I try to make a point of never writing when I’m annoyed. It doesn’t usually end well for anyone. I’ve also been devoting almost all my recent TVO.org work to covering the Public Order Emergency Commission in Ottawa, and that had been the plan for at least the rest of the month.
Let’s throw both of those notions out, just for today.
It’s Sunday afternoon as I write this, and an afternoon of yard work and general get-stuff-done has been sidetracked (darn) by a tweet I saw from Aurora mayor Tom Mrakas. Aurora is a GTA community, a part of York Region, about 45 minutes north of Toronto (it used to be about 30 minutes north of Toronto, but, hey, traffic). Aurora is a beautiful, lovely town. It’s an affluent suburb, home to just over 60,000 people. And it was, for a time, my home.
But I’ll get back to that in a minute. First: the tweet.
Let’s unpack that a little.
The mayor is responding to something specific — not just to the notion of 12-plus-storey buildings in general. A land developer had proposed a new development in Aurora; the town had rejected the proposal as too dense and asked for a revised version to be submitted. The developer hired a lobbyist, who then leaned on Housing Minister Steve Clark. When the province recently approved various regional official plans, Clark made a series of unappealable amendments. One of them was designating a specific parcel of land in Aurora as approved for residential development but with minimums for both density and height, specifically 12 storeys, that went well beyond what Aurora and York Region had intended. The lobbyist in question has ties to the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.
(Hat tip to Queen’s Park Today reporter Alan S. Halefor his reporting on this.)
Mrakas is angry. He thinks this is Clark doing a political buddy a favour. Hey, maybe he is. And if that was the entirety of the mayor’s tweet, fair enough. I probably would have disagreed, but it would have been a legitimate bone of contention and something worth thinking about.
But Aurora should never have a building of 12 storeys or higher? Really?!
At the outset of my journalism career, my wife, a teacher in York Region, was assigned to a school in Aurora. I was a complete journalism newbie, utterly green, and this is an industry that is relentlessly brutal at culling newbies. It made sense for us to live closer to her work because, to be totally blunt, I expected to get laid off literally every day. And even when I had the job, I expected to always be making about half what she was. (Even that was aspirational — I was actually making a third of what she was at the time.) So we bought a house in Aurora, in a new subdivision in a neighbourhood close to shopping and recreational amenities suited to the kids we hoped to have.
I’ll skip over the next five years here. I didn’t get laid off at work and actually thrived in the industry. Those kids we hoped for had come/were coming. And my work responsibilities were keeping me downtown a lot more than I’d ever imagined (the National Post, where I then worked, had switched from an office in North York to its current location downtown — terrific for those who already lived in the city, but a major bummer for the 905 contingent). The commute was eating my life. There were days when I saw my daughter only as she slept in her crib: in the morning, when I left to begin my 90-minute commute down to work, and at night, after I’d gotten home after my two-hour ride back. That wasn’t the kind of parent I wanted to be. Transit options using GO trains or buses, though much improved today, were limited then and not suited to my schedule. With a new baby son on the way, we decided it didn’t make any sense for me to never see the kids I was working to feed and clothe, and with my wife’s work more portable than mine, we moved to midtown Toronto eight years ago.
It’s important to note two things. One of the reasons we were able to afford the move to Toronto was that our Aurora home had appreciated considerably in value — like, considerably, and in only five years (not even a full five years). The housing-price boom that the Toronto area has seen hadn’t fully taken off yet, but it was well underway, and our Aurora home had increased in value massively because houses were in short supply. There were tons of people who wanted to move in and very little inventory. That demand helped make our move to the 416 possible.
I should also note that the area of Aurora in which we lived was fantastically well suited to high-density development. Almost ideal. It has access to schools, to shopping, to cultural amenities, to Highway 404 and a GO station, which, as noted above, has seen a major expansion of service since I lived there. (Had the service been the same then as it was now, we might not have felt the need to move at all.) Like, gosh, if you were to imagine an area in a major urban area that was especially well suited to high-density development, my old neighbourhood is basically perfect.
Oh, and, hey, what a coincidence: the property that Clark has authorized for high-density development? It’s in my old neighbourhood! I used to push my daughter’s stroller past it when out for some air. It’s directly between me and the gas station I went to, and where we shopped for groceries.
Mrakas may well have a point about Clark and the PCs being too cozy with developers and lobbyists. But the area he’s trying to protect is exactly the kind of place to put development if we are serious — an awfully goddamn big if, I admit — about meeting our housing and climate goals. You really couldn’t ask for better.
And Mrakas insists that Aurora, smackdab in the middle of a rapidly growing region of many millions of people and with a massive economy, should “never” have a 12-storey building?
Oh. My. God.
I’m sorry. I really am. I just can’t take that seriously. That’s a fundamentally unserious response to what could potentially have been a worthy conversation. “Oh dear, our precious Aurora, an affluent enclave that benefits from proximity to a major city but would be utterly ruined by a 12-storey building, must never change!” Puh-leaze, Mr. Mayor. Like, look at this Google Maps image of the general area in question. Just look at it:
(Google Maps)
Folks, I must have seen that exact view thousands of times commuting to and fro during my almost five years as an Auroran. That’s a big-box shopping complex on the right. Just out of frame on the left, a bit behind the vantage point (maybe a hundred metres or so?) is a GO bus station. The on-ramp for the 404, with its access (even with traffic) to the rest of the GTA, is next to the GO bus station — literally directly beside it. About four kilometres down that hill in front of the camera is the GO train station, a straight shot down Wellington Street, where expanded bus services could be added to link the train station to the bus station and the new developments between both.
And about smackdab between the vantage point and that train station is my old ’hood and the proposed development site, in an area packed with schools, parks, community amenities, shopping, a movie theatre ... everything people need to live well.
Aurora should have 12-storey buildings. It should have buildings even higher than that. Lots of them. It should have them just about exactly where the controversial site is. What it shouldn’t have is a mayor who would rather his existing residents benefit from what I did when I lived there — soaring net worth driven by a housing shortage that’s been manufactured to benefit the existing few residents at the cost of locking out the many more who’d love to live in a place as beautiful as Aurora and raise their families there but won’t get a chance because of the kind of reflexive toxic NIMBYism Mrakas and far too many others indulge in, knowing it’ll be popular with their voters.
Mrakas is angry, and I can respect that. But I’m also angry, and you should be, too. So, yeah. Minister Clark? Next time, make it an 80-storey minimum for the tower. And make it a few dozen of them, to boot.
Donate Now