If hating on Toronto can get a bit dull, it’s not because the city makes us work very hard for it. Colleague Matt Gurney’s latest about the trials endured by a woman seeking to (gasp, horror) sell coffee from a trailer is only the most recent example of a city where the default setting seems to always be no. It’s remarkable how rare the counter-examples actually are — areas where residents simply have clear permission to do what they want. About the only one that comes to mind is, alas, kind of perverse. The straitjacket of Toronto’s zoning policies (which makes it incredibly difficult to build new, dense, family-friendly housing) just happens to have a kind of cheat code built into it: for anyone with the money available, it’s trivially easy to buy existing multiplexes and gut them into single-family homes.
I won’t belabour this point, because there’s only so much even I can say about housing policy. But it’s important to note that this isn’t a bug or error in the policy, and it certainly isn’t new. This is the city’s planning policy working exactly as intended: Toronto makes it difficult to build densely and easy to destroy the density that already exists. It’s no wonder that neighbourhoods like the Annex now house fewer people than they did 50 years ago — the same basic process that’s currently depopulating and gentrifying lower-income areas worked its dark magic on the Annex decades ago.
It's not just planning policy or business licensing, either. More than a decade ago, city council realized that it’d adopted so many fussy, detailed rules about property standards that it was possible for a neighbourhood busybody to make themselves a living nightmare simply by accurately and legally reporting breaches of the rules. In a city with some self-awareness, this would have been cause for reflection and might have started a much-needed conversation about removing some of these rules so that the city’s bureaucracy couldn’t be weaponized against its residents by cranks. But that would be difficult, and the cranks vote, too, so instead council asked staff to disregard the very rules council had been responsible for adopting in the first place.
In short, while the rules around food trucks aren’t terribly important in themselves, the thing to understand is that Toronto gets everything wrong the same way it gets food trucks wrong. There are always going to be more rules governing our behaviour in a dense urban environment than in a rural idyll, simply because it’s easier for one person’s bad behaviour to harm their neighbours. Toronto, however, consistently acts like the only way to ensure public safety is to say no to everything first and then only timidly carve out exceptions to the refusal. This city debated “can we trust adults to drink alcohol in parks” for more than a decade before cautiously allowing it in a handful of places.
After watching this behaviour for long enough, I’ve come to believe that the root cause of this dysfunction is neither left- nor right-wing ideology among politicians, but something far more insidious: complacency. The current generation of Toronto politicians for the most part don’t remember a time when the city was struggling to attract people and employers (Mayor Olivia Chow is a notable and important exception, as her career began well before that of many current councillors) and most days act like the city’s current privileged position as a demographic and economic magnet will continue into the foreseeable future. If you’re going to be rich anyway, why bother dealing with the fussy stuff?
One reason to take the fussy stuff seriously is that, if Toronto doesn’t, someone else might. People mostly leave Toronto when they need more affordable housing; a handful of easy measures from other cities in the GTA or farther afield in Ontario would only accelerate that further. This week, Vaughan substantially cut development charges on new homes; that follows a similar move from Burlington earlier this year.
What should truly concern Toronto policymakers is what would happen if employers — and not just families — decided the city simply wasn’t worth it anymore. There’s no iron law saying that the city will continue to attract big employers, the city’s currently in pretty shabby shape from its parks to the transit system, and traffic is only going to get worse for at least another decade thanks to the construction of the Ontario Line and other large projects. There have always been other cities willing to lure big businesses with the promise of tax breaks or other inducements, but, as the amenities offered by Toronto lose their sheen, places outside the core could look more and more tempting.
Today Toronto is complacent, and it doesn’t have the political appetite to seriously address a rigid, ossified mentality throughout its public service. About the only way that’s going to change is if the city’s leaders get scared enough to change it. There’s an opportunity there for any of Ontario’s smaller cities, if they want to take it.
Donate