Northern Light
Superstar
The City can't refuse to build the necessary infrastructure to support demographic changes and then use that intransigence as the justification to demand that immigration/growth policies change to justify their own lack of action.
With what money?
As you point out, the City will need to transition to a higher property tax, lower development fee environment very shortly. Other cities, like Montreal have managed to do well with that. But it is a necessary shift: if TDSB and the City don't have the funds to maintain infrastructure, the solution is to increase taxes and pay for the necessary spending.
They absolutely should raise taxes, but they cannot raise them enough to address growth, there is absolutely no way. That's up to the province of Ontario.
No one is going to pass a 50% tax increase, zero chance, you could raise Marx and Trotsky from the dead and you wouldn't pass that.
If developing these necessary buildings to house population growth is what it take to jump start these changes, then I'm fine with that. The City can't be stuck in a chicken-or-the-egg situation forever.
Stopping growth solves the problem. (well stops it from getting worse). And there is no money to build the services to support 2 dozen of these buildings in this area.
Your insistent position here is that you want what you want when you want it; and the facts are irrelevant.
This building also isn't the issue, beyond some minor issues about massing and sidewalk capacity and such, its precedent. Wishful thinking funds nothing.
I don't live in this area, and I'm very pro-density; I'm just exhausted by people's lack of understanding that density also creates problems, and not all growth is sustainable forever.
This line of thought is what brought us to today, it's killed people, sent homelessness skyrocketing, harmed the environment, exacerbated climate change........etc etc.
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I can hear this exact argument above 20 years ago......if we double the population, finally we'll be able to afford good things; instead, we tripled homelessness, increased commute times and traffic congestion, drove up the urban heat island effect and deteriorated the overall quality of life for the first time in 4 generations.