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Jennifer Keesmaat's Toronto

It doesn't really matter how much it might cost if there don't exist the people to build it all.

It could cost a dollar and it wouldn't get done.
 
MTown said:
It doesn't really matter how much it might cost if there don't exist the people to build it all.
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How long does training take for plumbing/electrical/drywall/etc? 2 to 3 years? I'm sure it varies somewhat by trade.

Lack of people seems a surmountable problem over a 5 to 10 year period IFF the province directed re-education funding at it. Anyone able-bodied on the wait list who is currently unemployed could be retrained as a trade and put onto a government housing project. The quality of the first few buildings would likely be pretty poor but by the 10th they'd start getting up to standard.

That said, Keesmaat seems to be throwing BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals) at a wall to see what sticks.
 
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rbt said:
How long does training take for plumbing/electrical/drywall/etc? 2 to 3 years? I'm sure it varies somewhat by trade.

Lack of people seems a surmountable problem over a 5 to 10 year period IFF the province directed re-education funding at it. Anyone able-bodied on the wait list who is currently unemployed could be retrained as a trade and put onto a government housing project. The quality of the first few buildings would likely be pretty poor but by the 10th they'd start getting up to standard.
Click to expand...

That's not the issue.

Nobody wants to do the work. It's hard. Sometimes (usually, as here, where they're building multi-unit) it's long hours. Ridiculous safety fascism. Always a rush ("Work weekends!" "Work longer!" "Why isn't it done yesterday?"). Poorly paid considering the supposed importance of friggin shelter.
Physically degenerative work. People look down on you.
It's glorified slave labour, really. Along with anything to do with garbage, housekeeping, and I guess nursing.

It's just......quite unappealing to generations brought up on climate control and overpaid office jobs.

Now, in this case, where there will be some sort of mandated rush to get things done it'll be a worker's nightmare of constantly being pushed to work more, more, more.
They'll never be up to standard. Not after the hundredth. It's a rush to get it done and it's cut corners and save money.

I wouldn't touch this sort of work if you paid me triple and I'm highly skilled at what I do. Highly skilled enough to be able to say no to work that is unappealing. Such as this. I'm not the only one either.

It's basically impossible without importing massive numbers of foreign workers.

It's a nice idea and I'm all for it in theory, but Keesmaat doesn't know what she's talking about in this case. I think she just made up a nice tidy number and spit it out.
 
There's lots of options of reducing costs and delivering units- but you'd need to look further than North America to find them.

For instance, Keesmaat could go the self-build/incremental housing route.
Incremental-Housing-examples-Aravena-A-Elemental-Chile-Elemental-Monterrey-Make-it.png

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...le-Elemental-Monterrey-Make-it_fig3_259494438

Build the basic plumbing and HVAC cores and get homeowners and renters to do the rest.

Of course, this has been only officially tried on townhouses, and it also reduces design controls (so the neighbors might complain about appearances). It is a method that might work- and something that Canadians were doing (self-building) up until rise of tract housing.

There was a project at the 2016 Venice Biennale by Bel Architects, but this realm is still largely theoretical.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ad.2213
 
jje1000 said:
There's lots of options of reducing costs and delivering units- but you'd need to look further than North America to find them.

For instance, Keesmaat could go the self-build/incremental housing route.
Incremental-Housing-examples-Aravena-A-Elemental-Chile-Elemental-Monterrey-Make-it.png

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...le-Elemental-Monterrey-Make-it_fig3_259494438

Build the basic plumbing and HVAC cores and get homeowners and renters to do the rest.

Of course, this has been only officially tried on townhouses, and it also reduces design controls (so the neighbors might complain about appearances). It is a method that might work- and something that Canadians were doing (self-building) up until rise of tract housing.

There was a project at the 2016 Venice Biennale by Bel Architects, but this realm is still largely theoretical.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ad.2213
Click to expand...

Interesting concept. You'd need to hire a lot more building inspectors!
 
jje1000 said:
There's lots of options of reducing costs and delivering units- but you'd need to look further than North America to find them.

For instance, Keesmaat could go the self-build/incremental housing route.
Incremental-Housing-examples-Aravena-A-Elemental-Chile-Elemental-Monterrey-Make-it.png

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...le-Elemental-Monterrey-Make-it_fig3_259494438

Build the basic plumbing and HVAC cores and get homeowners and renters to do the rest.

Of course, this has been only officially tried on townhouses, and it also reduces design controls (so the neighbors might complain about appearances). It is a method that might work- and something that Canadians were doing (self-building) up until rise of tract housing.

There was a project at the 2016 Venice Biennale by Bel Architects, but this realm is still largely theoretical.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ad.2213
Click to expand...

That's pretty cool and interesting but wouldn't help achieve 100K in a decade here. It might achieve something, but not the full dream. I'm telling you guys, only a mass importation of foreign workers would do the trick.
 
Ok, so there are so many points here, I don't even want to multi-quote!

Let me try.

Cost of housing is complex, everyone knew that, no insight here.

Land is the biggest single cost driver. If the City provides cheap land that does help.

However, providing the amount of land required is not that easy.

Rebalancing supply/demand is matter of 100,000 new units if population growth is low to static.

That's very problematic and challenging no matter the politics.

Be that as it may, as has been pointed out above there are other obstacles and cost-drivers.

The easy ones to remove are minimum parking, waiving recreation space requirements (on-site), waiving parks or cash-in-lieu in areas of high parkland, reducing permit fees, waiving section 37.

Do all of those and you can take some costs out............not as much as some would hope, but a real dent. But if you do that....you have a revenue hole at City Hall to fill.........


****

Over to the labour supply issue. I'd invite @MTown and anyone else in a trades-related profession to comment, but its my undertaking that Ontario requires one-to-one apprenticeship training. While other provines have ratios of 2:1 to 4:1. This would seem to be a major obstacle to training enough people to be in the trades.
 
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I have no idea. I didn't do a formal apprenticeship and don't know anyone who has.

That being said, if I had to take on 2 apprentices, never mind 4, I'd quit. That would be beyond stressful.
 
Keesmaat is probably one of the more qualified and polished candidates for Mayor we’ve had in Toronto. Actually that’s probably an insult to her given our history of actual Mayors.

...and yet is it just me or is there something about her that just bugs you?
 
TrickyRicky said:
Keesmaat is probably one of the more qualified and polished candidates for Mayor we’ve had in Toronto. Actually that’s probably an insult to her given our history of actual Mayors.

...and yet is it just me or is there something about her that just bugs you?
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I smell the opportunism a mile away.
 
Filip said:
Her office is primarily responsible for a 3 stop subway being distilled to a one stop. Unfortunately, when you are the head of something, decisions and outcomes made from your group are your responsibility.
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You have a very strange concept as to who is responsible for City Council decisions. Oddly, the Mayor and Councillors have one vote each.

What a brilliant concept, that the Chief Planner dictates how they vote. Any more of these insightful gems?

Looks like posting the link was a waste of time, so I'll post some of the text instead:
Almost a year ago, the Toronto Star’s Jennifer Pagliaro published a story detailing, with her trademark meticulousness, how then chief planner and now mayoral candidate Jennifer Keesmaat had gone to great lengths internally to find ways to block the Scarborough subway.

For months, she wrote, Keesmaat was “trying to make it known to anyone who would listen that a seven-stop light-rail line the province had already agreed to pay for, and the city had already approved, was still the better option.” Pagliaro had retrieved dozens of documents illustrating how Keesmaat repeatedly challenged her bureaucratic betters about the wisdom and economics of recommending three (and then one) stop subway over an LRT network serving three priority neighbourhoods.

“It is a significant overbuilding of the needed infrastructure,” Keesmaat wrote in one memo to a council staffer and obtained by Pagliaro.

Now, three weeks and a handful of policy pronouncements into Keesmaat’s candidacy, my question is this: Where is the city planner who had been such fierce and courageously outspoken opponent of a manifestly wasteful megaproject?

When Keesmaat entered the campaign, I expected her — perhaps naively — to make the cancellation of this $4 billion boondoggle into the campaign’s defining wedge: a raucous point of distinction and a sure-fire ballot question.

It is entirely possible that with the dog days of summer and vacation season fully upon us, Keesmaat and her advisors have opted to keep their platform powder dry, and wait for the right (re: post Labour Day) moment to begin hammering Tory for backing this project.

But it’s also possible that the unforgiving logic of Toronto’s electoral geography, plus the lightning bolts emanating from Queen’s Park, have caused Keesmaat to re-consider the wisdom of hanging a target on her back.

I hope the answer is what’s behind curtain number one, but I wouldn’t be surprised by the more pessimistic explanation.

(Update: About an hour before this post went live, Keesmaat released a strong statement and then a series of tweets about the crisis in transit planning and Tory’s failure to deliver on his promise to make the Relief Line a top priority.)
[...]
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http://spacing.ca/toronto/2018/08/13/lorinc-the-subway-in-the-room/

And from the TorStar's excellent article *based on FOI gained City emails*:
Hundreds of pages of emails obtained by the Star through freedom of information requests over the past two years show how Keesmaat became the subway’s strongest critic on staff and tried — but ultimately failed — to prevent what some have called the biggest boondoggle of Toronto transit politics.

The number of reasons why the three-stop subway was a bad idea added up, Keesmaat agreed in one such email, to an “embarrassment of riches.”

The push to build a subway in Scarborough was one of the most controversial projects advanced under Keesmaat’s tenure at city hall, one that has complicated her legacy as a progressive city-builder. A compromise plan she later moved under Mayor John Tory today continues to unravel.

This is the untold story of how she tried behind the scenes to prevent the subway from being approved in the first place.
[...]
Click to expand...
https://www.thestar.com/news/city_h...aat-tried-to-stop-the-scarborough-subway.html
 
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