Canadian Skyline Thread III

[WhipperSnapper]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Not if you aren't in the market for one of the homes it isn't. If you are then it's a concern if you can't find a home that you want, but we're talking about people who already have homes complaining about development in the area. So no, it isn't any of their business if a home they don't own and weren't in the process of buying is replaced with another home they don't own and also weren't in the process of buying.

And of course that's setting aside the whole, "let's pretend that all the people who need homes don't exist and that the demand is all investors" thing. But I realize that obsessing about investors is necessary to justify hostility toward development.

The post in summary is all about the affordable housing crisis and that owners are impeding building our way out of the crisis for taking an interest in their communities beyond what they own. Typical ultra pro development mentality on these forums that is so short sighted. FFS, The affordable housing crisis is not a housing supply issue. There's thousands of units for rent at any time in Toronto. This isn't like the East Coast of Canada. Housing for the sake of housing that doesn't provide desirable family housing and leaches on well established, desirable family neighbourhoods is going to be a negative on immigration whether its quality or quantity. For Canada's sake, hopefully it's quantity than quality. We simply can't afford to bring in 450,000 people a year that are less likely to contribute.

Intensifying suburban Scarborough one lot at a time won't make it less autocentric. Enough intensification of lots will contribute to traffic chaos. On these forums, traffic concerns are NIMBY quackery.

There have been many single family conversions to multi-family in Toronto. It's no longer conceptual. There are some that did a good job. However, the majority resulted in overpriced cramped shoeboxes and none replaced the family home. It's not all additions. There's a subtraction involved and an important subtraction when the birthrate is at record lows.

Typically, any sort of irrational NIMBY concern gets dismissed in public consultation. Changes in response to public consultation almost always yields a better development. It's sad that these engaged community "NIMBYs" have often more insight on city planning than these forums. Here it's centred on number of people per square kilometre like more people per square kilometre will make a autocentric neighbourhood an urban walkable pleasantville and keeping up with Toronto and Vancouver on suburban skyscrapers

[Rico Rommheim]

View from the REM


DSC03672 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03680 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03682 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03683 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03685 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03687 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03689 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03693 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03695 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr


DSC03700 copy by Foofoo MacShoe, on Flickr

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

Basic supply and demand does not fucking exist in a market that has commoditize development potential. Stop brushing aside the quarter million approved units in the GTA that have had zero impact on property flippers from profiting. Opening up Toronto's character family neighbourhoods for shoebox development will another add million dollars in value to each house that is already overpriced from small scale multi-family given the lot size. You can't build affordable low rise at $5 million an acre nevermind the astronomical construction costs.

A developer that builds a house and puts it on the market is more of an indicator of end user demand from than presales of hundreds of units that won't be delivered for the next 5 years. This beast that Conservatory Group released 30 years ago is now entirely investor driven. At least Conservatory Group is an actual developer building physical units. The investors' primary goal isn't to have them occupied

Height and squeezing in as many people as possible take precedence on these forums. There's very little thought process on community planning. Any sort of concern or opposition to any development is labeled NIMBYism. A person concerned over their cat losing their panoramic view is a NIMBY. Someone concerned over traffic, schools and character of their neighbourhood which wasn't designed for cramped 4 plexes replacing single family homes is actually more in tune than the forums. The obsession with tall tower single use development around transit stations in far flung suburbia as progress.

It's applies to being labelled anti bike for having concerns with Toronto aggressively reducing lanes of traffic when the streets are already clogged with cars while building 50,000 more parking spaces with the 80,000 plus units under construction. Neither does it take into account Toronto is not designed like those two smaller, European cities with mixed employment and residential throughout their sizable medium density cores and skylines that make Ottawa's look grandiose.

Communist is a joke as there are many on the forums particularly urbantoronto that believe owning your own structure with a yard and a car is elitist. If this is a reflection of the broader Toronto society than it's no wonder no one is having kids. Biking or transit as a family is not an ideal situation at all.

I'm guessing 1 times coverage across Toronto has the potential to double the number of housing units. However, the outcome for the urban environment means a lot more roofs and concrete and a lot less spaces for trees to reach old age.

We want to add tens of millions of people to Canada than we should be looking at populous Asia and their masterplanned new cities rising in the wilderness than expecting the largest metros to absorb all these new residents.

Then there is you. You see affordability issues in Toronto. Being on a site like this, you're going to be skewed towards more development and not knowing Toronto all that well. It hasn't crossed your mind that Toronto's optimal population may not be squeezing in more people. Intensification is not redesigning neighbourhoods for greater populations. It's just developers densifying individual properties.

I wanted to repost this as it's one of the most interesting comments I've read here in a long time.

When say the we need to find a way for newcomers to not congregate in a handful of large cities so much, we are always told "we can't blame them for all not wanting to move to Nunavut" and get talk about how 90% of Canada is uninhabitable.

Yet still, just in Ontario south of Lake Simcoe there would easily be room for several brand new cities of 2-3 million people.

But no we don't have any vision of how to do grand things so obviously this is totally unrealistic, even if a very interesting idea.

If, again as you say, we really really really want to bring in millions of new Canadians into the country in the next years and decades.

[niwell]

Bring back Townsend! https://haldimandpress.com/townsend-...hat-never-was/

IIRC it showed up as a development area on provincial plans as recently as the 2010s. The original plan was to be very suburban in character but still a type of thinking we've pretty much eschewed these days.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by niwell

Bring back Townsend! https://haldimandpress.com/townsend-...hat-never-was/

IIRC it showed up as a development area on provincial plans as recently as the 2010s. The original plan was to be very suburban in character but still a type of thinking we've pretty much eschewed these days.

Townsend is so funny since it looked like an American suburb of the late 1960s, with bungalows and cul de sacs, but it was meant to serve as a worker's community for a state-run power plant and heavy industrial complex featuring a steel mill to the south at Nanticoke, which is very Soviet. I guess that was Canada in the 1970s.

[niwell]

I remember getting sent an old 1970s $10 bill as a kid from a British relative (I assume they got it from a bank over there) and the image on the back was of the Sarnia oil refinery. Can't imagine that happening today!

[lio45]

Originally Posted by niwell

I remember getting sent an old 1970s $10 bill as a kid from a British relative (I assume they got it from a bank over there) and the image on the back was of the Sarnia oil refinery. Can't imagine that happening today!

That bill was still in circulation in the early 1990s. I recall seeing plenty when I was a kid.

Both sides of that bill would be toxic now, not sure which one would be the most toxic actually

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by lio45

That bill was still in circulation in the early 1990s. I recall seeing plenty when I was a kid.

Both sides of that bill would be toxic now, not sure which one would be the most toxic actually

When I was a kid there was an obviously fake 10-dollar note from the BUNK OF CANADA that had a naked Pierre Elliot Trudeau lying on his side on it. Sorry guys, can't find an image of it on the Net.

[suburbanite]

Originally Posted by Acajack

I wanted to repost this as it's one of the most interesting comments I've read here in a long time.

When say the we need to find a way for newcomers to not congregate in a handful of large cities so much, we are always told "we can't blame them for all not wanting to move to Nunavut" and get talk about how 90% of Canada is uninhabitable.

Yet still, just in Ontario south of Lake Simcoe there would easily be room for several brand new cities of 2-3 million people.

But no we don't have any vision of how to do grand things so obviously this is totally unrealistic, even if a very interesting idea.

If, again as you say, we really really really want to bring in millions of new Canadians into the country in the next years and decades.

I don't think it's necessarily about having "vision". Western democracies don't tend to masterplan brand new cities because they answer to voters who are ultimately taxpayers, and the economics of plopping a million people down in rural Ontario an hour away from the largest established metro area in the country are nonsensical. What kind of federal or provincial investment are we talking about to turn Orangeville into a place where a million people will live simply because... it's empty space on a map?

We passed the point in time when filling up sparsely populated areas was a reasonable economic/nation-building exercise. It made sense when a new arrival could sustain themselves on a piece of farmland and a prayer, not so much when as a society expect that basic services and institutions should be available to everyone. Vision would be understanding that Canada is a very urban country and infrastructure investments in the largest urban centres which hold a disproportionate amount of the economic opportunity (and therefore immigration attraction) would go a lot further than a top down Stalinist approach of "we must move production east of the Urals!"

This doesn't mean that places like Kitchener/Waterloo or London couldn't or shouldn't grow to accept a higher proportion of new growth. However that would likely come as a result of investments in key industries or Canadian innovation as opposed to building apartment blocks in farmer fields and dropping a welcome sign out front.

[J.OT13]

From zzptichka on the Ottawa forum, a rare angle of Hull.


https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...=256368&page=2

And SL123, a few new rental towers built over the last few years just west of the CBD.


https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/sho...182878&page=39

That same two blocks 5 years ago, from zzptichka.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by suburbanite

I don't think it's necessarily about having "vision". Western democracies don't tend to masterplan brand new cities because they answer to voters who are ultimately taxpayers, and the economics of plopping a million people down in rural Ontario an hour away from the largest established metro area in the country are nonsensical. What kind of federal or provincial investment are we talking about to turn Orangeville into a place where a million people will live simply because... it's empty space on a map?

We passed the point in time when filling up sparsely populated areas was a reasonable economic/nation-building exercise. It made sense when a new arrival could sustain themselves on a piece of farmland on a prayer, not so much when as a society expect that basic services and institutions should be available to everyone. Vision would be understanding that Canada is a very urban country and infrastructure investments in the largest urban centres which hold a disproportionate amount of the economic opportunity (and therefore immigration attraction) would go a lot further than a top down Stalinist approach of "we must move production east of the Urals!"

This was a great post. I agree with everything here.

There was a time when moving tons of people to an empty space on the map stopped making any sense, and it was around the time that people started demanding any semblance of a modern life. It varies by country, but in Canada that ship sailed around 1919.

A modern life involves interacting with thousands of people, many of them invisible, who are employed in thousands of different professions. They exist organically in large, established cities; they exist to some extent in small, established towns, and planning for them from the top down is almost impossible.

They cater to our needs and desires. Some of them are must-haves. 0.03% of Canadians will be diagnosed with bladder cancer next year, so if you build a standalone city of 250,000 on the Canadian shield, expect 78 new patients to need a urologic oncologist. Is there a plan in place to lure X number of urologic oncologists to an empty square on the map?

Some of them are only nice-to-haves: like, in a city fo 250,000 I'd expect a few parents to want their kids to learn the harp. How many harp teachers will spontaneously move to Buttfuck nowhere?

But, in any case, you will have to compete with places where these things already exist.

The only people who really talk about building cities from scratch are tech bros who don't have any skin in the game and authoritarian dictators, mostly in the Middle East, who frivolously waste their money on initiatives like these.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

The post in summary is all about the affordable housing crisis and that owners are impeding building our way out of the crisis for taking an interest in their communities beyond what they own. Typical ultra pro development mentality on these forums that is so short sighted. FFS,

It's great that you're taking the time to summarize your reading of posts to help identify possible misunderstandings. In this case that's definitely not my intended meaning. I neither said nor implied that people shouldn't take an interest in their communities beyond their own homes. What I said is they shouldn't take that specific interest (how big the interiors of other people's homes are). Adding density does not necessitate ignoring planning principles and in fact planning principles often encourage density. You can take an interest in the exterior design of neighbouring buildings, how they meet the street, the amount of greenery, the height of buildings, and even the total number of units being built in an area. I might disagree with the positions people take on those topics but I wouldn't say it was none of their business. I limit that statement to only things that are none of people's business.

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

The affordable housing crisis is not a housing supply issue. There's thousands of units for rent at any time in Toronto. This isn't like the East Coast of Canada.

"Thousands of units for rent" doesn't mean much. In a city of 3 million, if the average household size is 2.1 then there would be about 1.36 million households. If that roughly equals the number of units and if only 1% are vacant, that would be about 13.5k vacant units which certainly qualifies as thousands. But a 1% vacant rate is well below a healthy level and and does not represent any spare supply. It's similar to the unemployment rate where is always some degree of unit churn with people moving in and out which in a city of millions represents thousands of units. The same way a 4-5% unemployment represents full employment at a healthy level while a 1% rate would be crisis level low. A similar percentage applies to housing vacancy. So there will never be a vacancy rate of 0% but this in no way suggests that there isn't a supply issue. Again, you can't judge that by absolute numbers (how many units exist or are being built). The only relevant way to use the numbers is to compare the units supplied with the units demanded. Any talk of the number of existing, u/c or planned units is useless without that.

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

Housing for the sake of housing that doesn't provide desirable family housing and leaches on well established, desirable family neighbourhoods is going to be a negative on immigration whether its quality or quantity. For Canada's sake, hopefully it's quantity than quality. We simply can't afford to bring in 450,000 people a year that are less likely to contribute.

Intensifying suburban Scarborough one lot at a time won't make it less autocentric. Enough intensification of lots will contribute to traffic chaos. On these forums, traffic concerns are NIMBY quackery.

That's also a mis-characterization of what I said. I never suggested there should be "housing for the sake of housing" without consideration for quality. Blending new growth into existing areas isn't "leeching" off them. It's just called growth. You see this is the problem with these discussions. At first it seems like people are just against a certain type of growth they find problematic, but it turns out they find an issue with any type of growth you can suggest. If it's all confined to separate highrise nodes then it isn't the right scale, the density is too high, it's sterile, etc., but when you suggest the better option of having it spread out and mixed with existing residential in a human scale then the new is "leeching" off the old. It's just finding various pejorative ways to characterize growth.

Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper

There have been many single family conversions to multi-family in Toronto. It's no longer conceptual. There are some that did a good job. However, the majority resulted in overpriced cramped shoeboxes and none replaced the family home. It's not all additions. There's a subtraction involved and an important subtraction when the birthrate is at record lows.

Typically, any sort of irrational NIMBY concern gets dismissed in public consultation. Changes in response to public consultation almost always yields a better development. It's sad that these engaged community "NIMBYs" have often more insight on city planning than these forums. Here it's centred on number of people per square kilometre like more people per square kilometre will make a autocentric neighbourhood an urban walkable pleasantville and keeping up with Toronto and Vancouver on suburban skyscrapers

My objection is not just what they say at public meetings. In fact I don't recall even mentioning public meetings. NIMBY concerns result in things like Premier Ford opposing the city's plan to allow 4-plexes as of right. They get anti-development people elected and those people make and change the rules which determine what is and isn't approved. And those officials are just obstructionists who do not have anything useful to offer the planning process.

But it's 100% that greater density doesn't make a place less autocentric. In fact, it doesn't make a place anything on its own other than more dense. It doesn't make it more or less pleasant, attractive, safe, interesting, or anything else. Changes can help to improve those things, can make them worse, or not effect them either way, Those things all come from how growth is done. That's reason I don't tend to discuss density at the same time as other aspects of planning. They're separate issues that warrant separate consideration.

[MolsonExport]

Originally Posted by lio45

I'm sure Acajack (being from Gatineau) will also recall when Chad declared that Old Hull was way too exurban within the greater Ottawa-Gatineau metro to be considered a "core" neighborhood. (Hint: chicken kebabs and Greek-style potatoes.)

well compared to okotoks, everything is exurban.

[theman23]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

This was a great post. I agree with everything here.

There was a time when moving tons of people to an empty space on the map stopped making any sense, and it was around the time that people started demanding any semblance of a modern life. It varies by country, but in Canada that ship sailed around 1919.

A modern life involves interacting with thousands of people, many of them invisible, who are employed in thousands of different professions. They exist organically in large, established cities; they exist to some extent in small, established towns, and planning for them from the top down is almost impossible.

They cater to our needs and desires. Some of them are must-haves. 0.03% of Canadians will be diagnosed with bladder cancer next year, so if you build a standalone city of 250,000 on the Canadian shield, expect 78 new patients to need a urologic oncologist. Is there a plan in place to lure X number of urologic oncologists to an empty square on the map?

Some of them are only nice-to-haves: like, in a city fo 250,000 I'd expect a few parents to want their kids to learn the harp. How many harp teachers will spontaneously move to Buttfuck nowhere?

But, in any case, you will have to compete with places where these things already exist.

The only people who really talk about building cities from scratch are tech bros who don't have any skin in the game and authoritarian dictators, mostly in the Middle East, who frivolously waste their money on initiatives like these.

I think you're really overstating this. The majority of bladder cancers are superficial and dealt with just fine by general urologists, , and a city of 250,000 would probably have at least one or two of these. If they need to see a medical oncologist, it's a trivial trip from Orangeville to any of the numerous large health systems in southern ontario. The chemotherapy can always be administered locally, overseen remotely by the specialist. There may not be very many harp teachers (although I suspect there would be at least one), but that's hardly essential.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by theman23

I think you're really overstating this. The majority of bladder cancers are superficial and dealt with just fine by general urologists, , and a city of 250,000 would probably have at least one or two of these. If they need to see a medical oncologist, it's a trivial trip from Orangeville to any of the numerous large health systems in southern ontario. The chemotherapy can always be administered locally, overseen remotely by the specialist. There may not be very many harp teachers (although I suspect there would be at least one), but that's hardly essential.

You guys make some good points but none of this makes the current approach sustainable, which is letting hundreds of thousands of people jam into already established areas, with few concrete plans for accommodation and just hoping that the market and the rest of the stuff that is essential to a good Canadian life are able to catch up at some point.

[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by theman23

I think you're really overstating this. The majority of bladder cancers are superficial and dealt with just fine by general urologists, , and a city of 250,000 would probably have at least one or two of these. If they need to see a medical oncologist, it's a trivial trip from Orangeville to any of the numerous large health systems in southern ontario. The chemotherapy can always be administered locally, overseen remotely by the specialist. There may not be very many harp teachers (although I suspect there would be at least one), but that's hardly essential.

My point with both the oncologist and the harp teacher example is that a major city has hundreds of thousands of people each of whom define what they want out of life differently, and it's impossible for technocrats to plan for this.

This is why masterplanned cities in the middle of nowhere don't work. Even in China, they build these but they end up being ghost cities.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by Acajack

You guys make some good points but none of this makes the current approach sustainable, which is letting hundreds of thousands of people jam into already established areas, with few concrete plans for accommodation and just hoping that the market and the rest of the stuff that is essential to a good Canadian life are able to catch up at some point.

I agree that it's more difficult to adapt to change that happens quickly. But the problem I have with these discussions is that a lot of it isn't related to the time frames. Even if growth rates were to drop significantly like say, by half, then we'd still be left with a lot of the same concerns. If a metro were to grow by 1/2 million in 10 years instead of 5, that might allow more time for construction to happen and for infrastructure to keep pace. But when the problem is that people don't want the new construction to happen then the only option is to stop growth entirely. Permanently. Or at least until all the people who have trouble adapting to change have completed their lives which could take awhile.

Like, in that 10 years you're still going to either have to accommodate growth within existing urban boundaries or allow cities to become unsustainable, sprawling messes by doing it as greenfield. And if a city goes with greenfield then the extra time will be needed just to add the more expensive infrastructure required to support it which is usually costlier than that needed to support infill. For instance, building new highway and rail capacity to handle the volume from these outer suburbs isn't cheap or quick. And even if the country stops growing overall, that doesn't mean growth will stop in the most desirable areas since there can still be domestic migration. So while growth rates are a perfectly fine thing to discuss, that isn't a replacement for figuring out growth methods. Nor does it negate the harm of wanted to enshrine residential areas in amber under the false idea that their current version is the only way to have quality of life.

[dleung]

Originally Posted by Gresto

Interesting discussion about pools and their prevalence in different provinces. I would only want a pool if it were indoors (to be used only in the winter), but the cost to maintain one must be astronomical, and it just seems impossibly decadent to have a pool inside one's house. I'm sure many of the McMansions in my neighbourhood have indoor pools.

Interesting, because I'm only interested in an outdoor pool and only if it has full sun, whereas for the colder months a sauna and jacuzzi will suffice. Hence condo living for me. Makes more sense to share a pool with neighbours - only downside is concierge starting to limit the number of guests; I've gotten in trouble so many times over the last couple summers lol

[MolsonExport]

An in-ground pool is a veritable money pit. Lovely for 5 months of the year (OK, four months without a heater, but I get 5-6 months with one). A real drain on the wallet, though.

[Gresto]

Originally Posted by dleung

Interesting, because I'm only interested in an outdoor pool and only if it has full sun, whereas for the colder months a sauna and jacuzzi will suffice. Hence condo living for me. Makes more sense to share a pool with neighbours - only downside is concierge starting to limit the number of guests; I've gotten in trouble so many times over the last couple summers lol

I could definitely live with a pool and jacuzzi in a condo building, but I live in a detached house. When one has a cottage, a pool in one's backyard is superfluous, and I agree with Molson E. that most backyard pools are likely a waste of money: vastly underused in most cases, I suspect, and costly to maintain. If I had an indoor pool or jacuzzi, I would use it virtually daily during the off-season. (Or maybe I wouldn't.)