Regarding capacity, the census tracts touching the Danforth and Pape intersection have had their population decline by 17% between the 1971 and 2016 censuses. As well, pretty much the whole of the Danforth has seen large population declines as well across the time frame. This, to me, indicates that there exists spare sewer, water, school, and library capacity, at least for the meantime, until the City is able to renew any assets that need replacing and expand capacity as needed.
Well, see you're right about the declines in many pockets, but the problem is that your understanding of how sewer and water are structured is off. All the pipes are interconnected more/or less (well they all feed into a few trunk sewers).
So sewers at Danforth see flows from much further north, fairly far east.
School capacity is very strained at many schools in the area because of past school closures, and because we have a far higher school completion rate these days (in the 1960s most students left after grade 10); also, we have smaller class sizes today in the younger grades (typically 20-24 vs 30, that means more classrooms are required.
The only schools running with spare capacity of significance in the area area are a couple of the old heritage High Schools (notably Danforth).
The local elementary schools for this area would be Frankland, and Jackman. The former is currently at 103% of capacity, the latter at 99.8%
Its true there are schools well under capacity 2-3km to the east; but no one wants to walk their kid to school for an hour before work.
Danforth-Pape Library is the most under-sized district-class library in the City and severely over taxed. Just visit it.
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Neither the TDSB nor the City of Toronto have sufficient funds to maintain assets as they are, let alone enlarge capacity. Secord Elementary school, a bit further east (Main Stn area) has had a 20-classroom porta-pack grafted on to the building and its building systems (a/c) are starting to fail and there is no budget for reconstruction and/or an addition/renovation.
TDSB capacity utilization rates can be found here:
It also indicates there is an urgent need for development like this to make use of an area of the city that has more or less been locked in residential amber.
As seen above, it indicated no such thing. Again, we don't build stuff until we have what's necessary to support the residents. I'm fine w/immigration, I'm fine w/density; but build the requisite supports or turn off the growth tap entirely.
As for paying for these assets, I'm not sure why this is complicated. Development charges and property taxes are well defined mechanisms.
The province just legislated a good chunk of those development charges out of existence and if Toronto has to balance its books next year, at the current crumby level of services, with no new investments in housing or transit by raising property tax, we're talking a hike over 20%, there is zero chance of that getting through Council and it still doesn't build one new LRT, one new affordable housing unit or enlarge one library.
I'm 100% in favour of a large property tax hike and tolling the Gardiner/DVP (which the province blocked); but again, until we've done what's needed we can't support the people we have. Pro-growth forces in this city, have, in my opinion, killed hundreds of homeless and poor people by driving them to freeze to death in winter, be victims of violence, succumb to addiction or die of dehydration in the summer.
We've chosen to invite more people without the housing to support them, and we've chosen to dis-invest in public services.
We can't fix that by more of the same.
I thought the Ontario Line, at this site, would function as the downtown relief line as well, taking commuters right downtown to office destinations there. I think you've overlooked that in terms of transit options and how there may be less impact on Line 2 than you think.
Read:
Source:
https://ttc-cdn.azureedge.net/-/med...a7953ca&hash=76F4E2ABA51A40E73D462B034462CBD3