The GTA has been showing signs of the urban ills that are commonly associated with city life south the border.
Downtown infrastructure has been deteriorating, as have cleanliness and order, which were once the city’s strong suits.
In Ontario, growth has shifted to lower-cost places like Kitchener-Waterloo (110 kilometres from downtown Toronto), as well as Guelph (95 km), Peterborough (140 km) and London (195 km). Even long declining areas, like the Maritimes, have been gaining population in recent years.
Clearly a new approach is merited. Leaders in Toronto have to accept dispersion and find the city’s niche within a wider range of settlements. Downtowns themselves, as Calgary’s urban leadership now suggests, will have to morph from primarily business centres to places more oriented to housing, academic and cultural activities.
To be sure, swank high-rise projects may appeal to the wealthy and the childless. But the urban future lies in places that are walkable but not hyper-dense and can attract middle-income families.
I’ve watched Toronto decline over the last 20 years, and I’ll tell you what the problem is, and it is pretty obvious. Too many big businesses, big government offices, and big health care organizations are located downtown. Hundreds of thousands of people need to get to these places every day for work. No one likes a long commute, so people try to live as close to where they work downtown as possible, which leads to extremely high housing costs, which leads to more suburbs, more car use, and then demands to build more road infrastructure. Also, with so many giant office buildings downtown, it’s vibrant during the day, but then almost everyone leaves at night, and people don’t want to invest in community infrastructure because they actually live in the suburbs.
So, why are all the big institutions of business and government located downtown? It would be far better to spread big workplaces out across Ontario. In the olden days, sure, it made sense to centralize business, government, academia, and tertiary care hospitals for convenience, influence, cross-fertilization, and all that. It was also a centralization of the elites for prestige, and the decision-makers were always people who could afford to live downtown. But, nowadays, that is totally unnecessary. People chat online now and try to avoid having to go to in-person meetings if they can avoid it.
There should be a total ban on locating any more government or quasi-government offices downtown, and they should slowly be spread out to other cities. It would make everyone happier and shorten commutes. Over time, those big buildings should be converted back to residential use, so people can actually afford to raise a family downtown.
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That’s what I said. We should increase the existing density of other cities besides Toronto. Toronto has great public transit and walkability in the downtown core. If other cities had large downtown employers and denser cores, they too would have enough commuters to justify good transit as well.