Planned Sprawl in the GTA

[wopchop]

It can really only expand to the east, maybe. There is already a garage on the west. There is some parking to the south but a LTC building as well.

There are parking lots to both east and south.
The lot to the east is easily the size of the current hospital. The one to the south is smaller but still substantial.
There are other lots in town on Davis drive that could maybe be purchased too. Almost everything across the street on the north side is already low-rise medical offices of various sorts.

The province spent $250MM plus on the rapidway barely five years ago, with a GO train stop 10 min walk away, on a line getting millions in upgrades. It is crazy to see consideration for the largest employer in town to move to a non-accessible location.

It is also highly suspicious that these green belt lands were bought by a private developer not even 2 months ago, just prior to the Province proposing this legislation. That stinks.

 

[lenaitch]

There are parking lots to both east and south.
The lot to the east is easily the size of the current hospital. The one to the south is smaller but still substantial.
There are other lots in town on Davis drive that could maybe be purchased too. Almost everything across the street on the north side is already low-rise medical offices of various sorts.

The province spent $250MM plus on the rapidway barely five years ago, with a GO train stop 10 min walk away, on a line getting millions in upgrades. It is crazy to see consideration for the largest employer in town to move to a non-accessible location.

It is also highly suspicious that these green belt lands were bought by a private developer not even 2 months ago, just prior to the Province proposing this legislation. That stinks.

I might be misunderstanding, but the way I interpreted the link, they are proposing a Southlake 'campus' for King Twp., not relocating Southlake Health Centre itself. Mush like RVH in Barrie is planning a campus in Innisfil. Fancy word for a satellite hospital.

 

[wopchop]

I might be misunderstanding, but the way I interpreted the link, they are proposing a Southlake 'campus' for King Twp., not relocating Southlake Health Centre itself. Mush like RVH in Barrie is planning a campus in Innisfil. Fancy word for a satellite hospital.

Seems bizarre if that is the case.
As you said, the growth is east and north of Newmarket (Bradford, Queensville, Sharon, etc.) not west in King Township.
Innisfil at least is a growing town.

 

[just east of the creek]

Plenty all across the region. Milton has huge employment areas east of James Snow just starting up, Oakville has employment lands along the 407, The 427 extension runs exclusively through large employment areas in Vaughan, Brampton, and Bolton, Caledon has large employment areas along Mayfield, and there are large employment areas in Durham along the 407.

The industrial market completely exploded through COVID for demand in warehousing facilities, after 10-15 years of the employment market demand stagnating though. Employment lands went from basically dead land with no demand to the most valuable land in the GTA in the span of about 12 months, developers are scrambling to get their hands on any serviced employment land they can right now.

Slate Asset Management just paid half a billion dollars for Stelco's land in Hamilton, for example - land that literally earlier this year was deemed worthless due to contaminants by MPAC. The rush on industrial development land is nothing short of shocking.

I agree whole heartedly with Paragraph 2. Spent some time on the Interstate 81 corridor, Hagerstwon/Winchester and south, in the past couple of weeks. The number of new development sin the 1/2 million to 2.5 million sq ft range is staggering,. All set up for manufacturing and/or logistics, almost all truck based, I believe we saw three that had rail or potential rail access. And in conversations, the topic of 'just in time', or lack of it, and the return of some forms of manufacturing from overseas kept cropping up.

 

[Northern Light]

I might be misunderstanding, but the way I interpreted the link, they are proposing a Southlake 'campus' for King Twp., not relocating Southlake Health Centre itself. Mush like RVH in Barrie is planning a campus in Innisfil. Fancy word for a satellite hospital.

This is correct; Southlake has a redevelopment plan in the works for its existing campus.

 

[wopchop]

Developers who bought Greenbelt land after Ford’s win set to profit | The Narwhal

Over half the parcels of land set to lose Ontario's Greenbelt protections include properties purchased since Ford was first elected

thenarwhal.ca

"In September, a company run by a prominent Ontario developer paid $80 million for two parcels of land that could not be developed. Totalling nearly 700 acres, they sit entirely within Ontario’s protected Greenbelt.

Weeks later, that investment by Michael Rice is set to pay off. The seemingly untouchable swath of fields and trees in King Township, just north of Toronto, is now on the Ontario government’s list of lands it wants to remove from the Greenbelt. If the change goes through, the properties Rice purchased in September could be ripe for development, and worth far more than $80 million. "

"Of the 15 areas slated to be removed from the Greenbelt, eight include properties purchased in the four years since the election of Doug Ford, who in 2018 was recorded telling a private audience he would “open a big chunk” of the protected area should he become premier, a Narwhal/Toronto Star investigation has found."

Who would pay $80MM for land they know is undevelopable? This company (Michael Rice/Rice Group) is a property developer - we know why they buy property.
Hmmm.

50% of the lands being removed from the Greenbelt purchased since the 2018 election.
Hmmm.

 

[W. K. Lis]

 

[W. K. Lis]

 

[xy3]

More inventory SFH in the 905 will help squash overheated demand for units in Toronto.

As someone who's looking to buy a small condo or townhouse in Toronto eventually (and as someone who'd never consider living in a car dependent area) I think this is great news.

Realisitically the intrinsic value of a condo in Toronto should be closer to the cost of one in Buffalo than a condo in Paris or NYC.

Now , if only city hall would move towards scrapping development charges in favor of hiking property taxes that fall more heavily on higher square foot homes then we may see some nice deflation.

As deflation sets in , we may see more appealing condo options (such as units with full size kitchens) return to the market.

 

[Northern Light]

Environmental Defence (the advocacy group) is taking the province to court to try to overturn the expansion of the urban boundary in Hamilton.

Environmental advocates take Ontario to court over Hamilton boundary changes

The Ontario government is being taken to court for its decision to alter Hamilton’s urban boundary.

toronto.ctvnews.ca

I look forward to reviewing the legal case here, as I very much oppose this move by the province but am not certain on what basis it might be overturned by the Courts.

The only argument I see made in the piece is this:

 

[innsertnamehere]

Is the province required to provide "reasonable justification" though? And if it hasn't - the best Environmental Defence can hope for is to force the province to write up some sort of planning justification. They aren't going to get it blocked.

Ultimately land use matters are solely in the province's jurisdiction and if Courts rule they didn't do it properly, the province can just change the rules to suit them.

 

[old boy]

Environmental Defence (the advocacy group) is taking the province to court to try to overturn the expansion of the urban boundary in Hamilton.

Environmental advocates take Ontario to court over Hamilton boundary changes

The Ontario government is being taken to court for its decision to alter Hamilton’s urban boundary.

toronto.ctvnews.ca

I look forward to reviewing the legal case here, as I very much oppose this move by the province but am not certain on what basis it might be overturned by the Courts.

The only argument I see made in the piece is this:

View attachment 449609

Keep the pressure on this small 'pointed head' clique. The Government is clearly being assailed on many fronts with the Bill 23 fiasco. I believe there are many career civil servants within the various Ministries affected, ( 15 Ministries are required to report to the Environmental Registry, and there were 20 EROs attached to the Bill ), who must be scratching their eyes in disbelief. I don't know if there is a legal case to be made, but there's certainly an ethical one. More homes. faster, indeed.

 

[W. K. Lis]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1613366932350316544

 

[W. K. Lis]

The invention of the automobile did solve one problem from before the 20th century, horse manure & urine. However, it created another problem, sprawl and auto collisions & death.

See link.

In 1898 there was the first urban convention of civic engineers and architects, held in NYC. It brought people from all over the world. The topics were to be the value of open spaces and the value of architecture in great cities but the meeting never moved beyond the manure crisis. The meeting ended with not much accomplished.

In the late 1800s there were over 300,000 horses in NYC alone, generating 2 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of horse urine every single day. Every. Single Day. Times Square was originally called “Longacre” and it was a massive field owned by John Astor where he sold horses; not soon after the meeting, Astor sold it to the New York Times and it became Times Square. (He later died on the Titanic.) There were even entire city blocks where manure was piled nearly 100 feet high because the city could not deal with it. When it rained, the cities filled with a disgusting mud of manure and filth. Urchins were paid by pedestrians to make a path before them as they walked. In some streets, the manure came up beyond the ankles; it was one reason there were steps up to the front doors of homes and the “mud room” was the place where people removed their boots before entering the house to not track in filth. The NY Times reported that 3 billion flies were bred in the filth every day.

In earlier times, manure was sold by the city for a profit to farmers who carried it to their farms in dung carts; most of Brooklyn was still open field in the mid 1800s. Then it was barged up north on the rivers to the farms. But as the city grew, the amount of manure increased beyond management and by 10AM it was no longer good for manure because so much filth was mixed with the manure that it was unusable as fertilizer. To make matters worse, the sanitation department was controlled by the Tamanny Organization, the biggest organized crime ring in America, and used for “no show” patronage jobs. Streets could be cleaned by extortion only. Richer city dwellers had to pay off the sanitation department to clean the streets, twice a week. And the cacophony of horses clopping was maddening. The rich paid to have their streets strewn with straw to cut down on the noise. The situation became so bad that the city paved some streets in wood, cut in wide blocks and laid with the grain up, to cut down on the noise - but the wood absorbed horse urine and stunk even more, and it rotted away within five years while sett blocks would last virtually forever. However, set blocks were uneven and people and horses would easily trip. A lame horse would be shot and left to rot for up to three months because there were no machines to haul away such heavy carcasses.

Teddy Roosevelt, before he became Commissoner of Police, hired to clean up the corruption in the police department, which had even fought a deadly civil war between competing departments, was first offered the job of cleaning the streets. He turned it down. “No one can clean up that mess,” he declared.

Even though it was illegal, the city pushed the manure into the harbor or onto barges and had it dumped at sea where it washed up on the beaches of Long Island, making the residents irate. The situation was so bad that bars of manure formed in the river that capsized ships and halted navigation requiring constant dredging. It was an absolute disaster.

The problem was solved in stages but it was actually the electric subway car and the invention of automobiles that saved the city, and cities worldwide, though in Europe, earnest efforts at sanitation had gotten the problem in hand long before the US. The automobile was in its infancy in 1898 with only a handful of electric, steam and gas cars but by 1908, half of all the horses in NYC had been replaced by cars. In fact, the impact on the horse market was so intense that people were frantically selling their horses for any price to the glue factories just to get rid of them. The last horse-drawn fire engine was retired in NYC in 1922 in a great ceremony where the last engine was called on a ceremonial fire call from a box, and they raced from the station for the last time, chased by their Dalmations, to a non-existent fire where the horses were relieved of their jobs, but preserved to live out their lives in a pasture as a reward for their service.

The automobile and a man named Colonel Waring saved NYC. Waring was given absolute dictatorial control over the clean up of the city and fired the Tammany no-shows and had his men dress in white uniforms as they shoveled the manure away, day and night. He even made it a patriotic duty to clean the streets and put in waste baskets and organized trash removal. He was so hailed by the city for his success that a ticker tape parade was held in his honor. But ultimately, it was the automobile that saved the city.

 

[lenaitch]

Have you ever thought about starting your own 'I have cars' website?