We've been here for a year and a half, just over, and even in that year and a half, we've
seen huge expansion in terms of houses that are being built, property prices increasing
as well, and then just changes in new people who are coming into our community.
The downside, perhaps, is the commute to work.
When you get to the GO train station, struggle for a parking spot, we have one vehicle.
We would like to rely solely on public transportation to get us to and from the city, however it
doesn't always work out that way.
As young professionals living in the city, meeting each other, getting married, having
a condo, we could both walk to work, so we had that real neighborhood feel of where
we lived and worked, two bedroom condo in Toronto.
It gets to a point where, again, you want to…
More space.
The history of Toronto's urban growth is fascinating in part because it's a tale of
two very different patterns.
In the 20th century, growth was all about moving outwards.
In the 21st century, it's all about coming back in again.
The Places to Grow Act is a part of the regional approach to how we build the future of regional
Toronto, known as the Greater Golden Horseshoe.
And its purpose, of course, was to see how we accommodate economic growth and population
growth and all of the things that we need in order to accommodate that growth.
Once the Second World War, we have taken in on an average of somewhere between 100,000
to 120,000 people from all parts of the world every year.
That's an extraordinary growth.
It's had an extraordinary impact on the demography of the place.
That's why we became, and are now, one of the great diverse city regions of the world.
There are many different ways to tell the story of how cities have evolved over the
20th century, but certainly one of them is to tell the story of transportation.
Essentially, form has followed whatever is our mode of mobility.
In 1891, with the advent of the electric streetcar, we saw the development of our streetcar suburbs.
The streetcar suburbs are a fabulous period.
They've left us a tremendous legacy.
Mimico, North Toronto, Leeside, these were all compact, walkable, transit-oriented neighborhoods
that had main streets with two-story buildings and relatively dense housing that corresponded
to that streetcar corridor.
They tended to be, though, very walkable because then once people got off the streetcar, they
were at most a 10-minute walk.
Historically, people lived and worked much closer together.
We started to decouple what was seen and perceived at that time as what we call the dirty downtown
to the clean pastoral suburbs.
The car was making it more easily available for people to live further apart.
We moved from this notion of a shared collective in a very sort of contained area to a more
individualistic society.
We designed our communities away from the centers and the downtowns further out.
And that was the beginning of a different understanding about what the good life was.
A park for 6,000 cars, just one of the attractions of Yorkdale Plaza, Canada's biggest all-under-one-roof
shopping center.
It was open in time for Toronto's Christmas spending spree.
Having bought all you can think of, you can relax in luxurious surroundings to gather strength
because eventually you have to tear yourself away from all that comfort, face Toronto's
icy blasts and go home.
Toronto's 20th century growth was a patchwork quilt of what I call arrival cities.
They are districts or neighborhoods or collections of streets populated by people who first
arriving in the city who are clustering together in order to provide each other mutual support,
financially in migration, in small business, in employment.
That has been interrupted in the 21st century by a change in the dynamics of Toronto.
In large part because of the success of the 20th century newcomers.
The old 19th century high-density housing districts in the central core that had provided
the landing pad for many different generations of immigrants no longer are affordable to
newcomers.
The definitive form of housing in Toronto and really in Canada in general is the slab
apartment building in the suburbs.
Suburban apartment living is unique to Canada.
There Toronto alone has 2,000 of these huge suburban apartment buildings and these have
become the place where new immigrants tend to arrive and settle.
When I first arrived in Canada, when I moved here in Thorncliffe, I really felt warm.
I didn't feel that I am in a new country.
I could relate myself living in India here.
It's quite similar, multicultural, you know, dancing popularly there.
And I felt a sense of belonging to this place.
And I think the way Thorncliffe has been designed and planned in 60s with these high-rise buildings,
I think whoever planned it was really an intelligent person.
So when we look at the origin of the influence for these tower neighborhoods, they came from
some really great models and one of them was in Stockholm, it was a new suburb of Stockholm.
And it still today is kind of the model for smart growth in the suburbs.
There's a new metro line, they built a community around it, outside of the metro line there's
a square and shops around that as high-rises and then some bungalows.
And so that's what was used at City Council to argue for Thorncliffe and to argue for Flemington.
And they were very much trying to do the same things.
And then as the region grew and they pointed to Thorncliffe and Flemington to build the
hundreds of other apartment neighborhoods, those ideas were kind of loosely used.
But the idea of convenience and the idea of how tightly that mix use happened kind of
got slowly spread further and further apart.
We start to see a real transition to large-scale master-planned communities that are no longer
mixed use but are simply residential housing.
And this too is a continuation of the out-worth growth in the city.
It includes Meadowvale, Erin Mills, Don Mills, these were all master-planned communities
that were really oriented around the car.
And it's not a coincidence that at the same time the 400-level series highways were developed
in the region.
When we hit the 21st century, something different happens.
We hit 2002 and a new official plan comes into effect in the City of Toronto context.
That's about something different.
It's about growing inwards.
At this point, the thinking shifts to be about intensification, infill, using existing assets
and resources and densifying along those existing assets and resources, like schools, like transit
corridors, like existing main streets, instead of perpetually pursuing new greenfield development.
This is a pretty significant change and it is also supported by and precipitated by the
Greenbell Plan in 2005, then subsequently followed by the growth plan which came into
effect in 2006.
This is really a reorientation in thinking that idea that the city would continually
expand outwards, which was really an unquestioned assumption for about a hundred years, is now
suddenly questioned.
And we start thinking in a different way about how to create a sustainable and a livable
region.
My best friend is a real estate developer.
He is a huge advocate of living in the city and families living in the city, so he supports
the argument that families can live in Toronto, have fulfilling lives in the city, and that
kind of developers are moving in that direction.
I find it to be so much easier to be active in Milton than in the city because, yes, walkability
to get groceries, to do window shopping is different in Milton, but at the same time
it's so much safer and easier to ride your bike to places here, and for families, like
friends of ours who have multiple kids, getting them to different sports is so much easier.
You're not fighting traffic and there's a lot more community spaces for these activities
to take place.
There needs to be a notion that we bring together those things that allow people to live a
full life in a community.
There needs to be, for sure, a much smarter way of combining provincial investment and
municipal investment in relation to public transit and the building of compact, strong
communities.
We can't continue to sprawl and deliver on the promise of transit-oriented communities.
What we wanted was a nice house in a good neighborhood, and all those things don't come
cheap in Toronto, of course, as you know.
The house we had in Burlington was beautiful.
We probably didn't use half of it.
Our basement was probably as big as the entire house here.
I was walking home one night, about nine o'clock, I guess, on a very nice summer night, and
I said, I could shoot a cannonball down that street, and not have a single person.
Quite a few cars, lots of people driving around, but nobody walking.
And if you walked, I felt, I used to walk to the ghost station most days, or at least
walk part of the way.
And I felt like people were staring at me out of their windows and going, it's the
one on the street, because you didn't.
The only time you talked to people was when you got into your car.
So it was very lonely.
One of the reasons the growth plan came forward as such a critical policy framework had to
do both with land consumption, loss of valuable farmland, environmental sustainability, and
mitigating extreme weather events, but also, at a very basic level, quality of life.
Sprawl results in an inefficient and dysfunctional region.
It costs about $125,000 per mile to repave a standard road every 15 to 20 years.
And if you're doing that with low density houses, there's no way they're paying enough
taxes to really cover that cost.
And that's just the road, not even the sewer, the power, the rest of the infrastructure.
And as our suburbs are aging, more and more communities are really finding out that the
maintenance costs are really unaffordable.
So the growth plan responds to these challenges of sprawl, essentially, by creating a regional
vision.
It also created a set of rules to level the playing field, essentially, when it comes
to planning.
This palities had to start, had to look inward and plan for growth through intensification
before they looked outwards and created new communities, essentially.
This was a huge change.
This was a huge change to the status quo that was happening.
And it is directly a result of the province responding to this condition of sprawl.
This policy follows people, planning follows people.
Queen Elizabeth, the absolute monarch of the United Kingdom in the 1600s, was, you know,
she had a place to grow, which is a darn great war around the city of London.
Could she stop sprawl, even like chopping people's head off?
No.
She used to go out there, chop people's head off, rip the darn stuff down, sprawls still
happen.
And by the way, that sprawl we now regard as being those wonderful neighborhoods that
we all love to live in and visit in London.
So you shouldn't fight those trends.
You won't win.
What you have to do is bend with them.
And luckily, those macro forces of the economy are actually helping create the kind of more
compact, more transit-friendly, and more pedestrian-oriented city that we need.
I think it's safe to say that there has been a convergence of factors over the past 20
years that have supported this shift back to urban intensification.
And part of it is changing preferences of a new demographic, the millennials or echoboomers,
who essentially are saying, you know what, I grew up in that car-oriented suburb, and
I don't want to own a car.
I would rather live in a smaller space and have more public amenity, live in that walkable
neighborhood where there's an opportunity to do all kinds of things a short distance
from home.
In Burlington, you didn't see people from your backyard.
You'd see them when you walked out to the car.
And so any sort of social contact you had was arranged.
You'd say, OK, how about next Tuesday you're going to do this?
Here I go out in the backyard and I see my neighbor and his daughter's out there and
my son plays this daughter and we have a beer.
Right.
Absolutely.
Or they're coming home.
We see their car come home and the kids just want to, oh, I see you.
Let's go play.
And it's just haphazard and it happens and it's fluid and it's lovely and organic.
We know we need densities that can support transit and walking.
At the end of the day, transit only works if it, in fact, is embedded in a mixture of
uses at densities that can support a level of service that will in turn be competitive
with getting around in your car.
Young and Finch and Young and Shepard is a perfect example of that.
That that is a suburban, Toronto suburb that has reached incredible densities.
The subway runs along there and they've taken advantage of the subway and there's places
to live, work and play within proximity to a transit station.
So that's just an example of one place that got it right.
Now not every neighborhood needs to have high rises and this is the important thing to keep
in mind that growing and intensifying our neighborhoods can also include gentle density.
And gentle density is things like adding some laneway houses, adding some mid-rise buildings
which are five to 11 stories along some of the avenues where we do have transit lines.
Our neighborhoods are evolving and changing right across the GTA whether you live in a
suburban community, whether you live downtown or somewhere in between.
Change is going to be part of the conversation today, it's going to be part of the conversation
in the future.
The reality is that we have about 100,000 people coming to this region every year which
means 36,000 new households are being formed.
That's a lot of housing that's being built across the region and it takes many forms
but as we shift towards more intensification and more sustainable development, the reality
is more of that development is going to occur within existing communities and those are
points of friction.
Dundas West station where there was the proposed giraffe high rise, that was a very appropriate
level of density.
We have a major transit hub there, there's a subway, there's four streetcar lines, there's
a ghost station and now there's the Union Person Express, it's a major mobility hub.
You need to serve that type of transit service with development, otherwise you squander all
of that potential.
That development was not approved at the OMB, it was ruled that it was not appropriate for
the low density neighborhood.
Eastside is today a very desirable neighborhood, it's on the Eglinton Crosstown which is, so
the transit's there, the desirable neighborhood is there and the city is encouraging, understandably
they're encouraging intensification along that line and the community basically supports
that.
This is their plan for development on Eglinton, essentially mid-race and people basically
went to the meetings and basically agreed with that plan, that concept, but what in
fact is coming in from the developers is not this kind of development, it's way, way bigger,
it's not mid-race, it's tall development.
Just the amount of development being proposed in these current proposals is something like
40% of Eastside's population, so that's clearly dramatic and very worrisome.
It's pretty obvious that the focus of development in Toronto is on the young, the broad young
corridor which includes Eastside and there's vast swaths of the city where very little
is happening and so our problem is that what we should be doing is spreading this development
across so that there's not an excessive amount of pressures on certain desirable neighborhoods.
This is where we get into the challenge of the politics of change.
A lot of people want to live in these neighborhoods but they can't afford to so they're priced
out of these prime locations, not everybody can live in a single detached home next to
a transit station but they can live in mid-rises, they can live in townhouses, they can live
in high-rises, they can live in all kinds of different options that are available that
can accommodate families of different sizes and families of different incomes and this
is the type of building that we need to be focusing on.
When we moved here Oakville was houses.
The area we're living in now was nothing, I mean it was a combination of fields and
forests and you didn't see townhouses or anything like that, little streets full of
little houses.
There's not a lot of walkability, there's no corner coffee shop, you have to drive
everywhere, anywhere you go and I think over time that was what we began to realize was
missing or what we were looking for so you know Humber Bay is sort of that in between
it's still got enough of the suburban feel and enough of the urban feel that it works
for us.
If everything just gets through the moving part we'll be okay.
I think Places to Grow has had a profound impact on aligning a whole variety of interests
on a regional scale.
Now we're still losing farmland, we still have a tremendous amount of green land that
is being redeveloped, we have this tension of too much growth in some areas but as a
part, significant inroads have been made to transforming how our region grows.
The growth plan identifies over 20 urban centers in the region which is essentially
all of the downtowns of the municipalities, there are some that are much larger than others
and if you look at what is the role of an urban center, if these are going to be your
growth magnets, if these are going to be your major transit hubs, if these are going to
be your employment anchors, you can't have 20 or 25 of those.
You have to pick a couple of core anchors in the region that can really attract a significant
amount of growth that can be linked with good transit.
Places to Grow projects that peel region will have a million jobs, almost a million
jobs by 2041 and we are to plan for that accordingly.
By planning for that I mean putting in the infrastructure and so forth, putting in the
infrastructure means significant capital expenditure to accommodate that future growth, however
the jobs are not happening, there has been a fundamental shift in employment, not just
in Peel region but in the greater Toronto area and I believe in the nation and that
shift has been a move away for manufacturing.
So we're planning for one million jobs, I don't believe that's going to be realized
by 2041, we are in a situation of debt because of the fact that we've put infrastructure
in the ground, the residential has happened and they've paid for their portion of the
infrastructure but the employment hasn't happened.
We're losing manufacturing jobs by the hundreds of thousands over the last 10 to 15 years
but we're actually gaining jobs in the knowledge intensive economy, in finance, in ICT, in
the creative economy sectors and those sectors demand the kinds of urban conditions that
smart growth that compact communities offer and these are where the growth plan can play
out an important role.
One of the next challenges for planning is not to try to over codify things, not to try
to over plan but to create the stage, create the framework that lets a lot of people, a
lot of citizens and residents and entrepreneurs play with it and shape it and mold it and
make it their own and that's what I think is going to create really great urban places.
We're not just building highways which trigger urban sprawl, building residential communities
and then there's congestion so you're building another highway which triggers urban sprawl.
That cycle is finished, we're building cities and building cities and growing the economy
and providing places for people to thrive and prosper, there's that sense of optimism.
Climate change has become a major, major factor in all of our thinking.
So planning today for environmental sustainability is an absolute requirement.
We no longer need to be doing our background research and analysis as to whether this matters
or not.
We can just step outside the door and we know that planning for climate change, planning
for adaptation but also ensuring that our city and our city regions are more resilient
in the future.
This is not optional, it's a required.
It has now become the center of our discipline as urban planners.
Everything we're now going to be doing, whether it's got to do with the building of what we
call complete communities, compact, strong communities, transportation, investment in
transit, that's also an economic opportunity because we're going to be changing the procedures
and the processes and the products that we need in the future in order to deal with climate
change, that's all economic innovation.
The conditions that the growth plan is striving for, higher density, more mixed communities,
more concentrations of employment, connections between employment and residents through transit,
these are all conditions that allow things like district energy, which is locally generated
energy often fueled by renewable resources, these same conditions are required for district
energy and the outcome of that is essentially lower carbon emissions and a lower carbon
footprint if we actually add that energy lens to the plan.
We need to make sure that the economy that we're developing is in tune with the needs
of climate change, the green economy, any kind of growth in the 21st century, economic
growth, jobs and opportunity is going to require first of all that we understand what our requirements
are to protect the natural heritage and watercourses and wetlands.
The promise specifically left an area between where was the settlement boundaries of the
different municipalities in the Golden Horseshoe and what was the southern boundary of the
green belt.
That was on purpose, it's something that in fact economists have now decided they better
start valuing and so that's why for instance we have the David Suzuki Foundation look at
the natural assets in terms of the green belt and they came up with a figure of 2.3 billion
dollars a year or the service that are provided by the forest, the wetlands, the river systems
in the green belt.
I think what's perhaps more of an issue is the growth plan and how that gets implemented
and whether we can actually start to see higher densities as the Cromby Panel recommended,
higher than what's in the current growth plan and whether municipalities and developers
will actually build those and also whether the province will be brave enough to tie its
infrastructure spending, particularly for transit, to municipalities achieving those targets.
Not to be dramatic but I feel like we are in a little bit of a crossroads right now
where as this generation of subgroups is aging and as this building stock is aging, we're
either going to take this opportunity to leverage this amazing set of circumstances to build
a more sustainable city, a more inclusive city.
The other side of that fork in the road because we become a more divided city, we know this
is already happening, that these big chunks of our older subgroups continue to lack investment
that we don't create the policies or the financial tools to reinvest.
I think the next round and the next generation of thinking is how do we take this fantastic
idea of complete communities and apply them to every community in the region.
I think once this first tranche of new LRTs is built and the first leg of the transit
plan, you're going to find that there's a completely different relationship to the tower
neighborhoods that are on the grid.
Suddenly if you're on a transit line, there's going to be interest in investing in those
sites.
What we have to be really careful about is making sure that new investment does what
it can to improve the existing neighborhood for the existing residents.
How can a new condo being built in the open space around an older tower actually help
cross subsidize fixing up that tower, making it ecologically efficient, fixing the elevators
and making it a good place to live for the people who live there.
We need to recognize that the new Toronto is in the places that we had thought of as
being the outskirts, the bedroom communities, and that those places need the resources they
need to development to be the city of the next three million people.
When I think of the opportunity, what does Toronto look like in 50 years?
There is a trajectory and there is a future where there's a whole series of hot spots
and higher density nodes that are like fantastic, complete communities that are connected through
transit and really convenient to get to.
So if you look at the young line, you've got Young and Bloor, Young and St. Clair, Young
and Eglinton, Young and Shepherd, that sort of thing could happen throughout seeded on
these already existing high density areas.
Today's moving day, the movers showed up this morning.
We've tested out the transit, it's going to take less than half the time that it did
going from Oakville.
Next week we start back to work and doing it daily and then we'll see how much we really
love the TTC.
One of the things we were worried about was that maybe the people, it would be different
living in a condo and not knowing anybody, but honestly it's really blown some of the
stereotypes that I had, sense of community and belonging somewhere when I didn't think
that that was something that we would feel moving into the city.
You can look around and see examples of places like Markham or Mississauga that are really
starting to grab hold of this, of the decades of suburban sprawl and raining it in and trying
to reverse that trend and a lot of that is happening around the excitement of transit.
They're building it all over the region, it's going to be connected and what they're doing
is they're building density around all of that rapid transit.
They're building high-rises and mid-rises and commercial centres and office centres.
Toronto is one of the greatest cities in the world and I travel all over the place and
I'm awed by the architecture and all these things in these other cities, but whenever
I come back to Toronto there's always just that feeling of you just get along, there's
just this sense of trust and this sense of we're all, that diversity is not a big deal,
in fact it's the best part.
I'm always shocked when I go to these great European cities and there's this undercurrents
of those are the others and it's just that doesn't exist here, that is so sacred and
so special.
And the way that we would lose that is if the drift between the rich neighbourhoods
and the poor neighbourhoods, who's connected and who's not gets to the point where there
becomes animosity and we just can't let that happen.
A great risk is that the change happens and really leaves the people behind.
The only way that we can continue to change in a sophisticated way is if we broaden the
conversation.
We bring as many people into a conversation about the future of the city and the future
of the region and we build understanding around why change is required and we continually
build our own knowledge base around how best to change and evolve as a region.
The extent to which that is a broad shared conversation will really determine our success.
