Roads: Gardiner Expressway catch-all, incl. Hybrid Design (2015-onwards)

[leopetr]

Amazon just called everyone back to work five days, and they're known for being pretty efficient. They don't care what any politician or landlord says, since they're bigger than any of them.

Amazon is known for stack ranking and trying to have every engineer leave the company after 18 months of employment

 

[goreckm]

They’re angry at the carbon tax because idiots like Poilievre keep feeding them BS about how it’s what’s causing all the problems with the economy. That same guy is also telling them “freedom” is owning two cars on a half-acre lot in a SFH suburb somewhere far away from a city.

Hey, I agree with you there, but the current economic situation makes the feelings easy to stir up. We'd probably meet our climate goals better by building more transit, more nuclear and renewables, and subsidizing peoples switch to EVs (ala Norway). And, most people aren't moving to suburbs with half-acre lots. Their moving to townhouses, semis and small detached houses wherever they can afford them.

We’re nowhere near being Detroit yet, and we’re still growing at an extremely intense rate; so someone didn’t get the note about moving away.

While the number of international immigrants is certainly large, the number of interprovincial and intraprovincial people moving out of Toronto is greater than the numbers coming in.

First off, that’s going to be an hour and a half commute on a good day.

If someone’s driving from Pickering to Brampton every day for a job, I have to say they’re a bit of an idiot for thinking that’s in any way sustainable.

People will do a lot to keep afloat in this economy. Just the act of buying a new house and moving is not cheap, not to mention finding something that a family can afford. Based on an median household income of $100k in the GTA, a family can afford to buy a ~400K house. Just doing a quick lookup for townhouses, semis or detached with 3+ bedrooms shows the closest available would be Kitchener in the West and Cobourg in the East, or Innisfil to the North, not exactly close by.

Get investors out of the market then. They’re driving a lot of what the builders are making and are a good part of the reason rental prices are so high.

Cities like toronto are seeing more than half of all condos and more than a third of all SFH housing snatched up as “investment properties”.

Yes, investors would need to be decimated, but much more importantly, there would need to the correct housing built. Your going to need tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of units built that are 3+ bedrooms, 1500sqft+ space, walking distance to transit, for < $500K. Apart from the manhattan project like investment, we would also need to solve problems with bringing in enough trades and generally driving down the cost of construction. Unless there's an idea on how to make that happen, we're going to be stuck with sprawl as long as the population keeps going up. Population stagnation or loss will help (if it ever comes to pass), but I fear the resulting consequences of that won't be pretty.

We can (and need) to invest in better transit for people already living near mass transit, and those that can live in the new developments going up around them as that improves the situation for everyone, but, punishing people that can't afford to live near transit hubs is not the solution.

 

[evandyk]

Right now you can't really build (at least in Toronto) 1500sf for $500K just in construction costs, never mind land costs. That's $333/sf. We just built a laneway house not quite that big but in that range, and it came in about $422/sf. You could make compromises we didn't want to in order to get that down, but probably not by 25% very easily.

 

[afransen]

Hey, I agree with you there, but the current economic situation makes the feelings easy to stir up. We'd probably meet our climate goals better by building more transit, more nuclear and renewables, and subsidizing peoples switch to EVs (ala Norway). And, most people aren't moving to suburbs with half-acre lots. Their moving to townhouses, semis and small detached houses wherever they can afford them.

All the modelling (and empirical evidence) is that pollution pricing is far more effective than subsidies.