26 ms·

Good. Toronto doesn't need condo neighbourhoods with gimmicky smart-phone integrations. It needs re-zoning of low density neighbourhoods to allow medium density

• cactus2093 6y ago
  But... condo neighborhoods are exactly that medium density housing. Every city does need more condos in their existing neighborhoods if populations are able to grow. (Unless Covid-19 will reshape the trajectory of urbanization, and major cities will mostly shrink for the next several decades. That actually seems somewhat plausible). But writing off all the sidewalk labs ideas as gimmicky smartphone integrations is pretty disingenuous. There were ideas for greener construction methods using more timber and less concrete, more space optimized for walking and biking instead of cars, interesting communal space arrangements to make spaces that can be heated in winter and converted to outdoor space when the weather is nice. There will always be some haters, but IMO all of these things would be amazing quality of life improvements in the majority of North American cities.
  • sudosysgen 6y ago
    Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. In general construction of new condos is focused on the luxury kind of condos Google was undoubtedly looking at, which are absolutely not what cities need right now. We need affordable housing.
    • refurb 6y ago
      Condos are too expensive in general to fulfill the needs of most cities. What the alternative? It's either single family home or condominiums (apartments).
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        Not necessarily, no. First, condominiums are not apartments, because they are supposed to be sold, and in general cannot be rented. This means that they are built for and priced for people that can afford a 450000$ mortgage plus large condominium fees every month. Which are not the people that need housing right now. There are also duplexes and triplexes, and apartments, as well as housing co-ops and subsidized or state-built housing. These are much better, imo, than condos.
        • alexashka 6y ago
          Units within condos are rented all the time. Your argument seems to be that there is a sizeable chunk of the population that cannot afford to own their own home. Yes, and? We live in a global market and as a result, citizens of successful cities have to compete with people not just from that city, but from people outside, who are willing to bring in some cash. Oops, that means a bunch of people now can't afford to own a home. That's the world we're living in. If you want to cancel inflow of capital into big cities, that's a political decision that has nothing to do with building or not building housing. If you want to 'just build affordable housing', you're really saying let's give permanent government assistance to a slice of the population. Are you qualified and knowledgable of all the side-effects of doing so? I'm not, so I don't even bother pretending I have a solution. People need to become 1% smarter, to realize how complex human societies are and quit wishful thinking of 'just give/build more stuff for people who don't have enough'. You're a software developer, you know what a ball of mud most codebases are and how hard they are to refactor. Human societies are a worse version of that and it's a thankless job because by re-factoring one bit, you potentially break a dozen other places and boy will you hear from them.
          • sudosysgen 6y ago
            If your idea is that the current system is so broken that there is nothing we can do to avoid 40% of the population in major production hubs to have to spend ridiculous fractions of their income on housing, with other that simply can't, then maybe indeed a refactor isn't enough, and we should start thinking about a complete rewrite. This isn't even a question of competition. Prices are increasing purely because the market can bear more expensive housing. The net effect is that real wages after rent are decreasing year after year since the 80s. At this rate, the day will come where the real wages of the average citizen of the US after rent will be lower than in the disaster that was the Soviet Union. The problem is actually even more complex that simply capital inflow into big cities. Because capital is already centralized around big cities, and has been for a while, which leads to the question, where is that capital coming from? And the answer is that it doesn't actually have to do with capital moving, as that mostly cancels out, but instead with growing inequality. Also, if your end statement is that it's ok that most people aren't able to own their home anymore, aren't able to own their cars, aren't able to own their furniture, aren't able to own their phones and so on, which is the direction in which things are happening, you shouldn't be surprised when heads start to roll in the next economic crisis. Literally. This is not a small issue, it is a massive issue. The incentive, historically, for the average person to continue participating in capitalism is the promise that eventually they will be able to have their own property, and maybe pass on some capital to their children. If you take away this incentive, the system will likely not survive for much longer. There is a reason why the first people that the population turned against in the Chinese revolution were the landlords. I don't want to see this happen again. So yes, if fixing this issue will break a few other places, I don't care, we can see what we will do later. This is one of the most important economic issues full stop.
      • geddy 6y ago
        Housing projects, so that in a year everyone can complain about the crime rate increasing and the quality stores closing and being replaced by fast food chains. It's like everyone's solution to make everything affordable is to aim to please everyone below the poverty line while giving a middle finger to everyone above it.
        • sudosysgen 6y ago
          Wait what, you're saying that poor people bring crime right? And what's your solution, to make them even poorer or homeless? Or are you just using class as a proxy for something else?
          • bergstromm466 6y ago
            I hear you brother/sister. I honestly believe, the people with these arguments have never experienced any hardships - which mean they can't understand the ruthlessness of their arguments. So ingrained are they in the Cultural Hegemony of Western civilization. I recently watched 'Owned: A Tale Of Two Americas', which is a great documentary on the US's racist housing policies.
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > construction of new condos is focused on the luxury kind Supply is supply. Harlem is largely former luxury units. Anecdotally, the luxury building opening down the street let me negotiate down my rent. It sucked the highest earners out of my building (and renter pool), which reduced my landlord's leverage. And it let me compare perks (e.g. included gym offsetting a membership), which increased mine. End result was a modest rent reduction.
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        Sure, and in most cities incredible amounts of condos have been built and prices of rent for low-income individuals have increased massively. It does not work in the real world. Supply is not supply. For one, these condos being built can essentially not be rented, and that means that they are not supply for low and middle income individuals.
        • WalterBright 6y ago
          If demand increases faster than supply increases, then prices go up. It does not mean supply&demand theory is invalid.
          • sudosysgen 6y ago
            So, demand and supply has increased dramatically in almost every single city in the world, and in almost no cities has supply outpaced demand? The world is not an economics 101 textbook. In Canada for example, the only province with functional and affordable housing is the one that enacted serious rent control and public housing, and they didn't have to build a lot. Seems to me that supply and demand isn't the whole thing if your goal is to have affordable housing.
            • WalterBright 6y ago
              > in almost no cities has supply outpaced demand? Detroit. Rural communities. In real estate, it takes a while (years) for supply to catch up with demand. What you're seeing is simply city populations are rising quickly.
    • CaveTech 6y ago
      I'm not sure if either are you Canadian/Toronto residents, but Toronto has been developing a metric fuckton of condos over the last decade. In my neighbourhood alone (a 3x4 block area) there's been 15 30+ story condos built in that timeframe. We have no problems with condo development, imo.
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        I live in Montreal. Incredible amounts of condos have been getting built left and right, and they are inaccessible to people that need housing. The end result is that the price of housing for those that need it the most has increased dramatically. Now the city, after spending years focusing on getting more condos built, realized it's not going to fix the issues and will start building at least a few thousand units of state housing.
      • jeromegv 6y ago
        It's irrelevant if that amount of condo is still not enough compared to the demand caused by 100 000 new residents moving into the region every year. Tech jobs are up. Airbnbs are up (as of before COVID). Supply is low. There are people lining up for renting apartments. It's a lack of supply.
        • sudosysgen 6y ago
          Even in places where population is decreasing, rent finds a way to increase.
      • bhelkey 6y ago
        I believe the above posters point is that, though a tremendous number of housing units are being developed, the demand for housing is increasing faster than this development. I don't have a stake in this matter but there appears to be some evidence to support this idea. > Between 2016 and 2019, the GTA added more than 325,000 jobs, but only 102,000 new homes. [1] [1] https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2020/02/15/toronto-housing-is-getting-out-of-reach-should-private-companies-start-providing-homes-for-workers.html https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2020/02/15/toronto-...
    • briffle 6y ago
      Building Luxury condos does create affordable housing. Where do you think those people move from? interesting thought from this link: If you destroy 10,000 luxury condo's in Toronto tomorrow, will your prices go down? https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/1/how-luxury-housing-becomes-affordable https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/1/how-luxury-hous...
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        Of course, destroying luxury condos and not replacing them with anything will not help. But the housing market is more complicated that straightforward supply and demand, with a lot of second and third order effects, and in the end building incredible amounts of luxury condos has done nothing for rent prices and housing availability in Toronto, or in Montreal where I live.
        • teen 6y ago
          How is supply and demand not the major factor here?
          • sudosysgen 6y ago
            Because the housing market has mechanisms (such as leveraged landlords) that mean that the price of land tends to inflate up until a situation of equilibrium such that the price of rent is always relatively high in any city where land is somewhat constrained, because zoning is a thing, because most people cannot get mortgages and are as such not able to participate in the condo market, because the price of land is wildly variable for reasons of zoning, because real estate investors do not always operate rationally (for example, empty rental homes held purely as stores of value), because the type of housing affects the type of transportation used which affects which kinds of land is suitable for use as housing, because not all housing is created equal in function or in value, and so on. Simply supply and demand is not a sufficient mechanism to explain the housing markets in cities such as Toronto.
        • colinmhayes 6y ago
          This is a naive take. Building luxury condos has definitely caused prices to drop, it's just that the effect of increased demand increased prices by more. Without the supply increase housing would be even more expensive.
    • seanmcdirmid 6y ago
      Condos are actually not expensive, just in the USA where they are mostly luxury products. In many other countries, condos are normal (and are called apartments or something similar) and much more affordable than single family homes or town homes.
      • asdff 6y ago
        A Condo in the U.S. refers to a specific type of apartment that you can buy, and usually cannot rent out or modify. Typically they have all the trimmings out of the latest catalogues when they are built, so they fetch expensive single family home prices due to all that granite. They are popular for downsizing after your kids have moved out of your house, or find yourself widowed or divorced. Due to their illiquidity and lack of space, they are less popular for younger people who might want more bedrooms some day if they have children. In most major cities in the U.S., any sort of property, even an empty dirt lot, is prohibitively expensive to the majority of the population. In LA in particular, the median home is unaffordable to 75% of the population. And the median home is a rotting bungalow precariously positioned on wooden posts built in 1947.
      • sudosysgen 6y ago
        Well, in Toronto they are quite expensive, so it really doesn't help. And that is mostly by design. If Google wants to build cheap condos, then so be it, I don't think anyone will oppose them. They would have to be really cheap though, because in NA condos can generally not be rented out.
        • CaveTech 6y ago
          Almost everyone I know lives in a rented condo.
          • sudosysgen 6y ago
            That's called an apartment, and is not what Google was building.
            • 6y ago
    • matchbok 6y ago
      No thanks. Government subsidized units are a mess, and have been tried before. Plop someone into an "affordable" unit and you are basically locking them there forever, as they cannot afford to move. That is a very bad situation to be in.
  • nick_ 6y ago
    I understand "high density" to mean condo neighbourhoods. I understand medium density to mean mid-rise, walk-ups, or town houses. The situation in Toronto is (and has been for some time) a stark contrast between low-density neighbourhoods of houses & small duplexes/triplexes, and high-density pockets of high-rise condos. This is bad for all the usual reasons of neighbourhood segregation.
    • brummm 6y ago
      I absolutely agree. Toronto has either single family homes (low density) or high rise condos (high density), but the medium density part is absolutely missing and it has a pretty negative effect on Toronto, I feel.
      • jeromegv 6y ago
        That's the issue. I'm all for condos in Toronto but the issue is lack of medium density, you either own your home and your lawn in the middle of downtown (which is now a multi-million dollar home) or you live in a condo tower of 30 floors. No in-between.
  • mdkrkeo9 6y ago
    None of those things require Google per se Ultimately they require the community itself to take it upon themselves to do it Which is hard since they are tasked with using their time to prop up big corps profit machinery most days I wonder if there’s economic benefit to leaving peoples wealth in their communities instead of extracting it into silos for the investment whims of a minority of global elites Curious if that model of thinking could be of use to North American culture Since Google doesn’t seem like really doing it, may be worth having a real think on it if you’re so sure it all needs to be done Shit n hellfire, American’s need to stop ogling the behaviors of others and behave exceptionally themselves. That might be useful to North America.
    • ehsankia 6y ago
      > None of those things require Google per se And it never did because it was never Google, it's Sidewalk Labs, which is a separate Alphabet company who's whole job is exactly to research and develop such plans. > Ultimately they require the community itself to take it upon themselves to do it I really dislike this argument. "We don't need AMP to make sites fast, webdevs can just spend time hand optimizing their sites themselves". Then you wait years and 95% of websites are still slow and bloated. Every single city and community has had the power to do this for years yet there are very few who have actually creating anything like it. Just because it's doable doesn't mean it'll happen without some incentive and help. > economic benefit to leaving peoples wealth in their communities instead of extracting it into silos Expect a lot of these create more value and wealth within the communities than they take. People love to blame tech companies, but without food delivery services for example, most restaurants would have no business right now. Google Maps and these other services all bring orders of magnitude more value to a city than they "extract into silos".
      • irieid9 6y ago
        Thank you for the banal correction of Google vs Alphabet And comparing website dev to community planning And ignoring the argument that communities are stuck focusing on profit generation which is acting as a block on their agency to collectively improve their communities Did you actually read the post or get stuck on the alphabet not google part and fill in the rest of the post with non sequitur? Food delivery existed before “tech companies” I’m not sure you are living on Earth. You do know society existed before the year 2000, yes? We’re ridiculing tech companies for capturing our agency. It has nothing to do with their technology but the social aspects of curving the masses attention to profit generating fiefdom a minority control Religion and monarchy before that operated on basically the same pattern in the abstract We don’t talk of sky wizard but we do talk of appropriate behavior that aligns with economics models of men paid a lot to make those economics models. We rejected God but replaced him godly men of industry. Right back to literal fetishizing a minority of real men like they’re kings. Oh and look at what’s up in the Oval Office. Coincidence? The bias is deep in the limbic brain which heavily influences our agency response It’s why I don’t curate an online identity. I don’t need to fetishize some profile that goes away if the servers shut down Stop importing other peoples semantic objects and applying your agency to their study and care. We still need tech but we don’t need Google Invent your own
  • sandworm101 6y ago
    >> Every city does need more condos in their existing neighborhoods if populations are able to grow. Except that is in cities like Toronto/Vancouver more condos doesn't mean more people living in those condos. These are investment vehicles. Many of these new condo biuldings in trendy neighbourhoods sit empty, having been purchased as an investment rather than as a living space. What is needed is more rental units, not more places for rich people to park money.
    • tempestn 6y ago
      If you keep building them, they will become more available. You're increasing supply, without affecting demand (from potential investors or residents).
    • ehsankia 6y ago
      Just tax empty places, isn't that what Vancouver does? Leaving a place empty/inhabited should be very expensive.
      • cycrutchfield 6y ago
        There's already property tax
        • ehsankia 6y ago
          That's different from the Empty Home Tax: https://vancouver.ca/your-government/vacancy-tax-bylaw.aspx https://vancouver.ca/your-government/vacancy-tax-bylaw.aspx
          • cycrutchfield 6y ago
            Right. The point is that empty homes already pay in to the system. Taxing property owners for how they choose to use or not use their property is silly.
      • sandworm101 6y ago
        >> Leaving a place empty/inhabited should be very expensive. Vancouver is finding that difficult to enforce. How do you tell if a unit is "occupied" or not? At the moment it is largely voluntary. The city cannot tell whether someone is living in a unit or it living overseas ten months out of the year. They aren't going to be sending inspectors to knock on doors. I'm a good example of the difficulties. I was away on training (military) for six months. My apparment sat empty. Should I have been paying the tax? How would the government detect that I wasn't there?... Short of me or my landlord admitting to it and then paying the tax.
  • 52-6F-62 6y ago
    Funny enough the city is actually making some real changes due to the pandemic. They're currently in the process of opening up certain roadways to pedestrian and cycle traffic and closing some of them off to cars save for local traffic. They've stated some of these changes are temporary, and some possibly permanent. This includes expanding the current bike paths and speeding up implementation of already approved paths. The program is called ActiveTO. It was just announced. https://www.toronto.ca/home/media-room/news-releases-media-advisories/?nrkey=28E48855A9EAD8478525856000758FD2 https://www.toronto.ca/home/media-room/news-releases-media-a... --- Edit: Adding the following quote as a decent summary of the intentions of the project: > “Our streets are going to look different in many places in the post-COVID world. We will need more road space for walking. We will need quiet streets. We will need more bike infrastructure. We are going about this in a responsible, common sense way with Toronto Public Health, Transportation Services and local councillors all involved in making common sense, health-focused decisions which broaden out our transportation network." - Mayor John Tory
    • kspacewalk2 6y ago
      We'll see if it materializes into a truly bold and long-term improvement (out of character for Toronto), or fizzles out into marginally effective solutions sandboxed into very limited time/space constraints (very much in character for Toronto).
      • 52-6F-62 6y ago
        We will indeed. I'm hopeful, though. For all that can be said about Tory he has proven to react in the peoples' favour when he actual has to face the consequences of not acting. I'm referring to the case of our subways A/C breaking in the middle of summer heat waves. When he actually rode it end-to-end with someone who raised the issue with him and he stepped off at the end of the line drenched in sweat he actually acted and it tangibly improved. I'm hoping this may be a similar situation and prove to be a silver lining.
        • kspacewalk2 6y ago
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    There were ideas for greener construction methods using more timber and less concrete, more space optimized for walking and biking instead of cars, interesting communal space arrangements to make spaces that can be heated in winter and converted to outdoor space when the weather is nice. None of those were innovative, or Google-first. They're all things that have been in the works by cities for decades. The problem is that people who don't watch or attend city meetings don't know it because change at that scale is slow. Unlike computer code, you can't just delete a section of a city you don't like and rebuild it. A city is a living thing, and living things take time to change.
• jimmaswell 6y ago
  What do you consider low density? I really don't like the idea of stamping out all single family homes and nice green areas in proximity to cities. Mixing high density in with commercial areas seems fine though.
  • asdff 6y ago
    Personally, I'd leave the truly suburban areas where you can't even walk to the gas station without it taking 30 minutes alone. However, there are plenty of neighborhoods in the US and Canada that were designed around walking to the streetcar. I think those neighborhoods are already laid out well for medium density apartments and improved transit.
  • alexashka 6y ago
    Why don't you like stamping out single family homes? What is the benefit/cost ratio of 2-3 story houses vs 10 story housing vs 20 vs 30 vs 40? Houses are for families with kids right? What do kids want? Kids want other kids to play with. Kids want to attend classes and learn stuff. The more options a kid has, the better. Which area has more kids and therefore classes: low, medium or high density areas? I understand that there is a trade-off where we don't want 100-story skyscrapers but to me, single family homes are an infrastructure luxury that hasn't been thought through and something we'd benefit from re-considering and re-educating people about.
    • jimmaswell 6y ago
      some benefits off the top of my head: -More natural settings shown to improve mental health -"neighborliness" scales inversely with density to a point - less neighbors means you're more likely to get to know them, while with more people there are too many so the crowd of people gets depersonalized to a degree, because 50 neighbors are too many to keep track of. -you don't have to go to some crowded city park full of garbage when friends have yards with their own stuff like sandboxes where they can have some privacy from for example sheltered city people or park cops freaking out over the kids having nerf guns -other activities become more feasible like bike riding (I wouldn't feel good letting a kod bike around NYC), ATV's, fishing -more outdoors setting prevents aesthma -safer setting for the kids overall Your concerns just don't work oout that way in my experience. I was in single-home-only towns as a kid and there was no problem playing with neighbors or anything. Even when houses are a mile apart it's really not a big deal just being driven to them. And since when do kids want to attend classes?