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Red Mars · Sep 7, 2019

Sept 7, 2019

Automation Gallery · Sep 9, 2019

i wouldn't be a bit surprised in 20 years to see this kind of development all the way up Dufferin to Bloor

concrete_and_light · Sep 9, 2019

Automation Gallery said:
i wouldn't be a bit surprised in 20 years to see this kind of development all the way up Dufferin to Bloor

It's what should happen on most of our downtown north-west streets (I think in particular in the west end it's really needed, probably also in the east, but I know less about the east end so I don't want to speak on it in an uninformed way).

It's completely absurd at this point how many of them are just endless rows of monotonous houses on an entirely hostile streetscape — cars and busses hurtling by, often without many trees. The houses themselves seem generally closed up and not that nice — unsurprising given that the street is a barren wasteland of traffic and concrete.

The potential for this type of intensification is huge, eventually likely will happen, and given that eventuality I wish I saw more from the City in terms of getting ahead of it. It would be good for housing density and IMO they could be particularly good sites to target for affordable housing. But also it would connect the city together into a real urban fabric in a way it currently isn't. Toronto has so many great east-west streets that you can walk along and find interesting things endlessly, but they all feel very isolated from each other since you can't really move between them while staying in connected urban districts. It feels like there are great gulfs between them. We have very few urban districts, instead mostly just parallel lines.

I imagine part of the lack of development on these is the general hostility of suburban political attitudes and councillors towards any action no matter how small inhibiting (whether in reality or only in signifying) people driving into the city (see: the opposition to and ripping up of the Jarvis bike lanes and discussions of how many minutes would be added to car commutes). But it's gotta be these main streets because the rest of the north-south streets are part of The Dream of the 1950s Homeowner Lifestyle Occupied Lands, which do at least have benefits more than the main street wastelands offer: they are a respite of green and shade and can be really nice for a relaxed walk, but can sometimes feel monotonous — potentially even a bit intimidating in their isolation and darkness at night — and, like, also sometimes you just want to walk out on the street in the city and move between places continuously in that mode! It would just make for a better city for our best urban spaces to be well-activated and networked together!

With a few exceptions — such as Spadina (which has one of the City's best small-scale, urban areas in Chinatown), Ossington (a place that, love it or hate it, became a whole new destination area of the city because it had the bones to become one), Roncesvalles, etc. — so many of them are soulless nothingplaces. Lansdowne? Dufferin? Bathurst? What do these streets offer in their current form, why are they still like this, and why are our leaders so without any sort of proactive action in building the city? Can we please just let thoughtful urbanists run the city for once and start building it properly?

IMO, if this is legally possible, a really bold and welcome thing for the City to do would be to start buying up house lots on these streets and then leading the transformation by facilitating their development into dense mixed affordable housing and commercial areas with good street design. Since it's almost certainly going to happen eventually anyway, The City really should try to guide it to make sure it happens in a way that's beneficial to the public and the city as a network of places (and also needs to get serious about transit on Dufferin).

Adjei · Sep 9, 2019

concrete_and_light said:
It's what should happen on most of our downtown north-west streets (I think in particular in the west end it's really needed, probably also in the east, but I know less about the east end so I don't want to speak on it in an uninformed way).

It's completely absurd at this point how many of them are just endless rows of monotonous houses on an entirely hostile streetscape — cars and busses hurtling by, often without many trees. The houses themselves seem generally closed up and not that nice — unsurprising given that the street is a barren wasteland of traffic and concrete.

The potential for this type of intensification is huge, eventually likely will happen, and given that eventuality I wish I saw more from the City in terms of getting ahead of it. It would be good for housing density and IMO they could be particularly good sites to target for affordable housing. But also it would connect the city together into a real urban fabric in a way it currently isn't. Toronto has so many great east-west streets that you can walk along and find interesting things endlessly, but they all feel very isolated from each other since you can't really move between them while staying in connected urban districts. It feels like there are great gulfs between them. We have very few urban districts, instead mostly just parallel lines.

I imagine part of the lack of development on these is the general hostility of suburban political attitudes and councillors towards any action no matter how small inhibiting (whether in reality or only in signifying) people driving into the city (see: the opposition to and ripping up of the Jarvis bike lanes and discussions of how many minutes would be added to car commutes). But it's gotta be these main streets because the rest of the north-south streets are part of The Dream of the 1950s Homeowner Lifestyle Occupied Lands, which do at least have benefits more than the main street wastelands offer: they are a respite of green and shade and can be really nice for a relaxed walk, but can sometimes feel monotonous — potentially even a bit intimidating in their isolation and darkness at night — and, like, also sometimes you just want to walk out on the street in the city and move between places continuously in that mode! It would just make for a better city for our best urban spaces to be well-activated and networked together!

With a few exceptions — such as Spadina (which has one of the City's best small-scale, urban areas in Chinatown), Ossington (a place that, love it or hate it, became a whole new destination area of the city because it had the bones to become one), Roncesvalles, etc. — so many of them are soulless nothingplaces. Lansdowne? Dufferin? Bathurst? What do these streets offer in their current form, why are they still like this, and why are our leaders so without any sort of proactive action in building the city? Can we please just let thoughtful urbanists run the city for once and start building it properly?

IMO, if this is legally possible, a really bold and welcome thing for the City to do would be to start buying up house lots on these streets and then leading the transformation by facilitating their development into dense mixed affordable housing and commercial areas with good street design. Since it's almost certainly going to happen eventually anyway, The City really should try to guide it to make sure it happens in a way that's beneficial to the public and the city as a network of places (and also needs to get serious about transit on Dufferin).

When you have a mayor whose main priority is keeping property taxes at or below inflation, what else can you expect?

Downtown Toronto · Sep 9, 2019

Adjei said:
When you have a mayor whose main priority is keeping property taxes at or below inflation, what else can you expect?

Your comment hints towards support of raising realty taxes which concerns me. How about the mayor gets in front of the ridiculous spending like with the rigged construction procurement process where a simple job that can be done with $6000 gets done at $75000? Anyone recall the park stair debacle of a few years ago where the city was getting quotes for 60-150k from contractors to install stairs that some guy got done for sub $600.00, no? well read here. This is just one of literally hundreds of contracts that get awarded annually at exorbitant rates but you rarely hear about it.?‍

Raising taxes is a bandage solution to a much bigger problem imho.

jozl · Sep 10, 2019

Good post concrete-and-light. The north south downtown streets you mention are dreadful and a colossal waste of housing space.

DavidCapizzano · Sep 10, 2019

Dufferin could use this kind of development all the way up to Lawrence.

ProjectEnd · Sep 10, 2019

Downtown Toronto said:
Your comment hints towards support of raising realty taxes which concerns me. How about the mayor gets in front of the ridiculous spending like with the rigged construction procurement process where a simple job that can be done with $6000 gets done at $75000? Anyone recall the park stair debacle of a few years ago where the city was getting quotes for 60-150k from contractors to install stairs that some guy got done for sub $600.00, no? well read here. This is just one of literally hundreds of contracts that get awarded annually at exorbitant rates but you rarely hear about it.?‍Raising taxes is a bandage solution to a much bigger problem imho.

So you work in construction? You know how trades price things? I'd love to get your delta on that job. 'Rigged construction procurement process' is a lot to claim when you're citing a hideously unsafe, amateur liability as your precedent.

You pay for the city you want. Raising property taxes is an imperative if we're every going to get the city many of us desire and, moreover, expect.

Downtown Toronto · Sep 10, 2019

ProjectEnd said:
So you work in construction? You know how trades price things? I'd love to get your delta on that job. 'Rigged construction procurement process' is a lot to claim when you're citing a hideously unsafe, amateur liability as your precedent.

You pay for the city you want. Raising property taxes is an imperative if we're every going to get the city many of us desire and, moreover, expect.

I've been involved in real estate for 20 years, both in new construction and asset management. You could say I know a little bit about construction as it relates to dealing with and paying trades, net cost of work performed and the city procurement process and how trades price "things". The construction procurement process or lack thereof is no secret in the industry, bid rigging is rampant to say the least and covered in the media to some extent. Raising taxes when there is rampant mismanagement of existing funds raised mainly by realty taxes does nothing long term and is just a bandage, same way the city relies on the land transfer tax, of course the procurement contracts being awarded at ridiculous rates are just one problem, but its one I have experience in and can comment on, I don't want to name companies but know from first hand experience and by talking to a number of city infrastructure inspectors that the funds being paid out for work is borderline criminal but more importantly difficult to prove according to the inspectors I conversed with, especially as it relates to road and sewer work. I don't have a problem with paying taxes, that is not the point, the issue at hand is where the tax money is ending up.

You don't have to take my word for it, do a Google search and see what comes up from the Globe, Star, National post etc.

ProjectEnd · Sep 11, 2019

Downtown Toronto said:
I've been involved in real estate for 20 years, both in new construction and asset management. You could say I know a little bit about construction as it relates to dealing with and paying trades, net cost of work performed and the city procurement process and how trades price "things". The construction procurement process or lack thereof is no secret in the industry, bid rigging is rampant to say the least and covered in the media to some extent. Raising taxes when there is rampant mismanagement of existing funds raised mainly by realty taxes does nothing long term and is just a bandage, same way the city relies on the land transfer tax, of course the procurement contracts being awarded at ridiculous rates are just one problem, but its one I have experience in and can comment on, I don't want to name companies but know from first hand experience and by talking to a number of city infrastructure inspectors that the funds being paid out for work is borderline criminal but more importantly difficult to prove according to the inspectors I conversed with, especially as it relates to road and sewer work. I don't have a problem with paying taxes, that is not the point, the issue at hand is where the tax money is ending up.

You don't have to take my word for it, do a Google search and see what comes up from the Globe, Star, National post etc.

Well that makes two of us. I never said that the construction industry is 'clean' (yuk yuk), but your implication was that the Mayor is able to do something about the procurement process the city uses / pursues. If you've been in real estate / construction, you know that's just not true. What's even sillier is the notion, pursued at all levels of politics in search of voter support, that we can maintain or grow a city using the rate of inflation as the benchmark for spending. You would know that construction costs in the last 2-3 years have exploded - a reality that both private developers and the city itself is having to deal with. So to imply that we need to halt all contracting until we can sort out the 'mismanagement of funds' is absurd and untrue.

And if you have all of these 'examples', why the hell did you use Adi Astl's dipshit homebrew stair as the hill to die on?

Downtown Toronto · Sep 11, 2019

ProjectEnd said:
Well that makes two of us. I never said that the construction industry is 'clean' (yuk yuk), but your implication was that the Mayor is able to do something about the procurement process the city uses / pursues. If you've been in real estate / construction, you know that's just not true. What's even sillier is the notion, pursued at all levels of politics in search of voter support, that we can maintain or grow a city using the rate of inflation as the benchmark for spending. You would know that construction costs in the last 2-3 years have exploded - a reality that both private developers and the city itself is having to deal with. So to imply that we need to halt all contracting until we can sort out the 'mismanagement of funds' is absurd and untrue.

And if you have all of these 'examples', why the hell did you use Adi Astl's dipshit homebrew stair as the hill to die on?

? the stair is the one that popped to mind. I agree that construction cant just stop but I dont really see or hear the mayor's office doing much in the way of improving it. Tory Huffing and puffing on the news doesn't count as trying to fix the issue. People on the ground I.e inspectors clearly say basically nothing has changed at least as of 3 weeks ago from when I spoke to one specifically about this when they were doing sewer work on my street.

Point I'm trying to make is that the issues at hand should be fixed first before you jump on the tax increase otherwise we are going around in circles and putting a bandage over spending problems.