The GTA has been showing signs of the urban ills that are commonly associated with city life south the border.
Downtown infrastructure has been deteriorating, as have cleanliness and order, which were once the city’s strong suits.
In Ontario, growth has shifted to lower-cost places like Kitchener-Waterloo (110 kilometres from downtown Toronto), as well as Guelph (95 km), Peterborough (140 km) and London (195 km). Even long declining areas, like the Maritimes, have been gaining population in recent years.
Clearly a new approach is merited. Leaders in Toronto have to accept dispersion and find the city’s niche within a wider range of settlements. Downtowns themselves, as Calgary’s urban leadership now suggests, will have to morph from primarily business centres to places more oriented to housing, academic and cultural activities.
To be sure, swank high-rise projects may appeal to the wealthy and the childless. But the urban future lies in places that are walkable but not hyper-dense and can attract middle-income families.
And nary a word about exploitative corporate landlords or rising costs or a dearth of affordable housing that’s driving both small businesses and regular people out of cities.
Of course, that would mean criticizing the invisible hand of the market.
Look around downtown Toronto. Hell, look around any city of any size in Ontario and ask who–aside from landlord, landlord’s real estate agents, landlords who are real estate agents and their bankers and mistresses and mistresses’ botox clinic/Porsche mechanic–can afford to live or start a business there? Do you want to pay three quarters of a million dollars for batchelor condo, and still pay maintenance fees atop that? How about starting a business when your landlord might decide to jack your rent 1000% because TD or Starbucks wants the space, or because your landlord’s coke dealer raised their prices that week?
Toronto’s problem isn’t like, eg, Detroit. It’s not getting hollowed out by White Flight. It’s more akin to San Francisco’s challenges, and that’s 100% raw, unadulterated money-grubbing at scale, which is nowhere near a progressive problem, unless you mean that we aren’t taxing these rentier fucks anywhere near enough.