Yes it really has become unacceptable at this point that the city is expected to lose much of its fine-grained vibrancy on main streets when — as can be seen in that aerial photo above — a similar sized building could be built in the residential area to the north west by assembling a few house lots together.
I don't even super super hate this building (grading on the curve of Toronto standard) and I think some of this scale should be built on the main streets and I don't even really super love these storefronts, but instead of bulldozing a fine-grain irreplaceable city streetscape with a generic anonymizing glasswall situation, what if the focus was more on developing the areas *around* and with our major streets creating new urban districts.
What if the encouraged areas of development were intensifying, say, one block to the north and one block to the south of Bloor St. with medium to medium/high density housing that also had retail/office/community style spaces at streetlevel/mixed in. Some single family houses would remain, of course, and become beautiful features of the neighbourhood, and some could be converted into other purposes. What were once private backyards could become parks. Whole new ideas of what the city could be could become possible. Our quality of life could be increased while realistically also dealing with affordability and sustainability. But! This type of city-building is treated as not even possible here. We sacrifice much that the city will never be able to regain and yet doing the same to single family homes, of which we have thousands upon thousands upon thousands all in a row forever is considered unthinkable, treated as not even a possibility.
Perhaps, I hope, we will come to see the scale of this type of change as an inevitability before we lose too much of the parts of Toronto that make the city a good place to live.
