It looks like Doug Ford and his Wrecking Crew are not at all interested in intelligent urban planning in Toronto, the province’s economic engine and the fastest-growing city in North America.
His developer-driven regime is bulldozing any and all city zoning plans and regulations via Bill 108, its so-called “More Homes, More Choices Act” which, according to Mayor John Tory, will be “disruptive” and is being passed with “absolutely no consultation whatsoever.”
The act, the city says, will:
<affect the planning and financial tools to support new development in communities across Toronto (growth pays for growth) that the City uses to provide:
– parks
– recreation centres
– childcare centres
– libraries
– subsidized housing
– paramedic services and
– other community infrastructure.
It will also change where the City can require new affordable housing, how heritage buildings are conserved and how development applications are reviewed by the City and at the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT).>
Today’s Globe and Mail has all the details but it’s subscriber-only. Here are some excerpts:
<“This is a giveaway to the developers at the expense of the local community,” said Mr. (Josh) Matlow, one the neighourhood’s local councillors, after The Globe and Mail reported that Municipal Affairs Minister Steve Clark was rewriting two major official plan amendments submitted by the city, in order to loosen rules for developers and allow for more housing units near public transit stations.
Mr. Clark told The Globe he intends to make major changes to the city’s plans for its midtown area – whose councillors include Mr. Matlow, an outspoken critic of the Progressive Conservative government’s recent housing plans – and for its downtown, to increase “flexibility” and get more housing units built to address Toronto’s housing crunch….
Both original plans took years of consultations with residents and work by city planners, and were approved by council last year and submitted under the previous Liberal government’s planning framework. Just before a deadline that would have seen them punted to the province’s Local Planning Appeal Tribunal for it to make the final decision on any changes, Mr. Clark said he intended to send rewritten unappealable versions back to the city that reflected what he described as his government’s recent policy changes and its very different vision for growth. As of Wednesday morning, the details had yet to be made public…
Downtown City Councillor Joe Cressy, a frequent critic of Premier Doug Ford, said he has been told the downtown plan known as TOcore, which he worked on for years and was meant to guide growth for the next quarter century, is basically finished.
“It’s like the Wild West for developers. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mr. Cressy said Wednesday.
Internal provincial government memos summarizing the province’s changes to the plans, obtained by The Globe and Mail, say city council reduced the densities first proposed by the city’s planners before approving its midtown plan. The memo says the province would scrap the midtown plan’s current height limits, and consider a larger, 200-250-metre area around transit stations as ripe for intensification.
The changes would make both plans more flexible, and remove “prescriptive process requirements” such as access to sunlight, allowing such criteria to be evaluated on a “site by site basis,” the memo reads. And while the province would maintain the city’s requirement for units with multiple bedrooms, it would scrap the minimum square footage requirements in the original plans.>
Translation? Supposed “family-friendly” buildings will be plopped into areas with insufficient infrastructure and services such as schools, childcare, green spaces, flood prevention and more while expensive subway stops, rather than more practical surface transit, to outer burbia will be built.
But ya know. It’s a “war on the car!”
As for sunlight, hey, better start buying Vitamin D.
Here’s an accessible CBC “cover” of the Globe scoop.
Bottom line is, Bill 108 will inflict considerable damage, havoc and cost on Toronto. But who is surprised? Not I. For the past year, the guy has been exacting revenge on the city for mocking his late brother Rob and for not voting for Doug as Mayor in 2014. The man is a hoodlum according to an extensive Globe investigative report on his and his siblings’ drug-dealing past. (Ford threatened to sue but didn’t. Hmmm.)
Anyway, here are two clips from CP24 today. Unfortunately, I could not embed them into this blog post so you will have to click on the links:
The first report shows an interview with Ontario Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Steve Clark saying Doug and His Buckabeers are rejecting two Toronto growth plans because they want to provide more low-cost housing for all the young people who want to get into the market. (Like this is going to win the youth vote?)
As if developers will build anything suitable and spacious enough for young families at an affordable cost. There’s nothing in the legislation to FORCE them to build such housing stock.
Sure, the idea is fine in principle, i.e. lower-cost, family sized condos and more density along transit. But the city has recently seen a dozen condo projects get suddenly cancelled, leaving buyers who had put down pre-construction deposits, high and dry. That’s because, between the pre-construction sale period and the actual construction, costs have rendered the project not profitable enough for the developer to proceed.
So you can bet that, even if land can be cheaply acquired, which it cannot unless it’s in the outer ‘burbs (where there are no transit stations), by the time a building goes up, the cost of construction will have too. This would be even more exacerbated by the fact that the Toronto construction industry can barely keep up with the developers’ plans. Ask anybody living in a new building about their elevators. So, so much for affordable housing.
The second clip, much longer, is an interview with Mayor John Tory. The first three minutes or so deals with the flooding on the islands, so you can skip ahead. Tory says he was informed about all of this via a text last night and newspaper articles today. Dialogue between parties, he says, are “almost non-exist” and that the Ford government rules “by fiat.” It’s worth your time but here’s a news story you can read.
Doug and the Thugs are fucking with Toronto, pretty much like a kid pulling wings off a fly or setting fire to a cat’s tail. This is NOT why he was elected, and was not part of any promise he made, like a beer for a buck. (And how’s that working out for us?)
It’s also a personal attack on Tory and the leftie city councillors whom he couldn’t get rid of during his vicious and ill-considered halving of the council during the municipal election campaign. It will be they who will be forced to announce the now inevitable property tax increases, no thanks to Ford’s never-ending assault on the city. It’s clear Ford hopes to see them all voted out when the time comes. And, by the way, might we be looking forward to another Ford mayor, like Doug’s nephew Michael, now a city councillor? (You read it here first.)
There’s not much we can do except vote him out, three very loooooong years from now. (Not that I think many of this blog’s readers voted Con.)
Meanwhile, expect our taxes and transit fares to zoom up bigtime to finance Ford’s money-driven obligation to developers. Remember that, via the “citizens” Facebook group but more-like-a-front organization, Ontario Proud, the Cons received mega-campaign contributions from developers. Now it’s payback. time.
Be outraged.
P.S. Ontario Proud has recently spawned Canada Proud, which will back the Conservatives in the upcoming federal election. Facebook fake news buyer beware.
Jeffrey Poulin says
He will make Toronto his playtoy now, with all the vindication he can muster. He will make himself and his buddies rich beyond all dreams now. The City That Killed His Brother is about to have its leftie neck rung, and hard. They are in this for the kill.
Antonia Zerbisias says
Seems very short-sighted of them.