Quote:
Originally Posted by C.
A rapid increase or decrease in city population tells a lot about the health of a city. The rapid intensification occurring in the city of Toronto is fascinating to me as a trained urban planner. What is the impacts to public transit transit? Is the more compact growth having a positive impact on the city's finances compared to the cost of servicing low density sprawl? Is the rapid growth changing existing neighborhoods or is gentrification causing displacement?
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Toronto’s transit system is strained at capacity in key corridors, particularly line 1, which is the only subway line to effectively serve the 500,000 jobs located downtown. There is another east-west subway line on the northern edge of downtown which is away from where most of the job growth is occurring. The rapidly expanding commuter rail system has taken up a lot of the slack, although this is only used by suburbanites to commute into the core. Elsewhere things just get more congested. There are a number of expensive transit and highway projects underway, but most of them are not going to where the jobs are and therefore won’t make much of a difference.
Municipal finances have not really suffered; the City cannot run an operating deficit, and property taxes have risen but are a) not completely out of line with inflation, and, b) are low by North American - even Canadian- standards. As a ratepayer, and user of city services, I don’t have much to complain about. I hear staff at some departments are stretched, though.
Gentrification is surprisingly benign. This might have to do with the fact that Toronto might build a sufficient supply of housing stock that caters to would-be gentrified, namely small condos for professional singles and couples. However the rental stock is very precarious- much more so than a comparable American city, since Canadians have failed to build purpose-built rental for at least a generation. A lot of units are owned by private landlords (I.e. condos, or units in a converted house) that could flip at any time. Rental increases are limited to 1.8% a year, but there are many stories of landlords jacking up rents for multiples of that.
This is just my view. Other Torontonians might have different perspectives.