The downtown Vancouver skyline in the distance beyond houses in Burnaby, B.C., on July 12, 2023.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Canadian cities have a strange shape. Toronto, Mississauga, Surrey – they all feature tiny spikes of high-rises amid vast plains of low buildings.
This pattern of tall and sprawl fundamentally makes no sense. It creates all sorts of challenges for new growth while leaving low-density neighbourhoods to grow richer and emptier. Yet our governments are doubling down on it through a seemingly reasonable idea: transit-oriented development.
The concept goes like this: Where there is mass transit, we should be adding new people. That way they can avoid driving and cluster into communities where they can walk to the store and encounter their neighbours face to face. Good in theory.
But in reality it’s a compromise. True transit-oriented development would spread new residents around the existing cores of our cities that have the best transit and the most amenities and are pleasant places to live car-free. They each have thousands of houses that are ripe for redevelopment.
Instead, TOD spreads out the growth into little artificial islands, very often reinforcing inequalities.
Consider two new subway stations on the Ontario Line in Toronto. Premier Doug Ford’s government is building this 15.6-kilometre line from the city’s core to an area northeast of the downtown. In a few cases, there are plans to create “transit-oriented communities” on top of the stations. Fair enough.
One of these is in Thorncliffe Park. It is a densely populated neighbourhood, one of Canada’s premier landing zones for immigrants. It is a community with strong social networks – but few physical amenities. Its parks are in poor condition. Its car-oriented landscape is difficult to navigate on foot.
Another is at Danforth and Pape, in the Riverdale area. This is a wealthy neighbourhood of mostly single-family houses, with half the density of Thorncliffe Park. Its population has declined sharply since the 1970s. Yet it is a 15-minute bike ride to downtown Toronto. It’s full of every imaginable public and private amenity. And it already has a subway. The Bloor-Danforth line came through in 1966. Now the area will be the meeting point for two transit lines.
Guess which of these places is getting thousands of new residents.
Infrastructure Ontario’s transit-oriented community proposals would put 414 apartments at Pape station, in two buildings of seven storeys and one of 29. The surrounding landscape of houses would be untouched. Thorncliffe, meanwhile, would get 2,600 homes in six towers of 24 to 46 storeys, plus an office tower.
This is naked politics. A rational approach to transit-oriented development would pack Riverdale with new residents, and the Ontario government could allow that at will. But it won’t, because Riverdale is full of homeowners who vote. Thorncliffe, meanwhile, is full of apartment dwellers – many of them newcomers – who have no political pull.
Call it tenant-oriented development.
Sadly, this is typical, and the planning profession reinforces this injustice and illogic. Planning policy everywhere has been committed to maintaining existing house neighbourhoods, often through the aesthetic lens of “neighbourhood character.” Contemporary TOD does nothing to alter this edifice of inequality.
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In some of our biggest and richest cities, Vancouver and Toronto, new growth is being concentrated next to subway stations or on top of existing apartment buildings. Tenants are threatened with displacement, through the Broadway Plan in Vancouver and everywhere in Toronto. Huge buildings that are home to hundreds of people are torn down and dumped in the garbage. But houses in places such as Riverdale are untouchable. All this provides the dark subtext to TOD.
Now, when you look at TOD communities, they can seem to work well. The Vancouver region has been exceptionally good at making these tiny pockets of towers feel somewhat urban. Downtown Surrey and Burnaby’s Metrotown have adept enough architecture and urban design. In the Toronto region, these places have mostly failed, though there’s a halfway successful example in North York Centre.
But such success is always – always – like swimming against the current. Getting people out of cars is very challenging. Builders and planners are trying to put thousands of people into a place where cars are the dominant mode of transportation and people’s lives are spread out over dozens of kilometres. Then they try to engineer a little island of artificial urbanity.
Is this better than pure single-family sprawl? Of course. Is it necessary, especially in Toronto, given the current massive expansion of regional transit? Also yes.
But there is a better alternative, which we choose to ignore: Let our cities be cities. Let central Toronto grow into the metropolitan centre it is, rather than preserving its house neighbourhoods in amber. Let Vancouver be urban, rather than a pastoral preserve of mansions and cottages. That way new residents could live where they want to be instead of taking the train.