scarberiankhatru
Senior Member
With their lacky mayor's promotion of a white elephant subway in trouble, finally the "special interests" councilor Doug Ford alluded to at the February 8th meeting come scurrying out of their holes. Of course Leo DelZotto, CEO of Tridel, wants a subway. The 2,100 unit Metrogate community he's building just east of Kennedy would have its own special stop known in the Ford Subway Plan as Agincourt station. Local writers Mike Adler and Chris Hume have both noted how this 17 acre mega-development site is somewhat isolated from the Sheppard community to the north and Kennedy Commons area to the south. Were the place to have its own subway stop, immediately all the units become much more valuable to the developer. Margin baby margin!
It's one thing for developers to push for city infrastructure for their communities. That's waht they get paid for. It's unfortunate that Toronto has councilors like Norm Kelly, who represents the area, and a mayor that continue believe its Toronto's job to subsidize one of the city's biggest land developers. Essentially they are saying OK we'll tax Toronto and Ontario to pay for infrastructure transit planners say is unnecessary so you can charge more for your condos.
The 'Metrogate station' would actually be at the intersection of the CN/CP rail line. In other words, you'd have a subway line, the Stouffville GO line, and a potential Midtown GO line all converging in one place, a place that is textbook perfect for massive intensification as well. There's plans to build new roads around Metrogate, connecting it with the north and east by crossing the rail lines - not that a lazy journalist or two would bother researching such plans. It wasn't Tridel's idea to create a secondary plan for Agincourt and promote redevelopment and it wasn't Tridel who proposed the Sheppard subway. Metrogate is already well into construction and Tridel isn't going to make any more money off it, but there's plenty of industrial land in the area...room for Tridel to go from 6 towers to 16. The alignment of transit and development isn't "subsidizing developers"...it's a necessity and it's standard practice.
But some people would prefer to eschew this transit nexus at the triple rail interchange and instead spend over a billion dollars running a streetcar ROW to the Zoo.