Sprawl and transit: Toronto is winning
A Le Devoir op-ed by an urban studies professor asks how it is Toronto has succeeded where Montreal has failed in reining in suburban sprawl and putting serious money into public transit development.
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Kate
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dwgs 10:48 on 2019-02-27 Permalink
I have family in Niagara and every time I go to visit I am appalled by how much valuable farmland and orchards are being turned into bungalows for TO boomers to retire in. Anyone who thinks that suburban sprawl has been contained should study the loss of agricultural land around the western end of Lake Ontario over the last 30 to 40 years, it’s staggering.
Blork 11:18 on 2019-02-27 Permalink
I only scanned the article but his thesis seems to rely heavily on population statistics without much analysis on other dimensions.
He says the population of downtown TO has exploded, but the cost of living downtown has also exploded, so all this tells me is that a lot of people in Toronto have insane amounts of wealth and those people are moving downtown for the fancy lifestyle.
He says the population of the first-tier suburbs has decreased slightly, but maybe that’s because the first tier suburbs are so expensive now that middle-class people are moving farther out of the city to the second and third tiers. (E.g., sell your shitty bungalow in Markham for $1,000,000 and buy a less shitty bungalow in Orangeville for cash and pocket the $400,000 difference).
david100 14:16 on 2019-02-27 Permalink
I think the only thing that Toronto is doing better is their green belt and ‘room to grow’ plan. Quebec should have done that in the 1970s, the province would be a lot more attractive and housing would be much more concentrated, with a better result for the environment and health more generally.
The government over in Ontario did a good and largely unheralded job of improving their regional transit system, unsubtly called ‘Go Transit.’ Their trains run every 30 minutes now all around the Toronto region. This move takes pressure off the housing market in Toronto and moves development activities to station-proximate areas all around, and most of these areas heeded the call and allowed development near transit. This is great, but Montreal will be doing a similar thing, probably even better with the REM.
Toronto also has a relatively good development politique, though in many ways Montreal’s is better – in Toronto, you don’t really have an as-of-right system and the projects have to go through the ringer to get built, which results in higher cost units when they come to market, and also tends to lead to worse developments overall (lower heights, highly similar forms, fewer units, etc) because that veto point lets the politicians meddle to win NIMBY votes. Montreal’s land use rules are maddeningly backward in some areas (Rosemont, Plateau, etc) but when a project checks the boxes, the city generally doesn’t interfere, keeping government-imposed costs down to development fees, low cost requirement, and the zoning itself.
The green belt there though, man, would be so nice to have had that in Montreal before the sprawl. They’re lucky to have that in Toronto.
Ian 17:11 on 2019-02-27 Permalink
Toronto has succeeded in reigning in urban sprawl but Montreal hasn’t? Oh my, hahhahahahaha
I’m from SW ON originally and I can tellyou for a fact that it is solid city all the way from Grimsby to Port Hope all along Lake Ontario, with Toronto smack in the centre, and it’s solid suburban sprawl north of Toronto all the way to Lake Simcoe, and west to Guelph. You want to know why Toronto has the Don Valley green space running through it? It was a polluted wasteland up until the 1980s. This isn’t some great vision of preserving green space, the Don Valley became so polluted there weren’t even fish in the river. The real reason the Don Valley sprang back is that the highway was built, shifting around access to space – you no longer had to put light industry central, you could put it further outside the main city, i.e.; the desirability of sprawl.
FWIW while GO Transit is a heck of a lot better than anything we have here, all the GO stations are suburban rings. Look at the names of the stations. Those are all commuter stations in former towns. The REM stations don’t even manage that – the Saint Anne one will be up in the industrial corridor, north of the 40, while all of the actual destinations in Ste Anne are south of the 20. Utter stupidity in terms of public service, so obviously a property development scheme. I wonder who paid off whom to make that decision bear fruit.
TL;DR:
The REM solves nothing, Toronto is hardly an example of reduced sprawl in any form, and the only reason it has a green swath through it is because of urban sprawl.
david100 03:18 on 2019-02-28 Permalink
Toronto’s green belt could very easily have been developed like the waterfront industrial areas are. Just because there’s sprawl in Toronto doesn’t mean that the green belt and ‘room to grow’ weren’t great plans that increased both density and livability. Also, REM will be better because of much higher frequencies, the better land use intent, and direct metro connections at three (possibly four) points, instead of going only to the central station for a transfer there.