Is Toronto the Manhattan of the North?

At the marathon council meeting which finished yesterday at City Hall, the last council meeting before the election, councillors approved a record number of new residential and office developments.  http://tinyurl.com/oaaqcxo

The residential developments which have been given development approvals comprise almost 7,000 new units and the non-residential/office components of almost 400,000 sq. metres.  Included in the office developments will be 3 projects on Front and King Street of 114 storeys of commercial space and 5 mixed-use buildings and condominium towers. 

All of these projects are yet to be built.  Construction is far down the road pending full pre-sales and bank financing for many of these projects so there is no guarantee which projects will actually proceed to construction.

Questions continue to be raised as to whether or not the city can sustain this pace of development and whether this is a bubble waiting to happen.  Clearly, if more and more companies are looking for office space downtown, they will need people to work in them and these people will need housing.  The synergy between non-residential and residential construction is clearly working well.

There is no question there is a building boom being fuelled by the need for housing and for more office space, which bodes well for Toronto.  This is a boom, not a bubble.

There are serious problems that growth is exacerbating - infrastructure and transit.  The basic infrastructure is old and needs replenishment and expansion.  Transit and roads remain gridlocked, from both vehicular and bus/subway perspective.  Too little money has been spent on infrastructure and transportation in the last 45 years.  We are truly in a crisis as expansion continues in GTA without the necessary services and transit to support it. 

The bulk of the subway system was completed in 1967 and other than Highway 407, there has been minimal highway or material road expansion anywhere in GTA.  The one arterial road that added some north-south relief, the Allen Road, has been turned into a traffic nightmare with the addition of numerous unsynchronized lights north of Yorkdale all the way to Finch.  Quite frankly, it is a road to be avoided other than between 12 midnight and 6:00 a.m. 

At the recent council meeting, Jennifer Keesmaat, Chief Planner, City of Toronto, emphasized the tremendous need for a downtown relief line.  Really?  This is news?  Look at any major city that has subway systems:  New York, London, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Seville, Barcelona and Montreal – they all have integrated subway systems that provide access throughout the city.  Here in Toronto, we think we are the next Manhattan?  We have a subway that has one U-shaped north-south line and one east-west line.  This is supposed to be sufficient for a mega city like the GTA? 

Local, provincial and federal politicians are all equally to blame for their short sightedness as to the need for an integrated and healthy transit and road system in Canada's major metropolis.  Even in Quebec where the political system is generally in turmoil, the provincial and municipal authorities have focussed on expanding the Montreal subway system, which started 13 years after Toronto, and now has a system to be envied.  There is no part of Montreal that does not have reasonable access to the Metro, even to the south and to the north of the St. Lawrence River where subways were built beneath the waterways at significant cost. 

The federal government finally woke up several years ago to start providing cities with some infrastructure money as can be seen in all of the various construction projects across the city, but it is too little and too late.  The crumbling infrastructure in the GTA will only be worsened by the ever growing demands by new developments.  A much broader federal/provincial plan has to be developed to ensure that Canada's most vibrant and important economic engine does not falter.