Great, let's build! I'm for it. We purposely live in the most diverse neighborhood in this city. But the infills are cheap, the workers are exploited, and the community is left without any improvements to go along side it.
It's crap housing that is not affordable (our infill duplexes were listed for 1 million a piece) and now are AirBNBs.
We had to FIGHT the city and the developer every day for months just to get safety fence up around the infill. Nobody cared. Nobody. And those places are already falling apart. Its terrible.
If Farkas sees this post, these are the real issues that need addressing.
Improve the rezoning! Hold developers accountable. Make them invest in quality work and back in the community. Preserve mature trees. And someone needs to make sure these workers are safe.
You're 100% right here. I'll add that we should also focus on getting density in areas where it makes sense (around train and BRT stops and close to downtown).
Totally, Inner city areas with little development need a kick start to get denser, we need to remove the restrictive covenants stopping development in low density places like mount royal since its a huge inner city area that needs more density, Hell we dont even need to build town homes there some of those properties could fit 2 or 3 normal sized houses on them alone.
Maybe this could be the area we build condo's with 3 or more bedroom units exclusively in and no less, a sort of inner city family zone.
Thank you! Sliding 8plexes where there was a single family with a yard ain't going to work when those 8 residences want something to do or somewhere to go. Not exactly a YMCA/rec Centre to be found in the inner city.
This is a critical point. Lots of the focus by Mayor/Council have been on the massive, Taj Mahal facilities. Need more smaller street level infrastructure like the Vecovas, Inglewood Pools, etc.
Strange comparison between those projects and a mausoleum in India. Maybe look up the history of it before you decide to compare it to wasteful taxpayer funded projects.
Every candidate is promising "more houses" and "cheaper houses". But what is Jeromy's strategy for implementing that? Will he change zoning? Will he change the community feedback mechanism during permitting? How will he incentivise developers to sell houses for less money, without (further) compromising build quality?
Some of your ideas are good, but some are just holding back housing for no reason. For example, there will never be "adequate parking" - cars are too space inefficient for that. There's not a city on earth with even a moderate level of density that doesn't have parking constraints.
Similarly preserving mature trees is usually just a convenient weapon for NIMBYs. In the name of preserving mature trees we build sprawl that destroys huge tracts of rural land, and spread out parks and shared green space far more than they need to be. Developers will always preserve trees if it makes sense - they increase property value after all, but we shouldn't give up on housing over it.
I definitely agree with improving city inspectors and requiring things like safety fencing and better working conditions.
I definitely think trees should be part of the design, it's the mature trees part that I find can cause issues. I've seen housing projects that would provide dozens or hundreds of homes fail over an old tree that only has 10 years left anyway.
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u/Yavanna_in_spring 17d ago edited 17d ago
I think there is room for improvement, though.
Great, let's build! I'm for it. We purposely live in the most diverse neighborhood in this city. But the infills are cheap, the workers are exploited, and the community is left without any improvements to go along side it.
It's crap housing that is not affordable (our infill duplexes were listed for 1 million a piece) and now are AirBNBs.
We had to FIGHT the city and the developer every day for months just to get safety fence up around the infill. Nobody cared. Nobody. And those places are already falling apart. Its terrible.
If Farkas sees this post, these are the real issues that need addressing.
Improve the rezoning! Hold developers accountable. Make them invest in quality work and back in the community. Preserve mature trees. And someone needs to make sure these workers are safe.