> My two cents: this incident illustrates the biggest obstacle to progressive urban policies: upper-middle class NIMBYs politics inform city planners, which ult

> My two cents: this incident illustrates the biggest obstacle to progressive urban policies: upper-middle class NIMBYs politics inform city planners, which ultimately results in policies that favor NIMBYs. Ultimately its council that approves/disapproves development, so I think while you're right here that NIMBYs are dominant at the community consultation level, and can impact design choices here, ultimately this is a political problem caused by the fact that established land owners show up to vote and other people don't. It's hard to speak to your 82m tower without more details, but there is a lot that goes into these design decisions. You're right that NIMBYism and politics is involved, but there are plenty of other of reasons why a tower of that scale may not be appropriate for that location. I think it's too simplistic to say that we need more residences, so let's max out the density on every opportunity we see. I'm a bit critical of this in fact, because an outcome from this approach is that rich, low density single family neighbourhoods are completely untouched by any development at all, while poorer, slightly higher density areas are constantly razed and gentrified. Inclusive zoning can mitigate some of the harms here, but ultimately this is clearly an inequitable design approach. My one other thought is that with platforms like twitter urban planners are no longer faceless bureaucrats, so we can listen to them and try to understand what they're up to and what they're trying to accomplish in our cities. Toronto's chief planner is on twitter at https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat