Raise the Hammer

It is a generational thing. I don't mean that to imply a kind of relativism or to suggest we shouldn't fight to fix problems as we see them. It's more a cautionary sensibility i learned from studying urban and suburban history ... the specifics change, but our tendency to use the past or "timeless" principles as a stick to beat the present doesn't. There are always people who will debate whether a mistake is a mistake ... my point was that yesterday's solutions tend to become today's problems.

I take your point about Crombie and the reform council in Toronto. But remember that at the time the province was willing to fund most of the cost of the Queen Street subway ... roughly the equivalent of the current Downtown Relief line. It was opposed by reform councilors, and most stridently John Sewell. Toronto planners working on the new Central Area Plan debated whether the line should be moved to either Eglinton or Sheppard. I once interviewed Richard Soberman about the Metro Toronto Transportation Plan Review done in the mid-1970s. He made it clear that reform politicians and their planning allies pushed for the Sheppard option because they wanted to decentralize office employment growth away from downtown. They were reacting against the office boom of the 1960s and early 1970s, which they feared was putting too much redevelopment pressure on downtown residential neighbourhoods. They envisioned that pushing office employment to suburban centres would result in concentrated decentralization that would reduce commuter congestion by moving work closer to people in the suburbs around Toronto ... 40 years on for a complex set of reasons it has created employment sprawl more than anything else. And employment sprawl is far more problematic than its residential equivalent ... residential densities are steadily rising across most of Toronto's postwar suburbs, and even in the 905 (unevenly), but employment continues to decentralize with a few exceptions (there is hope that mobility hubs around GO Stations will slow or reverse this, and downtown Toronto has started to add office space since 2005 after a decade and half of near total stagnation).

When you speak of incrementally urbanizing suburban-style neighbourhoods, I assume you mean along the Avenues. The reality is that reurbanization or suburban retrofitting is limited to mostly former industrial sites (brownfields) or strip plazas and underperforming malls (greyfields). Everything else is largely protected from change in the current official plan. There is hope that the Eglinton LRT will spur the owners of power centres in Leaside and along Scarborough's Golden Mile strip to intensify the use of parking lots by adding high-density housing or office space to the mix. A former Scarborough planner told me one reason for allowing big-box development on the former GM van plant site in the 1990s was that if a townhouse project was approved that would be it in terms of intensity of use ... big-boxes can be more easier redeveloped if land values rise enough to warrant it. What disturbs me is that for all the rhetoric about mixed-use what I've observed in practice is a lot of suburban infill projects where residential density is added with minimal improvement in terms of mixed use. Some retail is added at street level, which is an improvement. But overall a lot more residential than employment space is added. Though it is difficult to calculate, from a district level perspective it is likely that some inner suburban areas are less mixed-use now then they were in the 1960s and '70s as their industrial jobs are gone. White-collar employment was once expected to replace these jobs, but new office development has been virtually non-existent in inner suburban Toronto since the late-1980s ... the economics don't work, it doesn't have the centrality and regional transit infrastructure of the downtown core to drive rents, nor the lower cost structure of the 905 (which has much lower non-residential tax rates).