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Ontario allows more density, taller buildings near Toronto transit (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/ontario@lemmy.ca
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[–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

It means continuing to race to the bottom, building an unpleasant future where the average home you can live in is a shoe boxed sized condo.

We will not fix our housing issues by turning Toronto into Manhattan, we'll just tear down all the relatively dense and pleasant town homes and semi detached housing and replace them with shitty condo towers, meanwhile the suburbs will still sprawl endlessly with 100ft wide lots.

The way to fix housing without racing to the bottom is to build out transit networks to all our low density areas so they can naturally densify, not to replace our nicely dense neighbourhoods with hyper dense towers.

I do not understand why so many people on the left think that getting rid of all planning regulations and letting corporate real estate developers do whatever they want is somehow going to work out this time, and definitely not lead to our current situation of having massively built out housing that is so shitty no one actually wants to live in it.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I had to read this twice to realize I agree.

    When I was looking for somewhere to live in Montreal we looked at a few old upper duplexes and a few condos. The condos were tiny, expensive and many floors up in the sky. The upper duplexes were huge, similarly priced and not so far up. I don't know who is living in the condo buildings, but they keep building them.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    @MacroCyclo @ontario @masterspace in Toronto, amidst a terrible shortage of affordable housing, there are also many empty, tiny condos. So: the wrong housing, at the wrong price. #foolish #sadI lived for years in Montreal's old walk-up flats and duplexes. They are awesone.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This is only within 800m of 120 transit locations. That’s not going to build more high rises than people want, or turn Toronto into Manhattan. These very specific locations should be very dense to make transit effective and efficient.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Transit was effective and efficient when those stations were built 40 years ago.

    800m is not a short distance, that's almost a km. If you're talking about the stations on Bloor, 800m is a radius that stretches all the way up to Dupont.

    The idea that you can only build transit networks near hyper dense neighbourhoods is simply untrue, and exactly the kind of short sighted thinking that caused us to underbuild transit in the first place.

    Cities like Zurich or Newcastle have population levels of 200k - 300k and better subway and transit networks than Toronto.

    The entire reason that Toronto is a pleasant livable city is because we have pleasant housing near transit, everyone rushing to tear that down rather than build more transit is racing to the bottom for corporate developer interests without realizing it.

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