Die Ermordung geplanter vierplexer in Etobicoke legt eine harte Wahrheit über Toronto: Unsere Barrieren für den Bau sind wie unser Boden – hart wie Ton

Key sections:

>For decades, senior city planners have been acutely aware of the clay layers that exist within the various bureaucracies that touch development applications as they make their way through a meandering and at times impermeable approvals processes.
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>They take the form of risk averse junior planners or technical officials in other departments — transportation, water, forestry — who are expected to sign off on an application but aren’t invested in the pace of the approval. In other cases, the works are gummed up by the ward councillor, who may hold up a file in order to advance some local political agenda.
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>In recent years, legislative and administrative reforms from both the provincial government and the city itself have sought to smooth out the road to yes.
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>Yet one particularly dense layer stubbornly endures: committees of adjustment, those citizen panels tasked with vetting so-called minor variances, which is to say the details of reno jobs or new-build projects that don’t quite conform to the letter of the city’s zoning bylaws and tend to attract NIMBY objectors like flies to honey.
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>Established through the Planning Act and mandated to solicit public feedback, the committees continue to red light small-scale intensification proposals that would seem to deliver many of the planning goals approved by council in recent years: more gentle density, missing middle-type housing, transit-oriented small apartments.
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>They function as the last redoubt of residents’ groups versed in the art of using pretexts to disguise their distaste for projects that may bring — gasp — more tenants and people from a wider range of incomes into exclusive house neighbourhoods.
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>Think about the grammatical construction of that verdict: “not considered desirable.” By whom? Council certainly felt this kind of intensification is desirable. The developer’s planning expert provided plenty of evidence showing that a pair of four-plexes is consistent with what’s in the official plan as well as the city’s own recent land use planning reforms, including decisions to allow multiplexes in neighbourhoods. The neighbours, predictably, did not find it desirable.
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>Beyond the knee-jerk objections, this development proposal was likely torpedoed by unresolved contradictions buried deep inside the city’s own land use policies, especially those focused on neighbourhoods. In some bylaws, the city says neighbourhoods should be stable but not static, whereas others say that new projects need to “reinforce the physical character” of the neighbourhood when it comes to “prevailing” heights, massing, scale and density.
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>Mr. Plastina’s project, in effect, careened off the Committee of Adjustment’s subjective disapproval and then smashed into the rocks of what should be a glaring inconsistency in the official plan. He’s not the first builder to meet this fate, nor will he be the last.
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>Council in recent years has clearly said Toronto needs more missing middle housing and much less Chicken Little objecting from homeowners. Now it needs to get serious about clearing away the obstacles that stand in the way.

This is clearly a systemic problem not just in Toronto but with communities across the country. Allowing those with entrenched interests to in effect veto projects will pretty much prevent any community from changing to meet the needs of the future. Layered on top of this the confusing morass of policies and objectives put forth by not just municipalities but also provinces and it’s no wonder that many projects that are looking to build something different from the status quo have run into trouble. If we’re wondering why we’re continually failing at building what we know we need and want, this is one of the main reasons why.

From a policy perspective, the first thing to do is to clean up conflicting objectives from various levels of government. The next is to rethink where public engagement makes the most sense (for instance, at the broader community planning discussions) and where they make the least sense (when looking at the merits of a particular project). Finally, there is also the need for our largest cities to have more autonomy so that they aren’t continually running up against roadblocks put in front of them by disinterested provincial governments that they are ultimately beholden to.