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Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

theguardian.com

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Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#141

Post by mymythisisthis »

logifail wrote: post #86
routerl wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hilarious for me to see > Toronto was left without a good restaurant on the water which should actually be > The business owner was either unwilling or incapable of making his business succeed.

Q: Is there any kind of open market in moorings? If a normal restaurant gets threatened with a big rent hike, they can close at one location and open up somewhere else. Does that approach work if you're effectively renting your location from the Port Authority?

The prices are set by the Toronto Port Authority.

From what I remember, there was a a group of investors that wanted to purchase the boat, modernize it, make it into a really swanky, multi-purpose, venue, on the water. But by that point the Port Authority and owner had been fighting for so long that mediation/intervention wasn't possible.

It could be argued the Port Authority was charging him too much, perhaps just to get him to go. And that the owner was getting old, the best days of his restaurant were 30 years ago.

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#142

Post by tocoder »

bentlegen wrote: post #74
hourislate wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Fed Gov and BoC have no choice but to keep interest rates at zero and continue to play with numbers to keep the ponzi going so the whole Country doesn't collapse. You also have to take into consideration that there is no where else to find any work but in the big cities. The whole damn situation is a mess with no way out. Feel sorry for the kids who finish a degree in STEM from Waterloo or UoT and end up working…

I can’t speak for every industry, but many Bay Area technology employers have set up satellite offices in Toronto and Waterloo and are paying significantly higher wages (note: I represent one of them). This is having a net effect of driving wages up; I see it in the candidates we lose to other companies who are doing the same. Consider looking for a new gig. Also, Sentry is hiring in Toronto: https://sentry.io/jobs .

Unrelated to the post, at a previous gig, we used Sentry.io. Other than the first 45min wait time when you first hook it up to Sentry's API, it was a smooth experience. How do you like working at Sentry?

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#143

Post by 29083011397778 »

u678u wrote: post #106

Vancouver and Toronto really suffer because they're the warmest parts of a huge cold country and everyone wants to live there. Maybe global warming will mean more people will want to live further North or inland. Ideally the government would try harder like not tax people who live in smaller cities.

Let me start with the reminder that global warming means wider, less predictable swings. Not just warmer weather.

But more to the point, taxing people less doesn't always help. Alberta, with it's no provincial sales tax, is a place I'm leaving for the exact reason that there's no money for infrastructure or services.

Without taxes there are no backstops for me to fall back on (like a robust transit system). To me, that's more financial insecurity, not more.

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#144

Post by jjmarinho »

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #79

The biggest driver of poor housing affordability in Canada is immigration, with 300,000 people migrating to the country annually. Here are the top 10 migrant sources: Philippines India China Iran Pakistan United States Syria United Kingdom France South Korea Migrants from the poorer countries on this list are moving to Canada to undercut the wages and conditions of local workers, whilst driving up the cost of housing…

Too bad that from 2010 to 2020 Toronto experienced its lowest population growth ever. But go on and keep believing that it's somehow the immigrants fault...

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20402/toronto/population

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#145

Post by lhorie »

cobookman wrote: post #140
otoburb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world, [...] Toronto was ranked as the 98th most expensive city in the world; not even in the top 50, even though it's the 4th largest city in North America. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that Toronto and Vancouver are unaffordable and expensive cities for domestic Canadians to live in. >> Our debt to GDP is out of control. Our federal government keeps bo…

Toronto is expensive given the amount jobs are paying in the area. SF a condo might be 1M, but getting paid 250k+ for a job is fairly common. In Toronto the condo might be 1M (CAD), but getting paid 250k+ CAD is not common. By all accounts Toronto is more expensive than SF

My understanding is that there's a lot of foreign capital getting parked in real estate in Toronto. I believe they were going to implement a vacancy tax similar to Vancouver next year to try to curb that

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#146

Post by dsomers »

otoburb wrote: post #138
moufestaphio wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Toronto was ranked as the 98th most expensive city in the world; not even in the top 50. So, I'm not going to look into different methodologies that are used, but Toronto is often ranked near the top of least affordable cities. For example: http://demographia.com/dhi.pdf

>> Toronto is often ranked near the top of least affordable cities. When the only factor is home ownership, which is the focus of URI's study, this is absolutely correct. But then I think back to how absolutely unaffordable housing was across the GTA in the late 80s, after which point people were able to buy back in again when the housing market corrected 40% in most of the GTA, with certain areas of Toronto (not the…

Condos built in Toronto are mostly terrible for anyone that’s not single. They’re basically Airbnb speculation boxes in the sky. The city suffers badly from “the missing middle“ problem because of bad zoning. It’s a big part of why I moved away after living there 8 years.

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#147

Post by otoburb »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #133
clairity wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Regulations which include language like 'X% of units must be for renters making yes, regulatory capture at work. any time a stipulation is prescriptive rather than (largely) descriptive, it's quite likely a mistargeted regulation. being numerical makes it seem objective, but despite that, it doesn't lead to the implied/explicit intent, which is more equitable housing. it's a token gesture meant to veil the true in…

> what we need is to explicitly encourage human-scale ownership and development everywhere, through every means available, including zoning reform and tax policy. People focus on the zoning a lot, but it really is the tax policy. Look around Vancouver and you'll see little three story walk up apartments all over. They stopped making them in 1993 because the incoming Liberal government adopted an incredible deficit sl…

>>They stopped making them in 1993 because the incoming Liberal government adopted an incredible deficit slaying austerity approach which was in vogue at the time.

What was "in vogue" at the time was a Conservative (sic) Mulroney government routinely outspending revenues resulting in Canada's federal debt crisis in the early 90s[1][2] which helped usher in the Cretian government and Paul Martin's austerity measures. I think the austerity measures helped put Canada back on track.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/government-debt-to-gdp

[2] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/federal-...

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#148

Post by dsomers »

lhorie wrote: post #145
cobookman wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Toronto is expensive given the amount jobs are paying in the area. SF a condo might be 1M, but getting paid 250k+ for a job is fairly common. In Toronto the condo might be 1M (CAD), but getting paid 250k+ CAD is not common. By all accounts Toronto is more expensive than SF

My understanding is that there's a lot of foreign capital getting parked in real estate in Toronto. I believe they were going to implement a vacancy tax similar to Vancouver next year to try to curb that

There’s not a lot of evidence that it’s not the locals creating a bubble because of speculation and lax lending. If you don’t believe me look up how nicely private mortgage debt in Canada correlates with the growth in housing prices in Canadian cities. Canadians hold one of the highest rates of personal debt in the OECD.

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#149

Post by ultrasaurus »

tocoder wrote: post #142
bentlegen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t speak for every industry, but many Bay Area technology employers have set up satellite offices in Toronto and Waterloo and are paying significantly higher wages (note: I represent one of them). This is having a net effect of driving wages up; I see it in the candidates we lose to other companies who are doing the same. Consider looking for a new gig. Also, Sentry is hiring in Toronto: https://sentry.io/jobs .

Unrelated to the post, at a previous gig, we used Sentry.io. Other than the first 45min wait time when you first hook it up to Sentry's API, it was a smooth experience. How do you like working at Sentry?

I'm not Ben, but I have worked with him for the last 2+ years at Sentry. The whole Toronto office is super positive, and I love working with them every chance I get. Not to derail the thread too much but thanks for giving us a try and hopefully checking out the jobs page Ben linked to :)

Re: Toronto swaps Google-backed, not-so-smart city plans for people-centred vision

#150

Post by imtringued »

throwawaysea wrote: post #137
rubyist5eva wrote: post #14

As someone that lives in Toronto and is moving out in the middle of the month to go back home near family. The idea that Toronto is going to focus on "affordability" is laughable. It's one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world, and the incompetent city council, mayor and all the way up to the provincial government are doing absolutely everything they can to keep it that way - mostly without even realiz…

Is it really that these cities are poorly managed or just that everyone feels entitled to live in the most expensive and desirable places? I don’t get the point of building up more - it’s just going to induce more demand (a common argument used by urbanists when it comes to road infrastructure). The real fix is that people need to spread out, and stop feeling like there are only two places to live in across such a la…

>(a common argument used by urbanists when it comes to road infrastructure)

This just proves that you don't know how housing works. I'm not even talking about the market itself. I'm just talking about the concept of being allowed to live in a building for money. You have to pay rent to live in a house/apartment. Alternatively you pay a mortgage or you buy the house outright.

None of this applies to road infrastructure, you don't pay toll to use a wider road. It's a direct subsidy to people who like driving. You would have to be extremely stupid to not understand that wider roads will lead to more driving. There is nothing preventing you from using public infrastructure wastefully precisely because it's free. Free suffers from tragedy of commons, everyone knows that.

If you use housing wastefully like by keeping it vacant you personally pay for this loss yourself. You're on the hook for your own behavior. People also get to decide whether they want denser apartments meanwhile the city planner forces road construction upon you whether your neighborhood really needs it or not.

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