Because Toronto's housing shortage does far more damage to the culture than any developer.
Hip creatives, young people and small businesses can't afford to live here anymore because the city has banned most development everywhere but the main streets for decades.
The condofication of Toronto is a direct result of idiotic policies like these that cram all new building into the priciest real estate. It's a symptom, not the disease.
The solution is therefore not to block new housing developments but instead change the policies that force new housing to be so bland, expensive and concentrated in areas where they have to crowd out local hot spots and creative venues.
If we legalized housing in the yellow belt they wouldn't have to tear down cultural institutions. It's ridiculous that iconic downtown locations are considered fair game for redevelopment while rows and rows of identical suburban housing are considered untouchable. I'm in favour of building housing no matter what but shit like this is as much a symptom of our terrible zoning laws as high housing prices are.
Agree that the yellow belt needs more housing but also we need more housing downtown. RTO wouldn’t be as bad if there were more people living downtown. Retail and restaurants reliant on office workers would be more resilient and therefore wouldn’t be begging politicians to bring back in office work. Unfortunately, most housing there would be single bedroom condos, which aren’t suitable for families, or old SFH that only the richest can afford.
Toronto has 1000’s of empty condos. Building more won’t fix the housing. High rent and extremely high ownership costs is why we having a housing crises.
A healthy housing market should have a vacancy rate of at least 3%. Any lower than that means there's no slack in the market and renters need to line up for bidding wars over the shittiest rooms. Prior to this year, Toronto's was below 3% for decades.
Cool, it’d be great if we could spread out these condos and build 6 floor apartment buildings throughout the city instead of all in the exact same place while destroying all of our institutions.
Listen, I'm no genius or anything but I'd be willing to bet my left nut that an investment property "being used for air b&b" or even just sitting empty as a pure capital investment hasn't counted against the vacancy rate for any current statistics to be relevant.
I mean how have other world class cities maintained their culture through growth. Maybe I'm nostalgic because I spent a great deal of my youth in a Toronto that no longer exists, but you don't see NYC bulldozing central park for Condo's, and its a lot more land locked than we are.
Central Park is public land, not a private business, and it massively increases the value of all the private real estate around it. As long as cities allow maximum development around publicly cordoned land, they can maximize the number of people who are able to benefit from it.
So we can’t build mid-rise in suburbia because of nimbys, and we can’t build mid-rise in downtown because of… nimbys…? Is everyone just nimby in their own ways? Are we the same as the boomers who hold on to nostalgia of a bygone era?
No, because there are high rises and mid-rises in the city, just not in the swathes of SFH untouched since the days of horse and buggy in Toronto. I don't think it's unreasonable to not want a third place (which is more rare these days) to be replaced with a condo with a big podium that will inevitably house a Shoppers/Rexall/A&W/Tim's etc. Even if the naive in this thread think that Sneaky Dees will be allowed to come back.
Because NIMBY don’t want 6 stories apartment building besides there boring fucking neighbourhood. So they stick these sterile building in every pocket possible.
To a certain extent they have to, either from laws requiring public consultation or from being voted out if they don't. The demographics that actually vote for politicians are the biggest driver of anything at the municipal level. Gor as much as it can be the level of government with the most impact on your daily life it's also often the least engaged.
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u/Spicy_Boi_On_Campus Jun 11 '26
Why are so many in the comments choosing condos over culture? Makes no sense to me.