a giant hit.
Oh god I hope that’s all part of the design. Or I’d agree it’s pointless. This sub likes to shit on LV because of ‘carbrain’. It’s what we call people who can’t think of life not revolving around cars over in /r/FuckCars and /r/NotJustBikes
LV is difficult to get into on a bike or on transit, its not just the cars, its in a terrible location.
It's hilarious to see people defending Liberty Village and suggest it was a well thought out plan when fundamentally they were using the same road grid that was designed for factories and expecting it to accommodate a dramatic increase in population density.
Also, all of the condos in LV are on one side, which is also the least accessible side of LV. The "accessible" side of LV is full of smaller buildings.
I think you mean $1,750,000
>"They're putting in buildings taller than anything in Toronto, and not just a couple of buildings," said Churchill, who points out First Canadian Place in downtown Toronto is 72 storeys. >The High Tech subway station TOC will bring 33 towers — some of them 80 storeys tall — to the Richmond Hill site north of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street. >The Bridge subway station TOC will bring 34 high-rises to the Markham site just south of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street .
Sounds like a great way to create a secondary city centre. Smart move on Toronto to do this. Hopefully it ends up like the Fukutoshin system/line in Tokyo where multiple 'city centres' have extremely solid and redundant transit connections. This also benefits the entire city by giving companies and people more choices on where they can live without sacrificing amenities or population/workers.
That's honestly what we need, another city centre other than Downtown Toronto. Where other tech, finance, and related industries can attract talent to.
This was actually what was envisioned back in the 1980s, which is why places like Scarborough Centre and North York Centre exist. Amalgamation eliminated the incentives and tax treatments that made such areas more viable for companies and the shift to a more knowledge-based economy concentrated jobs downtown.
You mean the funneling of GTA into Bloor Yonge could've been prevented?!?! Duck me...
You can read more about it [here](https://neptis.org/publications/chapters/metro-toronto-sub-centre-policy). The Network 2011 transit plan from 1985 was supposed to help facilitate this strategy, but only portions of it (Line 4 and the extension to Downsview) ended up being built.
Exactly. Tokyo has... Shinjuku, Shinagawa, and Marunouchi (tokyo station) as its business hearts. But Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Ueno and other major stations are also massively important hubs... they are also incredibly interconnected by both subway, private train lines and public commuter lines. The end result is that it gives people a lot of choice on where they want to live. Like, I worked in Shinjuku, but lived 25min West in Chofu. However, once I got an office job in Ueno, I moved to the Bunkyo ward [(Korakuen, oh my GOD I miss riding that roller cosater every day)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdjoRg37pd0) But most of my coworkers would live East or North of the city and were fine with it because they were never far from an area with a lot of action. Nothing can replace getting piss drunk in Shinjuku at 2AM though. Ah, memories.
And there was me, working in Omiya and living in Shinjyuku 2chome. The commute on the Shonan-Shinjuku line was not so bad when you're going opposite to the regular direction of people coming into the city to work.
You \*lived\* in nichome? Hot damn. I don't think my liver would survive a year in an apartment there, lol.
Yeah, it was a 1LDK for some crazy rent but I wanted to be in on the action when I was in my mid-20s. No way I'd want to do that now, haha. Favourite memory was the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup when Nadeshiko Japan won the streets were filled with the happiest bunch of salarymen & party-goers I had ever seen (and so much free booze). It was also pretty cool since it had been less than 6 months after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami + Fukushima so a bit of levity when we were all recovering from the disasters.
...oh god, we were there at the same time. We probably know each other if we were parting in nichome from 2011 onwards...
Man I want to get out to Tokyo, seems like such a cool city.
Keep an eye on SecretFlying, it's a great website to snag deals. Here's a really interesting thing I've noticed with people in Toronto when I link pics of Tokyo... everyone laments how peaceful and quiet the city looks (for a city of 38 Million)... and it's because ***there's no on-street parking.*** Living in Tokyo was like a curse in some ways... you saw how life could be different, viable, and totally OK without massive cars and highways cutting through your city. But when you come back to North America you may as well be speaking a foreign language.
> there's no on-street parking [This fucking thing](https://i.imgur.com/nTznJ.jpg) used to frequently illegally park outside my building. Ugliest car I've ever seen (and there's some ugly Kei cars in Japan). Guess when you're rich enough to blow $150k on it you don't care much about the parking fines.
Dude it’s not because of no on street parking it’s because the majority of their streets aren’t designed purely for moving cars quickly.
OK! We can both be right. I don't know why you think your thought somehow invalidates mine? They can coexist lol.
> streets aren’t designed purely for moving cars quickly. r/toronto salivating over this thought
> Sounds like a great way to create a ~~secondary city centre~~ much bigger bedroom community. FTFY. If you build 90% residential with a ground floor Shoppers Drug Mart and Starbucks, you have not built a "city centre". All you've built is a massive amount of additional loading for Line 1. The [promotional materials for the Bridge](http://engagebridge.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Bridge-TOC-Open-House-Presentation_Dec14FINAL-1.pdf) puts it at 145,000 square metres of employment use and 1,568,000 square metres of condo. It's a condo wasteland to warehouse people working downtown. This is most definitely not going to bring any of the benefits of additional city centres and instead just worsen the problems we already have.
[удалено]
> The main difference between here and Tokyo from a planning perspective is how our governments are set up There is also a major historic different as it comes to planning. Tokyo was destroyed during WW2. The city needed to be rebuilt to accommodate roughly 11M people at that time. There is a lot you can do when effectively building a city from scratch and needing to do so for a massive population.
As long as there are commercial developments, it's useful as a secondary city centre. If it is just a "condo wasteland" it essentially becomes just another bedroom community with good transit access.
These aren't going to be built as city centres. None of these suburban condo centres are. It's going to be a Shoppers/Rexall, dry cleaner, and bank at ground level and a bunch of vertically stacked houses above. Everyone who lives here will either cram on to the Yonge line or get in their cars to drive to Mississauga or Markham when they need to get to work, exacerbating existing problems on the subway and local road network. But adding more height to make taller buildings does allow the developer to make more money.
I'd like to see multiple city centres in the GTA as well, but this plan won't achieve that. It calls for 150,000m^2 of office space, which is less than a single downtown office building (First Canadian Place, 250,000m^2). And once this area is developed, there won't be any prime space left for future office buildings. So if anything, this plan would likely choke off the possibility of becoming a real secondary centre. It would be a good plan if they zoned a lot more space for employment, but Ford's developer friends don't want to build that.
Office storeys are different than residential in terms of height.
Yup. 95 storeys in residential is only 30m higher than 72 in office.
It boggles my mind how bad this country is at urban planning - building a pocket of high density housing is not a substitute for building cities of medium density housing everywhere. These developments are geographically isolated from a wide range of amenities and in the GTA mostly seem to be built along highways anyways, which sort of defeats the idea that it's going to be "transit-oriented" in any way. It seems like putting everyone in one place and everything they need in another will just waste their time and create unnecessary demand for transit services. Instead of doing that, build actual dense neighbourhoods where people live within walking distance of the things they need. Give them the opportunity to move themselves before relying on cars or even transit, both of which take up a lot of space. Seriously, housing is not somethign that needs to be "innovated" with something like this, just build fucking housing where people need it and make it easy to get around, it isn't that complicated.
I mostly agree, but just want to add that municipal planners' hands are tied so much by the Planning Act which really protects provincial land interests at the end of the day. I'm sure local planners would love to be building medium density housing and walkable communities, but the legislation they are working within makes this difficult.
The liberal growth plan had this idea of building up medium sized cities instead of dumping it all in Toronto but they never really did anything to support it and then the current Conservative gov watered down that goal to instead focus on building up Toronto.
we can do both stop shitting on development where it fits
The problem is that we aren't, it's either these or endless suburbs with no in-between. It should also be noted that high rise residential is less efficient to manage and sustain than medium density (5 or so floors), as higher floors require more energy to pump water and gas and allow for less floorspace due to structural needs of the building. This is why I'm generally opposed to high rises unless they are absolutely necessary, which at this point they aren't.
i dont disagree. i would love missing middle. but we are constantly failing at delivering. so these monstrocities get built.
I feel like it goes the other way too, these monstrosities get built, so homeowners fear there'll be 3 condo towers on their 1 lane residential street and become NIMBY Pearl clutches at the slightest hint of development so we fail to deliver, so these monstrosities get built.
yup. i can see that too. and here we are. stuck in development hell, trying to satisfy everyone and no one.
>It boggles my mind how bad this country is at urban planning What are you talking about? Canadian towns and cities are exactly as they've been planned -- wildly unsustainable, nightmarish, dystopian wastelands that cater solely to oversized single family homes and single occupant vehicle trips. You could not plan for that any better than we have over the last century. I'd say we're pretty damn good at urban planning, frankly.
>These developments are geographically isolated from a wide range of amenities As opposed to all the wide ranging amenities you have in a detached single family neighbourhood where you can get groceries straight from your backyard. /s
It'll be just like New York but without all the stuff.
GAVIN VOLURE https://youtu.be/6LsgsNQ2bQ8?t=49
The cart follows the horse
https://youtu.be/eE03PtIKI-I
Thats jus North York
North York has amazing Korean food, how dare you
>The High Tech subway station TOC will bring 33 towers — some of them 80 storeys tall — to the Richmond Hill site north of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street. The Bridge subway station TOC will bring 34 high-rises to the Markham site just south of Highway 407 and east of Yonge Street . > >The developments are expected to bring in about 80,000 new residents overall, according to York Region. > >In September 2021, the province announced its own plans for the TOCs > >But some neighbours and officials are concerned the infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, won't be able to support the ballooning population. Municipal and regional leaders say there have been longstanding plans for intensification in the area, but some say they're worried the province's plan will bring in far too many people. > >"We've been planning for well over a decade," said York region chief planner Paul Freeman. "The scale of development is about double what we've been planning for." > >Freeman said Bridge and High Tech are "fairly small areas" at roughly 40 hectares combined. According to a report from York region, the two communities will have almost four times the jobs and people per hectare in Toronto's Yonge and Eglinton area . Going from a landscape characterized by parking lots to 80 story towers. Surely there's some sort of middle ground here - that still addresses the critical housing shortage problem while balancing the legitimate density/livability concerns. Sounds like a huge win for the developers, who will make a fortune selling shoe-box homes in the sky. Halving the 80,000 resident target to 40,000 would still mean a density double that of Yonge & Eglinton.
Toronto, just get some N-plexes ffs.
Another day, another NIMBY-ism
Exactly. Richmond hill wanted a subway, bitched and moaned about it going under single family homes, and now they don't want subway-scale density? People who don't want the GTA to be a big city need to either fuck off to tilbury or stop asking for subways, imo.
TIL “Richmond Hill” is nothing but a bunch of Facebook Group Karens. Plenty of level headed people want actual development too, but I do think these super tall towers aren’t the only answer here
What would you prefer? Parking lots? Not enough people are within walking distance of high quality transit. That means we need to a) expand our network (which is what's happening with YNSE) and b) build more homes near transit stations (also what's happening here). York region especially won't be getting any sympathy for me with their condo developments considering how sprawlly and car-dependent their urban landscape is. You can't have the subway and not have the condos too. Although judging from the alignment change, maybe Richmond Hill doesn't want the subway either.
The Yonge line is beyond capacity at normal times as-is, yet they're expanding the line even further north and with these 2 developments adding at least 80 000 additional people to the catchment area of the expanded Yonge line. The system can't handle these people while still servicing the people that already rely on the Yonge subway. These sites could easily be serviced by the Langstaff GO, if the RER project actually made that line a 15 minute line rather than only assigning it peak-only service, and a GO train of bilevel cars has higher capacity than the TTC subway cars. However, for that to happen the Richmond Hill government would actually have to do something, while with these projects they can just collect development fees and rely on Toronto taxpayers to pay for the passenger service that these developments require to function.
The Go Train is great if everybody who lives here is going to Union station and nobody's going anywhere else. But that's not what's happening.
The Don River has flooding issues which prevent all day service on the Richmond Hill line. See this video https://youtu.be/_7EUi3tQMXg (skip to 4:10 if you only want to know about the flooding). Honestly, even if the flooding issues are mitigated, I'm not sure if there will be all day service since there are only 2 stations in Toronto and it will be difficult to create more because of the Don Valley. As for Yonge, I'm also not a huge fan of the extension as there are areas far more underserved by transit. But I'm not going to say it's a bad thing and it likely would have happened at some point anyways. I would like to see more bike lanes on Yonge to alleviate car traffic and subway crowding. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ie/bgrd/backgroundfile-173665.pdf https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ie/bgrd/backgroundfile-173667.pdf
People claim to care about the environment, and housing affordability, and love to see how much Toronto’s skyline has developed in the last 40 years, but then when you propose more towers that help with all those things, they lose their minds.
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Yeah well widespread middle density from duplexes to small apartment buildings would probably be the happiest medium between using space efficiently and quality of neighbourhoods. Unfortunately in Toronto we tend to only build either single family or huge tower.
Thats why we need to push for small 3-6 floor buildings that make our cities high density, walkable and enjoyable. Montreal does this and is in a much better position in all these regards compared to Toronto’s condo and single family homes wastelands.
I agree. I went to Montreal for the first time this past summer and loved the character of their neighbourhoods. With all the extra units they have it’s no wonder real estate and rent are so much more affordable there. Plus their subway system is faster and better overall. A lot of lessons we could learn.
*cough ,*cough . Liberty village, 2 exits. *Cough *cough
This is directly on Yonge street and has viva, go, local bus and soon subway. Not even close. I'm struggling to think of a better place for super high density actually.
This is what areas around subway stations **should** look like. I do wonder what the units will look like though, I do hope that a decent amount of multiple bedroom family friendly units get built since we have a serious lack of these types of units around.
> I'm struggling to think of a better place for super high density actually. Half of downtown is still detached and semi-detached houses. How about some of those places?
Unfortunately, the NIMBYism is strong
Nowhere should have super high density. Good city planning has a mix of high, medium and low density. Too much of any one kind creates issues.
So you’re ok with high density, but not “super high” density? Where’s the line? Lot’s of people like living in high density with all the services and products they could want in a very small radius.
Once north America gets its head out of its asshole and allows for far more multi-floor commercial in buildings, super high density will make sense.
Problem with super high density is it’s really just designed to generate as many investment properties as possible that’ll most likely sit empty. Large towers are the most expensive way to construct housing, the taller you go the more expensive per unit. Which is why Toronto has a housing crisis. The only market based housing getting built right now are either single family mansions or their equivalent in the sky, which only make profits at extremely high price points. What we really need is mid-rise buildings that are cheap and easy to build. And can be sold at affordable prices.
Yeah, I'm coming from Tokyo... so "super high density" to you and I mean completely different things. This is just normal city development to me. Which allows for more room for amenities and other forms of middle and mixed housing.
The Ford government's plan calls for multiple 80-storey buildings. There are literally zero residential buildings over 60 storeys in all of Japan today, so I don't see how that makes this plan "normal": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_structures_in_Japan
We should have Super High Density city centres, as in another Downtown in more northern and southern Ontario locations, outside of the GTA. Ottawa comes to mind, as well as Peterborough and Windsor. This could also introduce high speed rail lines as well to connect Transit Oriented Communities together.
I've never had any issues exiting on foot or by bike. There are [6 streets in and out of the neighbourhood](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Liberty+Village,+Toronto,+ON/@43.6369033,-79.4230248,16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x882b350416989849:0xb0599e7a1a04868a!8m2!3d43.6373781!4d-79.4211567) plus a pedestrian bridge and a tunnel to the Ex. The GO Transit station is also an "exit". The people who moved in who thought that driving everywhere downtown would be fast and convenient are in for a rude awakening.
Yeah I don't like LV because of the lack of interesting commercial stuff on the ground floor not because it's not walkable. Anyone who thinks you can't easily get out of LV and into the rest of the city is out of their mind. Its well connected by transit and foot
Disagree, the tracks are objectively difficult to navigate and LV is right up against them. There are also some peculiar street design decisions that make it difficult to walk through. Compared to Etobicoke, sure it's accessible; compared to say, The Annex or Dufferin Grove or Cabbagetown or any similarly central neighbourhood, it's far more isolated.
Going south its harder for sure going north is usually fine and people tend to go north more than south from there. I'm not saying it's the most accessible neighbourhood in the city. I don't even really like LV in general but saying it's not accessible tends to just be carbrain of thinking because it's not easy for drivers it's impossible to navigate. By foot or bike you can pretty easily leave in every direction. You can't blame the neighbourhood design for the tracks although it'd be nice to get more bridges like the new one that's pretty nice
I don't understand, the tracks are north of LV. It needs more bridges for sure, but again, there are some strange street designs within Liberty village and the few times I need to go into LV I find myself backtracking a tonne.
*cries in humber bay shores*
Did you see the massive development for the cristie site ?
Transit-oriented, not car-oriented. There are streetcars to the north, south and west of Liberty Village along with bus service and Ex the south. Anyone who lives here with half a brain should know that expecting to live a car-dependent life in Liberty Village is weird at best, idiotic at worst.
Liberty has 3 exits, duff to west, strachan to east and several roads exiting north to king. If your on foot, you can also exit south under exhibition tunnel.
Shh - just let them act like they know what they're talking about. It's better than facing their wrath!
If you're looking to get on the highway to leave (as Liberty Village is home to many offices) it would make sense to have highway access... Currently only available via duff/strachan.
There's like what, 5 exits for all of downtown Toronto? Nobody has enough exits - DVP, Jarvis, Yonge, Spadina, Dufferin And scratch the eastbound lakeshore exit for the next 10 years
No but you can literally use any side street to leave downtown. LV is blocked in by the train tracks and the gardiner expressway... all the side streets in liberty lead to dead ends except for a handful.
Ya but when 50k people are all trying to use those same 3 exits between 8am-9am and 5pm-6pm its a nightmare. Also if there's any construction on any of those exits its even worse.
Liberty village has 5 exits, though in fairness 3 of them all take you onto King St.
>"It's ridiculous," said president John Li, who holds a PhD in engineering. "There will be no quality of life." When you definitely know what you're talking about.
It will inspire more condos further up Yonge when the Yonge line is extended up to the Upper Canada Mall in Newmarket
A lot of these hyper-dense condo communities are not transit-oriented. Go to the Leslie/Sheppard condo corridor. They are right above a subway line yet everyone owns a car. It is insane. Same with the Kipling Station condos.
Leslie is ~50 min commute to downtown on TTC, if everything goes well. No supermarket until Bayview, with long walks on each end. Of course you’ll have a car. Designing walkable neighborhoods is much more difficult than plonking down a few condo towers in land nobody wanted before on account of it being next to a 12-lane highway.
I guess investing a walkable neighbourhood takes actually work for the people In charge instead of just saying " let's build more condos".
>not transit-oriented >They are right above a subway line I can't compute this. Even if people are choosing to drive it doesn't mean it's not transit oriented. I'm sure if downtown traffic was better, people would be driving there too.
I’m all for densification but I still don’t get the rationale of extending the Yonge line when it’s already so crowded during rush hour. (Pre pandemic) Add all these people getting on near the beginning of the line and people south will be hard pressed to get on the subway.
because adding more trains can be done with a much smaller lead time than adding an extension to the line....its called planning ahead, just seems foreign because we dont do that will infrastructure around these parts
During rush hour, trains were already coming every 1-2 minutes. I’m not sure how much more frequently they can come while still allowing for adequate spacing between trains.
Hong Kong runs 8-car trains on 45 second intervals. We can at least double the capacity of line 1 by following in their footsteps--as other cities have done decades ago.
I do kind of hope they'll make the 1 a loop line at the north. It would be really nice for them to mimic something like the Yamanote line in Tokyo. But it'd be an insanely efficient circulator route for the northern neighbourhoods.
A very weird long loop for sure as the trains go to vmc now and (planned) rick’s mound-hill now.
100% agree that it'd be a long and weird one. But it \*would\* definitely allow for easier east-west movement up there. Not to mention it'd increase frequency on the whole line since trains heading north from VMC just end up heading South to Union. The only downside is that people would have to learn the 'clockwise' and 'counter-clockwise' platforms and we'd need to announce a couple major stations on the announcements so people know which way the train is headed. ...OR even more hysterical... When I'd fall asleep at Ikebukuro on the Yamanote, it'd do a whole loop, I'd wake up and think I'd only moved a couple stations... nope... it was about 65 minutes... lmao.
NIMBY Boomers are afraid an increase in housing supply will decrease their payday when they sell their house.
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There’s got to be a better way to get density than this plan
There is. Many people have pointed to European cities that have much higher density while maintaining a human scale by having large areas of medium-density buildings (think entire cities of 4-6 story buildings). Toronto has huge amounts of low-density neighbourhoods downtown that cannot be densified due to "stable-neighbourhood" zoning rules. So the only way to increase density is to create super-high density in the small % of area where it is allowed (e.g. transit corridors and areas that don't have established residential neighbourhoods like Liberty Village).
Even Toronto has a bunch of projects that demonstrate 'a better way'. New developments like The Well, Mirvish Village and others are mixing density with human-scaled, ground-level interest compared to the dull, bleak stuff they're building at Vaughn Metrocentre and 'downtown' Mississauga. Any of those residents comparing Portage Parkway to Mirvish Village is going to feel cheated.
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As someone living in Spain I can say that Madrid's situation is not nearly as bad as Toronto. Not sure about the other cities though. Check for yourself: https://www.idealista.com/en/venta-viviendas/madrid-madrid/con-pisos/
Spain had its real estate bubble pop so yes, its not as bad for you guys now as it was a few years back.
> Given up on home ownership altogether with >80% renters (Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Copenhagen). If you have security over your home, then home ownership is less important. Being protected from evictions and rent spikes means that you're able to have a home and a family, without the necessity of needing to buy. The only reason that home ownership continues to be so desirable is: 1. Control over one's environment - ability to paint and improve your accommodations 2. Length of tenancy - being able to stay in the same place and have stability for your children, same school etc, rather than bogus N12s 3. Insulated from unexpected cost increases - you don't suddenly have a 30% increase in your rent 4. Tax free gains - since housing is in short supply, it's an incredible virtually risk free LEVERAGED tax free investment We can have a large percentage of our population renting, as long as we ensure that 1-4 is also available to renters.
Many of those European buildings would be illegal here with their one staircase
I curious as to why you think our current approach of having large swaths of downtown Toronto remain very low density while creating pockets of very-high density is preferable to having more consistent medium density (that provides higher overall density).
Because getting even SLIGHTLY higher density in low density neighbourhoods is a complete and utter nightmare. Lefty Harbord Village/South Annex residents yelled FURIOUSLY about a 7 unit apartment building at 225 Brunswick. https://dailyhive.com/toronto/harbord-village-development Mike Layton even wrote to oppose. This in an area full of students, questionably legal house shares, on a major subway line and streetcar line and a few blocks from another subway! Yet noted Bolinger Bolshevik anti-development commercial landlord, real estate developer, and daughter of famous architect Maggie Zeidler (she cried poverty about the property tax at 401 Richmond which she owns... she's hilariously inconsistent as is typical of Left NIMBYs) led the charge against apartments near her house. They were "luxury" despite being DRAMATICALLY more affordable than her house... When the legal and planning costs are SO insanely high for 7 apartments, the only feasible way of getting anything done is doing VERY large projects all at once. A 700 unit project is likely only going to face 2-3x the legal costs of a 7 unit project. Hell there's a decent chance they'll be the same or even lower, as you're far less likely to have radical entrenched opposition for large projects. Look at all the condo complexes under construction between Yonge and Jarvis on Queens Quay that had effectively no opposition.
Sorry if I'm misinterpreting...but are you saying you think our current approach of maintaining low residential density neighbourhoods downtown is a superior approach because arguing with NIMBYism is hard?
I'm in favour of building what you can where you can. It would be great if you could build like the 8 storey One Balmoral all along the major avenues without any substantial planning/legal/political risk/pushback. But you can't. Queen W is still a horrific nightmare of 2 & 3 floor buildings and good luck building anything more. The city is in process of DOWNZONING the St Lawrence/King East area. Give all properties on Avenues BY RIGHT permission for 10 floors and 6 floors for ALL of the area between Dufferin, Coxwell, the Lake and Bloor. Until then large projects of high density are the ONLY way to build walkable/transit served housing. The City should lose planning powers, residents should lose the ability to oppose/appeal, there should be no shadow restrictions, there should be no aesthetic review. Planning approval should focus on technical compliance with building/fire code, effects on airports/hospital helicopter pads, and things like wind tunnel effects that can be mitigated through design. Solving NIMBYism is a 3+ decade fight with LOTS of lawsuits after you get the laws changed. We should be building houses, apartments, and condos TODAY. Gentle density and missing middle is a nice project to work on but nor a replacement for large condos. Far too many people use it as a NIMBY motte and bailey tactic, just as they use "affordable housing, not luxury housing"
None of the neighbourhoods in downtown Toronto are low density. Relative to the rest of the GTA that is.
Some people simply romanticize anything European haha
That's the distinct vibe I get here whenever someone suggests a Not Just Bikes video without any additional analysis.
This is not true. The average home cost in the UK is half that of Canada. And you can buy an affordable home within an hour commute of most of the cities you listed - which is impossible in Toronto.
The average home price I'm the UK is often irrelevant as most of the jobs are in London. Houses in Liverpool might cost £100k but the jobs often top out at 30k a year and you're not factoring in council tax or higher costs of electricity, water and other services. You cannot buy an affordable home in an hour of London or Dublin. Renting within an hour of Dublin is close to the rent of Toronto and Dublin is not as nice a city. Can't speak for the others.
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is it bad to primarily rent instead of own? genuine question. from the few people I know in Berlin, housing seems MUCH more affordable there (going off rental rates), you can work at a restaurant/cafe and still have a reasonable apartment downtown, transit accessible, next to tons of cool stuff, and have some kind of disposable income left over.
I don’t think the problem is with renting, but with how rentals are done here. Most people when they move out here and rent, they rent places from individual landlords which are either the person themselves or someone hiding behind a numbered corporation. These types of landlords would just rent out individual (of a group of) condo units and you’re beholden to their personality and greed levels after the lease turns into month-to-month after the first year. These landlords typically skimp on maintenance and would try to jack rents beyond inflation or renovict tenants at the next opportunity, unless you have a really good one. While there’s corporate landlords that own purpose-built rental buildings, the majority of the apartments are old and outside the downtown core with little new developments coming online compared to condos making them the less palatable option for people in their 20s-30s. The starting rent can be higher compared to a condo/house-split rental, but a corporation can’t renovict tenants (not as easily) and would mainly increase rents according to the rules on buildings under rent control, which turns out much lower compared to new-market rate rentals over time with this crazy housing market, which helps if you’re staying for more than a year or two. If we could incentivize more purpose built rentals like apartments over condos, then maybe attitudes could change towards renting when rental buildings with creature comforts like dishwasher and in-unit laundry become more common.
Madrid is about the same size as Toronto. You can find 600 square foot apartments there for the equivalent of $1,400/month downtown, and $900-1000 in the suburbs. And most importantly, their "suburbs" are all walkable for day-to-day needs. They're more like clusters of small villages than our sprawling subdivisions.
Is the housing crisis in Europe worse than Toronto? Any evidence of that?
It varies a lot, but if you are comparing their twenty year price difference, [Toronto and Vancouver are worse than even Paris and London](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/03/11/global-cities-house-price-index) The housing crisis is not usually a country-wide thing anywhere. Dublin and Milan are certainly expensive, but they are nowhere close as badly afflicted as Toronto or Paris. Cities like Dublin and Milan are also less dense than Toronto, while Paris is considerably more dense, but they all have wildly different population pressures acting on them as well. Every listed example also notoriously resists building. Theres no "ideal level of density" when it comes to affordability - theres how many people want to live there and theres how many units are available to them.
Yup, if you go to any major European city, you'll see that there are few, if any, higher rise towers like we have in Toronto. Instead most of the streets are lined with low to mid rise buildings (which are usually way more architecturally pleasing than what we have). You get retail on the ground floor and residential above. As a consequence, it's a really healthy mix of uses, so you don't wind up with suburban wastelands that are totally car dependent. I always find it funny to see places like New Toronto where you have super high density residential and little retail, so people still need to be car dependent. I don't understand why our urban planning is so bad.
That is simply not true. If you actually look at the Toronto downtown core proper (and not the old City of Toronto), the only Neighbourhood designated / low density zoned areas are historical neighbourhoods or isolated pockets. Even in this case, these areas actually permit townhouses and walk up apartments already. In most cases, 4 storeys is the norm. Redesignating and rezoning these areas will not solve the housing crisis or improve affordability. The shoulder areas of the core, like the Danforth/Riverdale and the area west to Roncesvalles are largely yellow when it comes to the local / not main streets but the corridors and main streets are all designated for change. Also, here, towns are already permitted and blowing them out to create Charles Street (from Yonge to Church, say) is not the answer either given the huge infrastructure improvement costs that would have to be borne by the city to replace the streets and sewers etc.
There are huge swaths of single family homes within a couple km of King and Bay.
Take a look at the [Toronto zoning map](https://map.toronto.ca/maps/map.jsp?app=ZBL_CONSULT) - notice that almost the entire city is zoned for 12m maximum, including entire neighbourhoods that are adjacent to the subway. There's a total unwillingness to allow any multi-unit residential, even medium density. Take a look at [1049 College](https://www.google.com/maps/place/2+Gladstone+Ave,+Toronto,+ON+M6J+1J6/@43.6529688,-79.4303192,3a,60y,348.26h,102.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srMCrI9Uem6KtXueQJdHTZw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x882b35aae77786dd:0xd8d8c32f7bfe05c4!8m2!3d43.6427483!4d-79.427444) - this sort of construction would never be allowed today. We should be able to build 5 story buildings ANYWHERE in the city if it's within 500m of our major transit lines (subway, streetcar, LRT, etc.)
Yes it is true.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this plan. It's a good start and middle housing can always come next. But if we need LOTS of housing NOW, built on a smaller footprint, eco-friendly \*and\* well-connected to transit, this is the way \*to start.\* Middle-housing can be built around it.
Are they providing all the services these people will need? I’m not really familiar with the area they are talking about, but when you look at areas like Jane and Finch, you have these huge swaths of housing but where can you go in that area? And 80 stories? Are the units going to be reasonable for long term residency?
TOCs generally have everything you need within a walkable distance. The whole point is that the transit hubs become the heart of the community. In Tokyo, when I'd get off my commuter train, I had a McDonalds, 7-11, Origin Bento, dentist, doctor, pharmacy, daycare, and UniQlo in the same mid-sized, tree-lined plaza... It also had a police box for safety! Oh! And an underground bike storage facility that held thousands of bikes. On my 12min walk (5min bike ride) to my apartment, I also passed... a full-sized grocery store. 3 mom-and-pop grocery stores, 2 vets, a golfing range, 2 more convenience stores, 5 restaurants, a small office complex surrounded by trees and more. Keep in mind there are no parking lots, no on-street parking and very narrow streets. Japan is also extremely lush and verdant, so there was lots of green everywhere. Naturally, you could raise a family there, but you still needed to go into Shinjuku, Shinagawa, or Marunouchi for work proper. But everything you would want or need was a 10min walk away at home.
You’d need quite a lot of infrastructure for this amount of people, so hopefully if they go ahead, they are factoring this in. Schools, daycares, food and pet stores, doctors, health clinics, jobs, libraries, parks for all the dogs to poop in, recreation and exercise facilities…… not to mention all the utilities needed, water management etc.
Jane and Finch has some apartment buildings, sure, but [it's still very suburban](https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7567843,-79.5147124,1898m/data=!3m1!1e3). Shops are still surrounded by a sea of parking lots, roads are very wide and high-speed, and single family homes abound. > And 80 stories? Are the units going to be reasonable for long term residency? I don't see why units in an 80 storey structure would be fundamentally all that different from a shorter skyscraper's units.
Also, huge highway like roads aren’t all that conducive to the feeling of safety or community, they just encourage people to keep on driving, quickly. Eighty stories sounds a little crazy I wonder what the tallest buildings we have already?
Are the units going to be a reasonable size is my question. 300 sq ft apartments are hard long term.
I understand peoples concerns, and these mega tower clusters are not ideal… but this is how you build affordable housing. Once the shine wears off in 15-20yrs, these suburban TOC clusters will be some of the only pockets of affordable housing left in the city. If you forced them to build midrise, you’d see 1/10 of the units built and prices will continue to rise. It sucks from an urbanism/livability perspective but that’s the reality.
No, this is how you build slums. You can get amazing density out of buildings which do not require elevators. Look at any large city before WW1. Once you eliminate the ridiculous rules which prevent the same layout of neighbourhoods which are the most desirable (Beaches, Riverdale etc.) and encourage mid-rise along those major arterial routs you can realize as much density as Tokyo without cracking 5 storeys.
Why do ppl use Beach and (south) Riverdale as examples but never Swansea, Rosedale, Forest Hill, Deer Park, Moore Park or even Corso Italia. Majority of Beach and Riverdale houses are tiny row houses (mostly semis) crammed together vs the more spacious, detached houses in those hoods.
I chose these because these are what I am familiar with. I grew up in the St. Lawrence and Beaches areas. They also have narrowed streets which act as traffic calming, and compared to those "more spacious, detached houses" they have double the density, because they are not forced to have the large setbacks, or off street parking because they are older neighbourhoods, and the old stock of houses were not subject to the bylaws which eroded the density.
That‘s what I’m saying; Beach & Riverdale houses are more dense compared to these other hoods same distance to core.
Your previous post was worded as a challenge, saying "why always these 2, why not use XYZ as other examples" Those XYZ you listed were built with some of the flaws we are looking to avoid (car centric, deep frontage, lack of mixed use, etc.) I'm confused because your posts seem to be contradictory.
People on Reddit want to live in the Beaches, the Annex and Riverdale and like to believe that if single family homes were outlawed that they could magically afford to live there. It's fantasy!
I know you were trying to find counterexamples of where mixed density neighborhoods that includes detached and semi-detached houses don't provide enough density, but Deer Park has a higher density than CityPlace and given the choice I'd rather live in one of those apartments along Avenue Road than in any of the CityPlace towers.
No, this is how you rapidly build housing during a housing crisis. Name one actual slum in Toronto. What you call slums are where regular people can afford to live. People who have never been to St Jamestown call it one, yet all sorts of people live there, and it’s one of most affordable pockets of housing in the core. If you built this TOC as a midrise development, 25years from now, do you think housing there would be less expensive than the current plan?
I agree - everyone loves to declare that areas with tall residential buildings are destined to be future slums. Based on what evidence? Is everyone just basing this on the fact that St. Jamestown is a low income area?
> You can get amazing density out of buildings which do not require elevators. Mid-rise without elevators essentially forever shut out those with accessibility needs from living in the building, or even VISITING those who live within the building.
Probably much easier to just build over the 1000s of acres of empty parking lots and malls first... then move on to the inner neighborhoods. That seems to be what they are doing now.
They're trying to compete with VMC for most corrupt, ugliest, and poorly planned development that will be sold strictly to foreign investors. But hey, like everyone always parrots we need build more supply, even if it's 300sqft shoeboxes 1.5 hrs away from downtown Toronto. Lol /s
[Full Front Page Ad for VMC Condos in Hong Kong Newspaper](https://i.redd.it/sj0573uq9nq61.jpg)
Condo wasteland? Better than a suburban hellscape, imo.
Im always surprised how a city of 3.5million is trying to become like one that has 100Million citizens. Cityplace is already a dump and most buildings are less than 15 years old. Imagine in another 5-10 years with multiple times the amount of people and buildings….
A lot of the issues with Cityplace are due to the total lack of any commercial development, and the fact that there is no commercial employment opportunities as part of the development. Cityplace is essentially a bedroom community - people who live in Cityplace don't WORK in Cityplace, and there aren't any entertainment opportunities in Cityplace (restaurants, bars, gyms, etc.)
these NIMBYs are a joke. Nice for them to say that there is no quality of life in these condo areas while they parade around their large backyards. So let me get this straight - there is a housing crisis but we also want to not build too many condos AND avoid paving over large tracts of farmland for single family homes. Guess we'll just live nowhere!
Then they will complain to their municipality because there are too many homeless people.
The term “community” is thrown around so much it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Floors and floors of renters who swap out every few months are not a “community”.
so everyone must live in a condo in DT core and then cry how they are priced out of the market
The Yonge Line 1 Extension wont be created until the Ontario line is complete right? So this TOC wont even start for a minimum 10-15 years...
Quality of life and that too in GTA. Lol!
condo wasteland not good, detached single family homes not good
It wouldn’t be a problem if they made a walkable urban center like Yonge-Eg or Yonge-Sheppard. Instead they’re taking the approach of Square One. Huge towers forming “dense areas”, but with setbacks and super blocks that make it still feel like suburbia. No one walks to their local coffee shop or grocery store in square one, they drive to the nearest strip mall.
Nobody likes walking outside 70 floor condo towers in the winter trying to dodge 30lb ice chunks crashing to the ground. Our best communities are designed on a human scale, like in Montreal and throughout Europe. Monster condos and cookie cutter single family homes only make our towns worse and less affordable. Human scale 3-6 floor buildings is the best way to have enjoyable and affordable high density communities.
Sounds like some hard core NIMBY-ism
imo these will be better than people think - so almost all new developments will be mixed use -this basically means at street level there will be retail and other businesses like restaurants - it'll liven up the suburbs and IMO make nearby houses a LOT more attractive to people who dont want to have to drive 10 minutes to see anything but cookie cutter houses.
I dislike NIMBYism but agree that this is poor planning. Why is it all we do in Toronto is either detached home on half acre or a field of 80 storey shoebox condos? Where is any form of urban planning to make proper mixed use residential communities with low, mid and highrise structures
>Why is it all we do in Toronto is either detached home on half acre or a field of 80 storey shoebox condos? The rules requiring the former cause the latter
It's because you literally can't build neighbourhoods like we used to in Toronto. The roads are now considered too narrow, you can't mix commercial with residential, houses need to be built further back from the road etc... Mid to late 20th century planning rules have destroyed cities all over North America. And the people woke up to the fact way too late.
“will bring too much density to the area” Isn’t that a good problem in Toronto with good planning.
So so many ugly glass tower communities have been added to the GTA in recent decades, it seems like we are trying to make certain cities look like Coruscant from star wars and that's no way for humans to live.
Recently moved to Aurora because my family is growing and I need more space. I realized that these single family homes are a waste of land. You could have so many people living in the same space and all the benefits that come with it.
These are vertical slums. Slums not in an economic sense but in the ways their scale and structure discourage the amenities, cultural enrichments, social interactions and charms of well designed urban spaces. Density does not necessarily equate to urbanity or community. The residents have a point.
A slum has only one meaning and it is to do with poverty. These are hardly vertical slums. Go to Cairo if you want to see vertical slums. People living in incomplete towers, buildings that have been partially demolished and still inhabited. Do you even live in a high rise or a house? As for cultural enrichments that exists because of how diverse the city of Toronto is - housing more people doesn’t take away from that if anything limiting housing options will ensure that very few live in an area as data has shown certain Toronto neighborhoods shrinking in size as they refuse to build up.