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Originally Posted by jollyburger
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Many of his assessments are halfway there, but ultimately have huge flaws.
Diversify the economy? Yeah sounds great, we should absolutely do that, but there's zero ideas actually being offered by this guy.
Support families with non-market housing? Yeah also sounds great. We're currently seeing more investment in this than we have for a while, ensuring that investment is stable and growing is a good thing. The proposed solution is a land tax, i.e. raising property taxes for this, but only on the big bad developers and not on legacy homeowners like him who spent their entire lives under contributing.
Shift from high rises to 6-storey buildings? OneCity pushed legalizing 6-storey blocks everywhere in the last election, and Patrick Condon's TEAM opposed that. If you're serious about doing this we'd end up seeing construction of 6-storey buildings significantly more wide spread to cover the loss of high rise density. We can't build ourselves into Europe without doing exactly what is happening with high rise displacement, but it would end up being on a massively larger scale. Again, something TEAM opposes with their criticism of the Broadway Plan.
Find cheaper and better alternatives to subways? Sure, that's surface or elevated rail. Buses, LRTs and pedestrian/cycling infrastructure are all great, but they're for entirely different use cases than a subway, and transport substantially less people with much slower speed. We should be building bus lanes (already proposed by Translink) and building out pedestrian cycling infrastructure (fund the city's existing transportation plans for this), but doing so instead of subway/Skytrain construction shows how little understanding he has of transportation planning.
The three remaining points are all just wishful thinking that are predicated on the points already proposed.
This guy was clearly once right about things but now is just out of touch.
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