Don't get confused by the politics; it's not a growth node.
Getting labelled one for political purposes doesn't mean it'll actually grow (whether a subway is there or not). Growth, in Toronto, follows planning applications and those are very quantifiable and SCCs numbers show it is not a growth node.
A subway can only accelerate a growth situation that already exists. It will not create gold from nothing (we've tried that a couple times; still doesn't work).
this is the tricky bit. It IS a designated "Growth node," both under Places to Grow and under city official plans going back to the early 1980s. But even Jen keesmaat said the market still isn't there. They're hoping/betting/pretending the subway will change that, but that's where I'm skeptical. Coffey1 asked, a few pages back, well how come York Region is getting all this transit and no one bitches too much about it. Well, because Markham Centre and even VMC are seeing precisely the kind of development Scarborough isn't. (One could say the same about Mississauga Centre too, more or less.) The former has a BRT and GO on its edge and the latter, of course, is actually largely contingent on a subway. But without getting into a debate about the delusion that transit can just CREATE shake-and-bake communities, come back to what
Keesmaat actually said.
"the market isn't yet ready for intensification."
More than policy, the market responds to what people actually want. And for 35 years, they haven't wanted to live/work in Scarborough Centre and, per the city's chief planner, they still don't. Why and how are complicated questions but my gut tells me that even if it helps provide a physical and psychological connection to the city proper, and while I hope it produces the envisioned intensification and ridership, my suspicion is that single subway stop won't be sufficient to alter a long-entrenched dynamic. Keesmaat also said the larger network, of which it's part, is the key. She may be right. Time will tell.
But, as I also said above, this is precisely the kind of discussion council didn't have. The debates here are (generally? often?) considerate of details and elements that the actual decision makers didn't consider in the years they spent debating it back and forth, and that's (I think) what the real problem with all this is.
