Wow, this sounds just like a Conservative rant about how dirty and evil and bad cities are, written to be consumed by folks from the burbs who haven't been downtown for 25+ years.

What? NatPo is owned by an American hedge fund? Quelle surprise.

But there cannot be a full renaissance without challenging progressive political power, which, unfortunately, has risen in Toronto.

Swing and miss by NatPo. Not that anyone should expect much from an opinion piece from any of a conservative American hedge fund’s papers.

NIMBYs can come in any political stripe and must be countered everywhere.

There’s grains of truth peppered in throughout this piece but it’s light on quality sources.

Cities will have to become denser mixed use places. More car dependent suburban sprawl is not the answer. It’s been proven not fiscally sustainable.

And nary a word about exploitative corporate landlords or rising costs or a dearth of affordable housing that's driving both small businesses and regular people out of cities.

Of course, that would mean criticizing the invisible hand of the market.

Look around downtown Toronto. Hell, look around any city of any size in Ontario and ask who--aside from landlord, landlord's real estate agents, landlords who are real estate agents and their bankers and mistresses and mistresses' botox clinic/Porsche mechanic--can afford to live or start a business there? Do you want to pay three quarters of a million dollars for batchelor condo, and still pay maintenance fees atop that? How about starting a business when your landlord might decide to jack your rent 1000% because TD or Starbucks wants the space, or because your landlord's coke dealer raised their prices that week?

Toronto's problem isn't like, eg, Detroit. It's not getting hollowed out by White Flight. It's more akin to San Francisco's challenges, and that's 100% raw, unadulterated money-grubbing at scale, which is nowhere near a progressive problem, unless you mean that we aren't taxing these rentier fucks anywhere near enough.

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.

This issue had become more visible ever since the early days of COVID. Cities and urban cores became "ghost towns", plenty of local business that serves the local community actually only catered unspokenly to commuting office workers, failing to stay afloat and many closed down as a result. It became apparent no one actually lived in the surrounding areas.

Our cities were and still area geared to single working individuals or couples without children. Nothing ties our city dwellers to their surroundings communities or business. What north america style cities are missing are a larger influx of families in cities.

Families provide strong ties and a sense of community. Very rarely do we see children walking in the downtown area or even playing on neighborhood streets. Instead most families move outside of cities as they grow in size for many reasons, housing and affordability being one of the big ones.

There are ways to fix this though. One of the main ways is city zoning policies. More "missing middle" style housing in needed.

"Missing middle" housing is the many different housing styles that sit between the standard sized suburban single family home and a typical downtown condo unit.

As we can see in north america families have limited choices and options when it comes to housing as they grow in size. Very rarely will a family be able to find a 3 bedroom apartment in a downtown core, and if they do a single family home in the suburbs will be priced more competitively and usually be larger in size.

Here is a great video talking about some of these points.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM

And here is a great article as to why developers can't build family sized units in north america.

https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america#:~:text=There%20are%20two%20factors%20driving,dictated%20by%20the%20zoning%20code.

As an end note. Cities that design with a sense of place (referred to as "third place") are always IMO more successful in providing a strong sense of community. You will see these "third places" all over European cities.

I will drop this last video here for anyone that is interested in knowing more about this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOc8ASeHYNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o

I'm sure it has nothing to do with this:

It now takes 39 years for an average person to buy a home in the GTA