None of those things are going to happen if the Avenues strategy is respected. It was calibrated to deliver the housing levels needed by the city.
This ties in to the
myth of zoned capacity, the idea that you can parcel out a set amount of permissible units, regardless of the economics of building those units, and expect that to meet future housing needs without price increases.
Think of this: let's say the entire city was nothing but 2 story buildings and you "upzoned" it to 3 stories. In theory, you've added 50% to the amount of permissible housing! That should be enough for half a century! But to add new housing, you could have to: a) buy an existing house, b) demolish it, c) construct a new unit. What would the price be for a unit in that new building, given the costs to do all that plus a profit margin? Even with 50% more room, you can bet that prices per person would be much higher.
The true, empirical, measure of whether there is enough housing being delivered is the price of housing, not a calculated amount of legally permissible units.
The Avenues strategy is a step in the right direction because it is a large-scale de-zoning, but they still picked the easiest targets: noisy, commercial arterials at the boundaries of "stable" neighbourhoods. It's just like what happened with The Kings and Liberty Village, the city de-zoned industrial areas because they were easy targets, and the explosive growth in those areas is the direct result.
Density is necessary but that doesn't mean it should be pushed to the limit.
The sad thing is that you wouldn't see so many high-density proposals if it weren't for restrictive zoning. Midrises are cheaper to build, and less risky to sell out. But when swathes of the city are off-limits to development, and anything over 5 stories guarantees a risky approval process and lengthy court challenges, "go big or go home" becomes a necessity to accommodate the risk.
The Official Plans are not meant to be a starting point from which negotiaion begins with the sky the limit.
Ideally, this would be the case, where buildings could be built as-of-right without spot rezonings and court cases. But most of the city is deliberately under-zoned in order to a) placate NIMBY homeowners, b) to allow the city to extract concessions out of developers, getting new residents to pay for amenities that current residents won't pay to keep taxes low.
These limits should be respected. This is about greed, not city building.
- Paul
Greedy developers make for a convenient scapegoat: they do have the profit motive. But so do all the homeowners who are looking to protect their ballooning housing values by preventing people from moving into their community. Who is greedier, the developer who earns a profit by selling an essential good at market value, or the homeowners using legal measures to prevent people from moving into their community?
It's important to look at who is indirectly affected by a policy, and not just those who are directly affected (the so-called "Forgotten man"). We see the people at Yonge-Eglinton who are traumatized by the "creeping density" of townhomes, but you don't see the people who are priced out of the area and end up moving to a car-dependent suburb instead because it fits their budget.
It's deeply dysfunctional that Toronto
is closing schools for lack of students, when GTA suburbs are
exploding with demand. And that in a region trying to deal with out-of-control sprawl and housing prices, that every unbuilt unit downtown is celebrated as a victory.
