Why did city planners do this in Toronto?

[Bubble99]

Down town Toronto looks more like New York but Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough are mostly suburb and looks nothing like New York.

Why did city planners in Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough not make it more urban.

Like this 4 story apartments above stores https://i1.wp.com/www.welcome2thebr...20/07/20200522_153025.jpg?fit=1600,1200&ssl=1 or these mixed use buildings https://i1.wp.com/www.welcome2thebr...827543002779558450875.jpg?fit=3000,3000&ssl=1


These mid rise apartments http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2-UJpbwIY...Q/s1600/winter+morning+in+the+North+Bronx.jpg


More mid rise apartments above store https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp6681407.jpg

Mid rise apartments https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/a2/22/2da22286a6170885672fba6c47ffc306.png

These low and mid rise apartments https://static01.nyt.com/images/201...umbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale


More mid rise apartments https://static01.nyt.com/images/201...00b3d82-articleLarge.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp

These row houses

https://voyageforum.info/images/hd/posts/openmedium/1570541195-wJUztXyyaiZBsBx.jpeghttps://voyageforum.info/images/hd/posts/openmedium/1570541195-wJUztXyyaiZBsBx.jpeg

Why did city planners not make Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough more urban like and ban houses and built mid rise apartments or row houses?

Here is urban suburb look like in the UK

They could of made Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough look like that.

Interesting thing is Toronto has a density like New York and down town Toronto looks like New York but most of Toronto is one big suburb with Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough being mostly a suburb with houses and high rise apartments here and there. There just way to many houses and just not urban look at all.

Keep in mind a million dollars will buy you a condo in the city and million dollars a small house in the suburb. The real state cost is very high.

 

[decafjava]

Hmm I will check out the links later but my folks lived in Ajax briefly in the late 80s and it wasn't to my liking at the time. I can say the Greater Vancouver area has changed beyond recognition even since 2018 (my last visit before this past summer). Urban development in Canada at least is pretty chaotic.

 

[Bubble99]

Hmm I will check out the links later but my folks lived in Ajax briefly in the late 80s and it wasn't to my liking at the time. I can say the Greater Vancouver area has changed beyond recognition even since 2018 (my last visit before this past summer). Urban development in Canada at least is pretty chaotic.

I think if Toronto and Vancouver would of ban homes and had high rise residential in the core area and mid rise apartments and row houses with mix of mixed use buildings they could had average price of $400,000 than what it is now of million dollars will buy you a condo in the city and million dollars a small house in the suburb.

Even if they made Toronto and Vancouver the down town area like New York City and the outer area like Baltimore or Philadelphia the average price of $400,000 than what it is now million dollars will buy you a condo in the city and million dollars a small house in the suburb.

 

[B S Magnet]

Forewarned, @Bubble99 : I won’t be answering any more of your questions arising from my reply here or my replies on the other two threads on which we went back and forth, only to learn you were wasting my time.

This post is for any other readers who still have any interest in the overarching topic of urbanization in Canada.

Down town Toronto looks more like New York but Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough are mostly suburb and looks nothing like New York.

That’s true. The suburbs look like suburbs. That’s urban history.

Recommended reading:

Careless, J.M.S. 1984. Toronto to 1918. (free to borrow on archive-dot-org or at the Toronto Public Library)
Lemon, James T. 1985. Toronto since 1918. (free to borrow on archive-dot-org or at the Toronto Public Library)
Solomon, Lawrence. 2007. Toronto Sprawls. (free to borrow at the Toronto Public Library)


As in life, you will never, ever be able to fully comprehend everything you see before you right now unless and until you go back and see how everything arrived to this moment. That goes for history, for technology, for culture, for society, for nature, and for many more things.

Why did city planners in Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough not make it more urban.

Why did city planners not make Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough more urban like and ban houses and built mid rise apartments or row houses?

For those with even a mote of interest about this topic, you’ll want to know the locations name-dropped by @Bubble99 are three of the five suburban municipalities (boroughs) which were amalgamated with the old city of Toronto by the province in 1998, creating the now-current “megacity” of Toronto, making it now the fourth-largest city on the North American continent (behind L.A., NYC, and Ciudad de Mexico).

Between 1954 and 1997, six boroughs were joined together administratively by the province as the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, to work together on area concerns like transportation planning, emergency services, and infrastructure services, as well as other public services permitted by provincial by-law.

1954 wasn’t a full amalgamation. Each borough had their own city councils and mayors.

Before 1954, there were several smaller, provincially-approved amalgamations brought on as the economics of running tiny towns became too costly for small villages and hamlets to keep up. Most of these were small towns, villages, and farming townships in what are now the outer suburban parts of Toronto (the five suburban municipalities: Etobicoke, North York, York, East York, and Scarborough) with now familiar neighbourhood names like Mimico, New Toronto, Junction, Long Branch, Malvern, and Weston. Most of these amalgamations happened shortly after the turn of the century, prior to WWI.

And lastly, the first round of amalgamations happened mostly in what is still called “Old Toronto”: the central part of the city.

These amalgamations happened mostly in the 1880s and early 1890s. Most were done for the same reason: necessity. Small villages couldn’t afford the expected upgrade costs to expanding infrastructure demand. Most of those former hamlets are now Toronto neighbourhood names: Annex, Cabbagetown, and Seaton Village.

So to answer @Bubble99 ’s question:

Suburban planners in the suburban boroughs of the 1950s and 1960s developed their boroughs to be “suburban-y” because that is what borough residents wanted from their boroughs: single-family houses, wider streets, faster speed limits, fewer corner stores and more shopping centres and shopping malls.

Borough (city) councillors in those places passed by-laws and approved zoning plans which assured that further conversion of former, remaining farmlands within the borough would be converted directly into subdivision tract houses and commercial strip centres all but requiring the use of a car. Borough-employed planners obliged council guidance and prepared official zoning plans reflecting that guidance.

It was only by the early 1960s, when urban in-migration spiked for several reasons covered already, when borough planners and councils realized they needed to absorb a lot of new residents as quickly as possible. The problem was most of the old farmlands, bought up on the cheap by boroughs and private developers, were newly built up with a recent flood of single-family houses built between 1946 and 1960, in economic, subdivision-styled neighbourhoods. So the most feasible, practical, and quickest remedy around this crunch was to build upward — and ideally, nearby large car traffic intersections.

And that’s precisely what happened.

Meanwhile, the old city (borough) of Toronto had been building more densely for several decades because the city was surrounded by the hard boundaries of the other five boroughs. Even so, Toronto did approve the build-out of pre-WWI and interwar suburbs designed around foot access to streetcar lines. by the 1930s, Toronto no longer had much former farmland on its peripheries (next to the surrounding boroughs) and had built outward as far as it could.

They could of made Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough look like that.

Narrator voice:
No, they couldn’t. Residents already living there didn’t want that. They elected councillors who voted to keep that from happening.

Interesting thing is Toronto has a density like New York and down town Toronto looks like New York but most of Toronto is one big suburb with Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough being mostly a suburb with houses and high rise apartments here and there. There just way to many houses and just not urban look at all.

Me doth think @Bubble99 hasn’t travelled very much in their lives, because this is not accurate. (No comment or reply needed.)

Here is urban suburb look like in the UK

Sweaty, that isn’t a London suburb.

These are the London suburbs.

Keep in mind a million dollars will buy you a condo in the city and million dollars a small house in the suburb. The real state cost is very high.

And there we have it, folks. This is why I am no longer responding to @Bubble99 ’s repetitive questions and poorly informed or considered remarks. Bubble99 is either unable or unwilling to do the thoughtful, critical thinking work themselves, and that is something I can’t make them do. They need to want to do the work by themselves because they sincerely want to. :sigh:

For the rest of y’all, thanks for indulging my long-form nerding out of something I actually understand reasonably well. (It ought to, given the student debt I’ll be paying off until I’m 70…)

p.s., to @Bubble99 : This is not Quora or AskJeeves.

 

[decafjava]

Fascinating, my parents lived in Ajax, Ontario for awhile in the late 80s. I spent a gap year working before we moved to Nova Scotia in another suburb/small town called New Minas (I completed a BA at Acadia University). I was raised however in BC, first Surrey (Vancouver suburb) then Langley (semi rural farm suburb). There are many things I like about Toronto but I found Ajax and Scarborough pretty soulless (maybe as a mid-twenty year old) and liked the Annapolis Valley in NS much more.

 

[B S Magnet]

Fascinating, my parents lived in Ajax, Ontario for awhile in the late 80s. I spent a gap year working before we moved to Nova Scotia in another suburb/small town called New Minas (I completed a BA at Acadia University). I was raised however in BC, first Surrey (Vancouver suburb) then Langley (semi rural farm suburb). There are many things I like about Toronto but I found Ajax and Scarborough pretty soulless (maybe as a mid-twenty year old) and liked the Annapolis Valley in NS much more.

You’ve had a buffet sampling of suburbs, exurbs, and satellite communities! Although not always fun, it’s still handy to have that vantage and perspective to look back upon.

Spoiler: Ajax and Durham Region

Ajax, along with Pickering, is still very much a car-oriented suburb to this day. Although Metrolinx (the provincial transit planning agency for the Greater Golden Horseshoe Area) have worked in the last decade or so to improve funding for integrate regional transit, such as Durham Region Transit, these remain suburban municipalities deeply invested in the model of living set out by the first builds of suburbs after WWII. There were more raw hectares, more farmland, and undeveloped regions to be able to break ground and lay in tract houses.

Now that built form is hard-baked into the terrain. Repurposing, upgrading, or adapting it for diversified use, requires a lot of capital. It requires a change of municipal by-laws. But most key, it requires a change of political values in the constituents who elect their councillors and mayor.

For now, at least, external factors (like long-tail impacts of climate change, the deferred costs of subsidized suburban living coming due, and so on) don’t suggest things will be changing very fast for the Ajaxs, Miltons, and Brantfords of the area. But they are, when panning back to, say, 20 years ago, shifting in tiny ways toward recognizing those external changes are happening.

Spoiler: Scarborough

Scarborough, on the other hand, the longer I’ve known it and the longer I’ve learnt from people who are from there, is a surprisingly fascinating place. It is, unquestionably, the most culturally varied and enriched part of Toronto (when looking at it from the six former boroughs), if not throughout all of Canada — even more so than North York.

The thing about Scarborough is, both prior to and after amalgamation, it was treated as the area’s red-headed step-child: technically part of the area, but might as well be on the moon. That’s why the perjorative Scarberia stuck for so long. Also, before the 1990s, much of Scarborough was still WASPy as all get-out. Exhibit A: Guildwood.

But that changed as more new Toronto residents found, at least for a time, less costly housing way out on Sheppard East, Lawrence East, and Ellesmere. And the area grew quite a lot. The problem was when amalgamation happened, the new Toronto inherited the former Scarborough’s zoning policies, which were almost entirely centred on single-family dwellings with moderately large yards. So everything was simply atomized, spread out, and impossible to navigate on foot or bicycle.

Even TTC service for Scarborough was long a sore point, and still is — especially after the late former mayor, Rob Ford, cancelled the Transit City light-rail/bus rapid transit/subway plan, already approved with ground already broken, in 2010. This meant the Sheppard East LRT wouldn’t open in 2014.

It meant the light rail replacement for the Scarborough RT line was killed (Ford demanded subways, despite ridership not meeting the per diem levels (typically, greater than 100,000 daily riders are needed to justify capital costs for building, installing, and operating one). It also reinforced an idea that Scarborough could only have subway lines and stations spread far apart (further rationalizing more reliance on cars). Scarborough RT ridership, before it was terminated, typically hovered at around 40,000 — both a minimum threshold needed for justifying light rail and also accounting for the many days each year the ageing line had to be shut down for unscheduled maintenance.

Most of Scarborough’s nifty subcultures these days tend to stay hidden to most who aren’t already living there, as one still needs to be patient with bus transit, hailing a ride-share, or driving a car (still). There’s a history of neglect in bringing Scarborough closer to the rest of the city, despite past efforts to nix those efforts to bring it in, but that may be changing at long last. The long-proposed LRT for Eglinton East is still on the table, though it was supposed to have been built and opened (when it was still called the Scarborough Malvern LRT) by 2015.

But yah: being in your teens or twenties, and being just left in Scarborough (for school, because of parents, etc.) means going far and beyond to know how to get about on the TTC and catching rides from people. There so much interstitial ground to cover on foot otherwise. It’s neither sustainable nor lends to making community connections easily.

I have yet to ever travel east of New Brunswick, though I’ve been meaning to visit NS and also the Rock.

 

[decafjava]

Yea I had a job in my gap year and took the GO Train from Ajax to downtown Toronto. Sometimes came back late. Oh and my parents lived in St. John's Newfoundland and New Brunswick before retiring back in BC (Abbotsford). Both are great but I really love Newfoundland. Not the climate but the landscape, the charm of St.John's and the people.

 

[AlaskaMoose]

Forewarned, @Bubble99 : I won’t be answering any more of your questions arising from my reply here or my replies on the other two threads on which we went back and forth, only to learn you were wasting my time.

This post is for any other readers who still have any interest in the overarching topic of urbanization in Canada.



That’s true. The suburbs look like suburbs. That’s urban history.

Recommended reading:

Careless, J.M.S. 1984. Toronto to 1918. (free to borrow on archive-dot-org or at the Toronto Public Library)
Lemon, James T. 1985. Toronto since 1918. (free to borrow on archive-dot-org or at the Toronto Public Library)
Solomon, Lawrence. 2007. Toronto Sprawls. (free to borrow at the Toronto Public Library)


As in life, you will never, ever be able to fully comprehend everything you see before you right now unless and until you go back and see how everything arrived to this moment. That goes for history, for technology, for culture, for society, for nature, and for many more things.




For those with even a mote of interest about this topic, you’ll want to know the locations name-dropped by @Bubble99 are three of the five suburban municipalities (boroughs) which were amalgamated with the old city of Toronto by the province in 1998, creating the now-current “megacity” of Toronto, making it now the fourth-largest city on the North American continent (behind L.A., NYC, and Ciudad de Mexico).

Between 1954 and 1997, six boroughs were joined together administratively by the province as the Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto, to work together on area concerns like transportation planning, emergency services, and infrastructure services, as well as other public services permitted by provincial by-law.

1954 wasn’t a full amalgamation. Each borough had their own city councils and mayors.

Before 1954, there were several smaller, provincially-approved amalgamations brought on as the economics of running tiny towns became too costly for small villages and hamlets to keep up. Most of these were small towns, villages, and farming townships in what are now the outer suburban parts of Toronto (the five suburban municipalities: Etobicoke, North York, York, East York, and Scarborough) with now familiar neighbourhood names like Mimico, New Toronto, Junction, Long Branch, Malvern, and Weston. Most of these amalgamations happened shortly after the turn of the century, prior to WWI.

And lastly, the first round of amalgamations happened mostly in what is still called “Old Toronto”: the central part of the city.

These amalgamations happened mostly in the 1880s and early 1890s. Most were done for the same reason: necessity. Small villages couldn’t afford the expected upgrade costs to expanding infrastructure demand. Most of those former hamlets are now Toronto neighbourhood names: Annex, Cabbagetown, and Seaton Village.

So to answer @Bubble99 ’s question:

Suburban planners in the suburban boroughs of the 1950s and 1960s developed their boroughs to be “suburban-y” because that is what borough residents wanted from their boroughs: single-family houses, wider streets, faster speed limits, fewer corner stores and more shopping centres and shopping malls.

Borough (city) councillors in those places passed by-laws and approved zoning plans which assured that further conversion of former, remaining farmlands within the borough would be converted directly into subdivision tract houses and commercial strip centres all but requiring the use of a car. Borough-employed planners obliged council guidance and prepared official zoning plans reflecting that guidance.

It was only by the early 1960s, when urban in-migration spiked for several reasons covered already, when borough planners and councils realized they needed to absorb a lot of new residents as quickly as possible. The problem was most of the old farmlands, bought up on the cheap by boroughs and private developers, were newly built up with a recent flood of single-family houses built between 1946 and 1960, in economic, subdivision-styled neighbourhoods. So the most feasible, practical, and quickest remedy around this crunch was to build upward — and ideally, nearby large car traffic intersections.

And that’s precisely what happened.

Meanwhile, the old city (borough) of Toronto had been building more densely for several decades because the city was surrounded by the hard boundaries of the other five boroughs. Even so, Toronto did approve the build-out of pre-WWI and interwar suburbs designed around foot access to streetcar lines. by the 1930s, Toronto no longer had much former farmland on its peripheries (next to the surrounding boroughs) and had built outward as far as it could.



Narrator voice:
No, they couldn’t. Residents already living there didn’t want that. They elected councillors who voted to keep that from happening.




Me doth think @Bubble99 hasn’t travelled very much in their lives, because this is not accurate. (No comment or reply needed.)




Sweaty, that isn’t a London suburb.

These are the London suburbs.




And there we have it, folks. This is why I am no longer responding to @Bubble99 ’s repetitive questions and poorly informed or considered remarks. Bubble99 is either unable or unwilling to do the thoughtful, critical thinking work themselves, and that is something I can’t make them do. They need to want to do the work by themselves because they sincerely want to. :sigh:

For the rest of y’all, thanks for indulging my long-form nerding out of something I actually understand reasonably well. (It ought to, given the student debt I’ll be paying off until I’m 70…)

p.s., to @Bubble99 : This is not Quora or AskJeeves.

😅 got to give it to you: you are enormously patient!