I should clearly I mean back than in the 50s and 60s.
OK.
Again, road build-out policy between the two nations were very different, and in Canada, that highway planning was handled on a province by province basis. The federal government mostly stayed out of it.
But why did Toronto build Jane and finch to house the poor and low income in high rise apartments
I don’t think the original intent of developers who built apartment towers along Jane, up to Finch, were aiming for what ultimately happened.
I do think the way in which planners, during the 1950s and 1960s, conceived of how to develop on major concession routes, was shortsighted.
[Sidebar: Jane is a N-S concession; Finch is an E-W concession — with E-W concessions, like Sheppard and Steeles, each being 2km apart from Finch in either direction; N-S concessions, like Jane, were subdivided into 100m, though many N-S concessions are side streets.]
Their shortsightedness came from a belief that suburban development, at and near major intersections (as Jane and Finch were then), would favour car usage. There was TTC bus and even, I believe, electric trolley bus service (though trolley buses were gone by the late ’80s, with Weston Road being one of the last to operate). But this was during a time when explosive growth in car ownership and cheap fuel, even in Canada, would favour building high rises near major road intersections, albeit with more “green space” between plots than downtown Toronto. There was also significant popualtion growth in post-WWII babies entering adulthood, as well as new Canadians, and a housing plan was needed (with units of fewer bedrooms than the typical post-WWII suburban house in the area).
The “green space” idea was borrowed, in part, from Ebenezer Howard’s
Garden Cities; a lot from Le Corbusier (which I linked to earlier); and Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Broadacre City planning concepts. These were shortsighted on the planners’ and developers’ behalves: none was thinking about human connections, how people use space, or community cultivation.
Lastly, the private developers who built in these areas (along with social housing being built by the province), believed these ventures would be successful.
But what happened was once residents moved in, many found themselves completely cut off from the city: you couldn’t really walk anywhere any longer. You couldn’t ride a bike. There were no walk-up grocery store or supermarkets (or, later, when there
were, they were designed with giant, American-styled parking lots). It was basically like Regent Park, “except make it all high-rise and out in the middle of (then) nowhere.”
Planners back then, whether city, region, or province, were all white men. The uniformity of the “profession”’s makeup was its giant blind spot.
The planners hadn’t considered usage-integration.
They were thinking on the lines of
monoculture: housing in one place; shopping in a second; school in a third; and work in a fourth. They were thinking like people who were accustomed to owning one or even two cars in their households.
The desire to live in these green moats waned fast for the first round of new residents. Demand fell, so prices came down by the 1980s. It became, in effect, privately-owned “affordable” housing, mixed with social housing which, again, lacked human connections. It was a way for a lot of first-gen Canadian families to get a foothold and dwelling in the metro. But that entry came with the cost of a pre-engineered isolation which none of those planners and developers would ever have to experience in their daily lives.
Developers were, as developers do, thinking about their return on investment. They mostly managed to recoup construction costs, but within twenty years, it was clear all of this was a hot mess — in no small part due to the planners (who weren’t North York planners, but provincial-level Ontario Housing Corporation planners).
Ever since then, communities have worked and striven to find ways to bridge those chasms with in-fill development and with community centres. So many people have died due to that 1960s-engineered, planned isolation from the rest of the metro and city. People who moved there found themselves in the nations’s biggest city, but they were not
of or
with the city through no fault of their own. They were sequestered, out of sight, out of mind, and nope, the car was not the answer to tying Jane and Finch to the rest of the city fabric.
And at long last, after being halted by a now-deceased, self-absorbed mayor in 2010, the fixed-rail LRT to Jane and Finch — the Finch West LRT — is finally (finally) being built. It’s opening over ten years late. It will connect to the Finch West subway station (which opened six years ago). And some sixty years too late, Jane and Finch will no longer be cut off from the city. There’s a whole lot of work still to be done.
Next up: getting Rexdale and Malvern better connected through fixed rail connections.
but in LA south central it is mostly small houses and low rise apartments. Why did the two cities gone down very different path what to do with the poor and low income?
In L.A., segregation, by force of law, was law of the land in the U.S. until, well, 1964. As noted earlier, L.A. developed a lot of “missing middle” low-mid-rise housing, but at the same time, the way L.A. became
L.A. was unique to L.A. and no other city on the continent.
It started as a bunch of small towns and villages, some going way back to Spanish colonization, which, as the petroleum industry took off (the Miracle Mile); entertaiment moved into the village of Hollywood; and a sea port was built, councillors, mayors, and developers/land owners/prospectors — all white men — envisioned a stitching together of all these hamlets into one large city. Or, if not a single city, then a metropolitan area.
From the 1920s, these hamlets were stitched together with paved roads and highways. In 1928, L.A. passed
the first enforceable jaywalking ordinances and in 1920,
put in the first permanent traffic signals (red/green; red-amber-green happened also in 1920, but in Detroit).
Then, they developed land with low-mid-rise and mid-high-rise apartments to house newcomers coming in with the new economies. They were built alongside modest-sized, single-family bungalows for mostly working-class white people making good money at the wells and the ports.
Still, there were shanty towns dating back to the days of the prospectors — areas which would bcome light industrial/warehousing zones and also the enforcable segregation of Black and Chicano Los Angelinos into these oldest, most run-down housing in the newly-stitched city: South Central, Compton, East L.A., and so on.
So L.A. was unique in how it came together.
Toronto developed much the way a city like Chicago developed: from the very start, it was a place where rail, marine shipping, and routes intersected, bringing in raw materials from the “hinterlands” — with many of those routes and lanes built atop the same trading routes and trails which had been established and used for generations by (in Toronto’s case) the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (or Iriquois).
Tkaronto signified a meeting place for different first nations communities to meet seasonally to trade and commune. Geographically, the Toronto area has long lent itself to being an especially hospitable place for routes and paths to, literally, intersect at a natural harbour.
