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Bagless grocery shopping? (Loblaws Milton)

It doesn't have to be Kowloon-like density. Even if you built Cabbagetown or Corktown type housing, along with low rise buildings in all the brownfield areas of the city, you'll greatly increase the population of the city.
 
It's a crap movie -it's not a doc - everyone in it is acting. Save your 4 bucks.
More correctly, it's part doc and part movie and is actually quite interesting.

Thanks for the tip...glad I didn't waste my money on this. It seemed to be a doc from the trailer on YouTube.
I'd recommend it. It's quite believable and tells the "suburban story" in a bit of a unique way (even if the acting isn't the best).
 
It doesn't have to be Kowloon-like density. Even if you built Cabbagetown or Corktown type housing, along with low rise buildings in all the brownfield areas of the city, you'll greatly increase the population of the city.

It'd still be a fraction of the number of people living in and moving to the 905.
 
Urban Sprawl

This (Urban Sprawl) is really a separate issue.

However, I will touch on it briefly.

Urban sprawl is absolutely devestating our area.

1) It IS currently consuming land at a rate of 9,100 acres per year.
2) The cost of extending services from water to sewer ever further from Lake Ontario and the urban core is extremely expensive and taxpayers are on the hook.
3) It is a very inefficent form of development which perpetuates not the CHOICE of car-use but rather CAR DEPENDENCE. The provision of transit for the elderly and students in these areas is very limited and very expensive (average fare-box recovery is 18%, compared with 78% in the 416)
4)The on-going destruction of Class 1 and Class 2 farmland, much of which is among the best and most fertile in the world is a serious concern for long-term food supply and security.

***********

Just because its more convenient to your work and/or more affordable does not mean it is a reasonable or ethical choice to buy there.

Nor does it mean it should be a legal choice, however, that onus falls on Queen's Park to crack-down on the developers who build the housing and the municipal councils whose members often accept unseemly contributions from said developers, and then approve said housing.

************

As for Toronto's density.

If you raised the density of the inner burbs to that of the 'Old Toronto' you would approximately double the population of said areas.

That would accomodate approximately 1,800,000 people (approximately 700,000 people currently live in the core-area)

Current population growth in the '905' is 133,000 per year.

So the 416 is capable of absorbing all of that for the next 14 years or so, before starting to get a bit on the full side.

Truth be told though, we do have to start looking at hard population caps in this area of Ontario, soon.

Planning is a long-term exercise, and while patterns of settlement invariably shift over time, we have much more room in Eastern and Northern Ontario or in other regions of Canada such as Manitoba, Sask, The Alantic provinces and Quebec.

It can not be everone's absolute right to settle in Toronto or Vancouver.

There simply isn't room.

But for now, much better use could be made of already under-developed land, instead of claiming another 100,000 acres of farms and forests in the next decade.
 
I travel from my office in Kitchener all over the Bruce Penisula, up through St. Jacobs, Wingham, Lucknow, etc. almost every week. There is still plenty of farm land out there. What the smaller towns have done is refused land owners from splitting their lots, meaning that if you want to sell your farm land, the city won't let you sell it piecemeal. Also, the Menonites are very strong and rich landowners in the areas north of Brampton and will likely never sell out.
 
So? I'm not saying we divert everyone out of the 905. The 905 is huge compared to the area of Toronto, of course they'll have more people.

1/1 is still a fraction.

I'm talking about preempting endless "Eww...why do people choose to live in the 905 instead of downtown?" comments. It's incredibly obvious that the 416 could fit more people if there were townhouses everywhere instead of bungalows on 50 foot lots, but unless we raze most of the city, the added people would have to be housed in a smaller area, in Kowloon-style tower clusters.
 
I'm talking about preempting endless "Eww...why do people choose to live in the 905 instead of downtown?" comments. It's incredibly obvious that the 416 could fit more people if there were townhouses everywhere instead of bungalows on 50 foot lots, but unless we raze most of the city, the added people would have to be housed in a smaller area, in Kowloon-style tower clusters.

I'm not trying to judge people for living in the 905, because I know that cost is a big reason why. What I'm judging is the utterly depressing physical condition of these new communities. As the pictures in this thread attest to, there is absolutely nothing redeeming in these new developments. It's just frustrating that as a society we are regressing from the planning norms that once governed the development of our cities.
As for the Kowloon argument that keeps coming up, I guess you disagree with the posters that participated in the Distillery debate, specifically those that feel that high density can be achieved by attractive, mid-rise buildings lining main streets.
We wouldn't even have to touch the bungalows for decades, we could just keep developing our main streets with much denser developments than what we have presently. The fact that one of our main streets, Yonge St, is lined with one-story structures along much of it is a disgrace, and shows how much density could still be added just along the main strips (the Avenues plan) without resorting to some sort of Kowloon-style development approach.
 
The fact that one of our main streets, Yonge St, is lined with one-story structures along much of it is a disgrace, and shows how much density could still be added just along the main strips (the Avenues plan) without resorting to some sort of Kowloon-style development approach.
Indeed, it continues to be one of my #1 issues with this city. Many of our main streets look like a frontier town, not of a high density sophisticated world city.
 
And at several of the Yonge Street locations where they've actually "built upwards" more than a couple of storeys - I'm thinking of certain buildings south of St.Clair to around Summerhill for instance - the results have been rather deadening.
 
At least today's sprawl is largely better than what got built in the 50s-80s.

Maybe if every old industrial site in Toronto was covered in townhomes and if every building along every arterial road in the city was razed and was built instead (funny how referencing New York is a no-no but wanting to transplant Paris to the 416 isn't), we'd fit another million people in the city. It's still only a fraction of what's been and will be done in the 905, where there's an implicit belief among many people that 905 sprawl looks the way it does because everyone chooses it, searches it out, even, and that by moving there or living there, they are saying to developers "Yes, I prefer sprawl...I want to be a 10+ minute drive from everything." Maybe if more than a quarter of people worked downtown, more people would make an effort to live there.

There's loads of people who live in horrible suburban areas because they've always lived there, or everyone they know lives there, or they work there, or it was more affordable, etc., but aren't entirely happy there. Urban intentions are nice but they don't change the fact that millions of people must live in sprawl if they want to live in southern Ontario. We're not going to get better developments by demonizing those who live in them.

We can and should fit more people in the 416, but why pretend that Avenues will solve all our problems? How many Subways, dry cleaners, Second Cups, and tanning salons does Yonge need, for example, between Eglinton and Blythwood - and why on earth would we be better off with that than with what's currently there solely because of the disgraceful one storey buildings? Density can be achieved with a wide range of buildings. If the Avenues plan backfires, we'll have a dozen Bay Streets, each 20km long. But what wonderful streetwalls we'll have! I'd prefer a dozen Kowloons instead of that.
 
What's so necessarily "disgraceful" about Yonge-style (or to use a "hipper" example, Queen-style) streetfronts lined with anonymous "one-storey buildings"? (Which BTW tend to be two- or three-storey, more often than not. I guess because they're lowrise taxpayers, they tend to be typecast as "one-storey".)

Indeed, it continues to be one of my #1 issues with this city. Many of our main streets look like a frontier town, not of a high density sophisticated world city.

"High density sophisticated world city" is an aspiration for dumb yokels, SimSkyscraperCity dipsticks, and Tyler Brule fascists.
 

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