Watching this community consultation was simultaneously hilarious and profoundly depressing. Both city planning and the community have made it clear that they are strongly opposed to the development.
First of all, they're saying it does cast a non-zero shadow on the sacred lands of Jesse Ketchum, which basically means it was dead on arrival. But that's not enough, so tonight many community members came for blood, with prepared notes and rehearsed speeches disparaging the developers and the City for "destroying the community". Here's a summary of some of the major sticking points:
- Too tall for the location, as it lies just outside of the official designated height peak at Yonge + Bloor. A few fun quotes (I wish I could say I'm only paraphrasing):
- "It's a head and shoulders above everything else around"
- "It belongs farther south where there are already tall buildings"
- "It belongs somewhere else but not here. The area is changing and I don't like it."
- Impact on traffic congestion
- Insufficient parking spaces
- Poor accessibility to the building by car
- Too few family-sized units
- Multiple accusations toward the City of putting corporate greed above the wellbeing of the community.
I felt so sorry for Mr. Giannone, who has clearly invested a lot in this project and is very proud of the result. You could tell he had been looking forward to presenting it to the community, only to have it completely torn to shreds. Some people did acknowledge that the design has architectural merit, but it was not given much consideration relative to the "egregious" violations of planning policies.
By the end of the meeting, the city planner and councillor had made it clear that the response to this proposal will almost certainly be a refusal report.
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