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

I suppose you don’t read anything about population demographics in Canada. If you did you’d realize we have a very low birth rate. Without immigration Ontario and Canada will fail, like Italy and Japan we’ll be stuck in economic stagnation and ever increasing debt load, until we can’t pay for basic social services or people are forced to work 80 hour weeks to get by.

When did your family come to Canada? Why do you think you should be the abetter of when it’s full? It’s been growing for 200 years and and at any point people could point to a Canadian city and say it’s full because that’s completely subjective in a country that could easily fit the world’s population.

You’re also completely missing the mark on what I’m saying a increasing density. I’m not talking about shoving people in tiny condos, I’m saying the housing that’s zoned for single detached houses should be zoned to be five story walk ups with beautiful courtyards like London, Paris, or the city I live in now, Amsterdam. These aren’t small condos, they’re large flats that families can live in, it’s not uncommon for families to have multiple floors. You know what people and kids do that don’t have back yards, they walk to a local park and interact with their community, and it make a much healthier and social community. Compared to most European capitals Toronto is a bland shithole, keep your ugly McMansion, keep your ugly car depended suburbs, keep your obesity, and bad food, keep your lame two weeks of vacation where you come to visit European cities you refuse to learn lessons from. Honestly get fucked, I’m over it, people like you are so ignorant it makes me never want to come back to Canada. There, are you happy, Toronto minus one person.

Milton doesn't necessarily have more capacity or willpower to offer tax breaks than Toronto, and the incentives for companies are stacked.

Perhaps decades ago I'd be content with commuting out to the middle of nowhere by car to work for a large company as a lifelong employee. Perhaps those circumstances still exist, but there is a comparatively large number of people living downtown that won't touch transit-poor suburb offices with a 10-pole stick. If you're setting up shop in the suburbs, you will get a pick of only suburb residents.

On the other hand, if you're setting up shop in downtown, you get a pick of both downtown and suburb dwellers. The latter will drive anyway, so it matters comparatively little whether you drive from Mississauga to Milton or from Mississauga to Toronto. Plus a lot of people can find a GO station somewhere and get downtown that way. Good luck commuting to a Milton campus by train from Markham.

Furthermore, with Toronto in the centre of the population bell curve, it's not even just downtown employees vs. suburb employees. It's also that by building on one edge of the municipal area, you will have a harder time to attract people from the other edge. Mississauga to Milton isn't too bad, Ajax to Milton is twice the distance vs. to downtown Toronto.

So in the end, it all goes back to making a choice between locations with relatively broad appeal and a lot of competition, or niche locations that work great for a considerably lower potential selection of employees. Large international companies are finding that they are competitive enough to win employees in the downtown job market while still benefiting from the broad base of talent available there. You'd have to give them unprofitably high tax breaks to make them give up their talent pool.

Smaller shops may try out the niche strategy in the suburbs and may find it to work well for their purposes. But I guess those were not the target of your call for suburban HQs. They're also not at a size at which Milton would consider giving out tax breaks.

There can always be exceptions, although as a general tendency the house is stacked against suburb HQs. Maybe with a drawn-out WFH trend this could change, but for now I still don't see it happening.

> Maybe with a drawn-out WFH trend this could change

What's interesting is that the two companies I mentioned are both very large (offices in multiple cities) and don't have butts-in-seat cultures (people already worked from home a lot even pre-pandemic).

The point about Ajax to Milton being a very long commute is quite valid though Ajax could also try to attract companies of its own. The go train point is fair, but not critical IMHO. People can and do move. And for better or for worse, these municipalities do have very strong car cultures as of today. Living in Scarborough to commute to Markham is a pain in the neck by public transit, but trivial by car (and consider that downtown traffic and parking story isn't great compared to free parking virtually everywhere in Markham, so there's some amount of mutual exclusion there). Also IMHO, the infrastructure follows demand. Some stretches of Hwy 7 have public transit lines now; there's clearly a desire to build out a local scene that isn't centered around downtown Toronto.

I think defending the idea of cramming downtown more and more is more based on status quo, and ultimately it's not going to be sustainable. Downtown Toronto has already grown upwards quite a bit; at the pace condos are going up, it's eventually going to run out of parking lots to convert to vertical space. I think developing new talent-attracting centers is going to be important regardless; better to get the ball going before it becomes an unavoidable necessity.